THE COUNCILLOR

1

The morrow’s daylight brought emancipation from many fears. Alderman Bankett in his bed of masonry, seemed--for the nonce--remote as the moon. His memory might be evoked without a qualm. Yet logically, if there be any intrinsic awfulness in the condition of death, the late lamented alderman--being one whole day deader than before--should have been four and twenty hours more terrible to all juvenile respecters of his latest state. But the fears of youth are as illogical as the loves of mothers and the arguments of men.

Meanwhile the solitaire--that had passed the night warmly in Beryl’s purse, beneath her pillow--resumed its interest and importance. It was disclosed to the next door neighbour as a personage of no small erudition in local affairs, who tested its quality with her tongue, and described the hall-mark “eighteen carat, marm. You may be sure it’s not been bought for nothink. The pair would cost somebody close on five pound.” With Mrs. Holmroyd’s assent she took the trophy round to sundry neighbours likely, in her opinion, to cast light upon it--or at least to share (and even amplify) her curiosity. But none was able to affix ownership.

“What I should do, marm,” she confided to Mrs. Holmroyd in a voice lowered to suggest discretion, which was her nearest attainment to the exercise of this excellent quality. “I shouldn’t say nothink to nobody of a while. As like as not there’ll be a reward offered if you keep quiet a bit.”

From such a course of action Mrs. Holmroyd’s spirit recoiled. “Reward!” she said, shocked the more because her children both stood by, and so corruptive a sentiment must be repelled at once. “I would not think of taking it, Mrs. Kenway. The stud does not belong to us. We could not possibly accept money for a thing which is not ours.”

Her neighbour, scornful of such weak-spirited morality, expressed a very different view upon the question.

“When a thing’s once lost,” she said, “it’s nobody’s, marm. Them that finds has as good a right to it as them that loses. If they was to say nothink, nobody would never be the wiser.” The solitaire, reclaimed by Mrs. Holmroyd with a “Thank you” of quiet dignity that was a rebuke,--all told,--circulated through the inquisitive fingers of her scholars in turn, who subjected it to every test of curiosity, and were not indisposed to constitute it their exclusive study for the morning; but these combined efforts brought no enlightenment. The father of one of them (it transpired) had a pair of studs like these--though not the same--and larger. The uncle of another had a diamond pin. Somebody’s sister owned a pearl necklet and had been to London by the Railway Trip three years ago. The conversation, obviously developing into a concerted movement against Time--whom it sought to outflank by every manœuvre known to scholarship--was brought back firmly to its pot-hooks and slate pencils. Discipline had been restored, and the academic stillness of the room was broken only by the sniffs and scratches and laboured breathings of preoccupation when suddenly all heads were startled by a dreadful announcement.

“Please, Mrs. Holmroyd! Willie Johnson’s spitting on his slate and rubbing it with his hand!”

The infant thus detected in this most repulsive of academic crimes, secreted his slate instantly beneath a defensive fore-arm, and, showing a face of incredible malevolence over his shoulder, cried:

“I aren’t then! You’re a storyer. I haven’t spit once this morning. I haven’t spit since yesterday. It’s you that’s spitting.”

Mrs. Holmroyd, shaping a countenance of appropriate horror and distress at these revolting revelations, said “Hush! Oh hush!” But before she had time to address her scholars on the reprehensibility of the act alleged, or expound to the full its pernicious influence on health and morals when developed into a habit, a voice accompanying an outstretched finger cried dramatically:

“Look, Mrs. Holmroyd! It’s the Bellman. He’s stopping. He’s going to shout something.”

Even the culprit, moved by the announcement, struggled from his seat to catch a glimpse of this far-famed official. The scholars rose as one to gather round the window. Over the colliding heads of her academy Mrs. Holmroyd peeped into the street below, where the portly functionary who had paced at the rear of Alderman Bankett’s funeral yesterday was now to be seen, looking first to this side and then to that, and taking stock of all the windows, as a primo tenore rolls impressive eyes around the tiers of breathless boxes before melting into an aria. He wore his municipal silk hat bound with its silver braid, and his municipal blue tail coat garnished with the bright electro-plated buttons, and the municipal red and white striped waistcoat. But in addition he wore on his right hand to-day a brazen gauntlet that turned out to be the bell of office held by its clapper. This, first transferring to his left hand and thence back again by way of the handle to his right, he swung with solemn emphasis for the space of nearly a minute; at the end of which time, stifling the bell’s vibrations in the folded hollow of his left hand he threw up his head like a bull at feeding time and cried forth his proclamation in the stentorian foggy voice for which he was renowned, and by whose virtue and his impressive corporate ventrosity he had prevailed over half a score of rivals in open competition before a Sub-Committee of the Town Fathers in the Horse Green, where his masterly manipulation of the bell, his side-whiskers and excellent demeanour (even at the extreme range of two hundred yards) evoked favourable comment from critics previously (and subsequently) fortified for their exacting duties by recourse to the mayoral parlour.

He vocalized monotonously over two tones--these being, as Mr. Rencil might have pointed out, the unaccentuated subdominant and accented tonic--in much the same way that Oswald pointed the psalms. His vocal organ was so resonant, and as he declaimed the words he so turned his head and mouth towards the four quarters of the compass in rotation that by far the larger part of what he uttered was lost to his hearers in the schoolroom; who, truth to tell, were more active in imposing silence than observing it. But it was agreed he had begun his proclamation with the word “Lost,” and “Tuesday” had been mentioned, and an address in Daneborough given, and some of the scholars vowed there was mention of a Reward. None betrayed the least doubt as to the nature of the publication. It concerned Oswald’s solitaire. The owner, alive to its loss, was having it cried to the town. There was only one course to be followed.

“Run, Oswald dear,” said his mother, “and ask the Crier who it is, and where the stud is to be taken.” Adding in a commendatory undertone as he moved to do her bidding: “Don’t forget to say Please and Thank you, Oswald.”

Filled with importance to be the unquestionable discoverer of so notable a solitaire, Oswald ran downstairs bareheaded and into the roadway to the spot where the Bellman had been. But he was there no longer. Actuated by conspicuous powers of locomotion he had travelled already some distance up the street, and after a moment’s hesitation at the sight of his objective so far remote--giving an uneasy glance at the schoolroom window, that seemed alive with rapping knuckles and agitated heads and hands--Oswald started in pursuit.

Now there is more difficulty in negotiating a Bellman--once he is in motion--than the thoughtless deem. As Oswald pursued the retreating shoulders he was dismayed to note how big and broad they grew, and how much more bulk the functionary offered for respectful eyes to dwell on, viewed from the roadway in the rear, than from the vantage of the schoolroom window. Also, the blue of his official coat assumed a cut and tincture too constabulary; and Oswald grew uncomfortably conscious of the absence of his own hat. With a beseechful gaze, therefore, upon the Bellman’s tail buttons, that stared back on their pursuer with the stony disregard of eyes, Oswald kept up his pursuit at a dog-trot pace between walking and running, nicely regulated by the Bellman’s own.

“He is sure to stop at the next corner,” Oswald assured himself. “I must not lose sight of him.”

But the Bellman ignored the next corner as completely as if it had been no corner at all, and passed on with a step betraying not the least abatement. Nor was Oswald’s peace of mind improved by the fact that other children, without the least official claim on the Bellman’s attention, but stimulated by his own pursuit, joined in the chase, thus compromising his mission with the vulgarest curiosity. Depressed by this new company at his heels, it was not until Oswald had begun to lose both ground and hope that the Crier stopped at last and smote the air with his bell.

This time Oswald could better mark the notable effect produced by it. Doors opened; curtains were pulled aside; heads in dustcaps issued from upper windows; bare arms wrapped up in aprons multiplied at passage ends. From everywhere and in no time an audience assembled to collect the words expelled by the Bellman’s powerful lungs. And strangely stirred, Oswald heard the message, spaced by stertorous breathing, that the object of his long pursuit declaimed. It was as follows:--

LOST! On TUESDAY afterNOON Betwixt the MANSION HOUSE St. SAVIOUR’S CHURCH And CIMITERY Or THEREABOUTS. Between the HOWERS of ONE And TWO THIRTY, p. m. Part of a GOLD SLEEVE STUD Oo-HEVER shall FIND SAME And will RETURN it To number THIRTY HUNMOUTH ROAD Will be SUITABLY Re-WARD-ed.

This proclamation ended, the Bellman reclaimed his bell once more from its resting place in the cradle of his folded left arm and passed quickly on to arouse the interest and stir the echoes of other corners. The congregated women, reducing their circle now that the Bellman was no longer constituted the attractive centre of it, prepared to discuss the news at length.

“A gold stud,” said one.

“It’ll tek some finding, missus,” said another.

“A deal more finding than what it would if it’d been brass,” said a third.

“They don’t name Reward,” said a fourth.

“They know better,” said the fifth.

Speculation was indulged in as to the identity of the advertiser and the chances of the stud’s recovery, and the listening children were stimulated to activity with reproaches on their indolence.

“Don’t stand staring there. Be off wi’ you. Use your eyes and look for stud. You’ll let somebody else get it if you’re not sharp.”

Oswald, magnetized by the conversation, stood for some minutes a silent auditor. At first a wondrous pride possessed him. He it was who had the stud, whose vigilance discovered it. His eye, sharpened to a point of supplication, almost besought these loquacious ladies to connect his presence with the thing discussed and to interrogate him. But for all he was by far the cleanest member of the company, they gave him no attention; his presence passed without comment. Not until the children were commanded to “be off and look for stud” did his pride undergo a sudden transformation and turn to guilt and shame. He had forestalled these children. The stud was his already that they were about to look for. Their diligence must be in vain. O! how angry they would be with him if they did but know. All longing to be questioned left him. He stole away.

2

The bricks of the houses on the Hunmouth Road were redder than the bricks of houses in other quarters of the town; for to this eastern side of Daneborough, more than any other, the energies of the builder and the ambitions of the prosperous were directed. As each aspiring tradesman advanced in turn to a degree of prosperity that could contemplate detachment from the business source of it, he turned his eye towards the Hunmouth Road as inevitably as in decrepit age men give a thought to Heaven, to which (indeed) this pious retirement on the Hunmouth Road might be regarded as the first stage. Even the lamented Alderman Bankett, albeit never to his latest breath employing fourpence for any purpose that threepence ha’penny was competent to serve, submitted to this custom, prompted by the laudable desire that his last days might be spent in some spot nearer and more befitting his Maker than the potato shop in Lower Tomb Street.

The house whose number had been proclaimed so lustily by the Town Crier during the course of the morning was within but a few years of being as ruddy as the ruddiest. It was a detached double-fronted villa overlooking the extensive Town Acres, from which only the Hunmouth Road divided it. Above one of its gables the slated roof gave birth to an aborted turret, protected by a cast iron balustrade, on which the individual fond of elevation and unsubject to vertigo might take the air on all fours, or with the aid of binoculars and favoured by the weather, obtain a view of the horses streaming across the Race Course on Sellinger Day. Not that anybody ever did; this superb prospect remaining the prerogative of brick-layers and an occasional plumber. On the bevelled coping of the lower front wall immediately flanking the iron gate, from which a painted palisading sprang, was carved in deep and monumental letters the number that the Bellman had announced, whilst on the coping at the opposite side of the gate, in the same deep and chiselled lettering, were the words BRIAR DENE, offered evidently as a picturesque alternative to visitors with no head for numbers. From the gateway an asphalt path, cutting a curt lawn in two, led to the front porch. Ferns in place of flowers spread their fronds at the foot of the window bays, and wreathed a rockery outrivalling the turret in pretentiousness--and even superseding the house itself in topographical importance, being used by every postman, constable and errand boy as a bearing in their negotiation of the district. For this rockery, dissociating itself from glittering felspar and oyster shells with which rockeries of the period usually ravished the eye of the beholder, aspired to architectural heights by its incorporation of crocketed stone finials and gargoyles and molten glass and twisted lead and bell-metal from the ancient church of St. Gyles, that had been destroyed by the fiery hand of God within the living memory of man. Elizabeth’s own eyes, in fact, had seen the belfry fall, and her two hands were able to depict its collapse with a graphic intensity that thrilled Oswald’s imagination and lent an added terror to the dark. It is true that scarce a garden of self-respect or consequence in Daneborough but was regaled with relics from the same source; nevertheless, few offered them to the public eye in such impressive form, and “Rockery House” was not less frequently an appellation of the home of the solitaire than the name and number incised upon its garden wall.

To this house, as shortly after midday as her scholastic labours allowed, Mrs. Holmroyd made her way accompanied by both her children. Beryl carried her hands in a little woolwork muff sedately borne before her--not that the morning air was cold, or that her fingers felt the need of such defence against the weather, but as an adjunct to importance. Oswald, wearing his Sunday gloves and cap, guarded in his pocket the momentous solitaire, wrapped in cotton wool and fine paper. They had no knowledge of the famous Rockery to guide them, and relied solely on the number retained by Oswald from the Crier’s proclamation; but the numbers along the Hunmouth Road, intercepted by gardens and by other roads leading out of it, multiplied so slowly that Mrs. Holmroyd began to entertain a doubt of the accuracy of her son’s memory or hearing--a doubt which, truth to tell, whilst denying, he more than shared with her. When at last they reached the mystic Thirty it struck their eyes with such a strangeness, and the gate and rockery and garden seemed to bear so little relationship to solitaires that all of them gazed in silence for a moment at this unconvincing goal of their journey.

“ ... Are you _quite_ sure, Oswald?” Mrs. Holmroyd asked. He was. That is to say he tried his very best to be. For other numbers had now begun to press their claims unpleasantly upon him. Without further question his mother pushed open the elaborately foliated gate, and solemnly they walked in order up the asphalt path to the front door, whose upper panels were resplendent with cut and coloured glass.

Succeeding a delay not without significance to one well versed in the liturgy of housekeeping, the door was dubiously opened by a maid of diminutive stature, occupied in pulling over a plump red wrist the second of her sleeves. Being, doubtless, more accustomed to the call of tramps and travellers at this hour of noon, her countenance expressed amazement to find the step so liberally occupied, and she stared at the visitors with as blank a look as if she had been asked a question in Old Testament history. Nor was her perplexity lessened when Mrs. Holmroyd, realizing her own ignorance of the family on which she called, sought on this subject to be informed. After a facial struggle with an intelligence so ill equipped for such a query that more than once it seemed the maid was on the point of leaving her interlocutor in order to refer the subject to higher authority indoors, she replied to Mrs. Holmroyd’s question with the one word. “Burfords.” Burfords evidently signifying the plural. Mrs. Holmroyd felt thereupon emboldened (and the more so by reason of a now more noticeable smell of cookery) to enquire if Mrs. Burford were at home.

“There isn’t a Mrs. Burford,” the maid said after a struggle. “She’s dead.” The intelligence seemed tragic until, perhaps noting the shocked adjustment of Mrs. Holmroyd’s face, she modified its abruptness by saying: “She’s been dead a long while. She was dead when I came.” “There’s Mr. Burford,” she vouchsafed helpfully, “if you mean _him_. But he won’t be home while dinner.” She further added: “There’s Miss Burford ...” and having communicated the information was gathered up into conflict with her own intelligence again. Indeed, all the while she held the door she appeared to be tormented by some secret intuition to shut it, and every time she spoke she seemed to lend ear to subtle atmospheric disturbances behind her as if a will were active in the ether whose messages she sought to pick up. In reply to Mrs. Holmroyd’s enquiry whether Miss Burford were at liberty the maid’s face suffered a spasm, accompanied by the words, “I’ll see.” For some moments her actions maintained a conflict between closing and re-opening the door. Finally she compromised the difficulty by leaving it ajar, and was absent some considerable time--during which the smell of dinner grew frenetic. When next the maid returned she said in a repressed voice suitable to a house of mourning: “You’re to step inside.” She led the way past a pretentious mahogany hall-stand, radiating branches like a genealogical tree, from whose bristling pegs hung a couple of notably large and masculine felt hats above a big bluff-handled masculine umbrella that kept company with several substantial walking sticks, and introduced Mrs. Holmroyd to a room on the right of the entrance hall, saying in a voice now depressed to a whisper:

“You’re to take a seat.”

The room thus offered to the advancing visitors enhanced the funereal atmosphere of their reception by the fact that its venetian blinds were three parts drawn. Over the centre of the carpet a holland drugget had been spread, whilst most of the chairs were similarly draped, and the room was permeated with a fine haberdasher smell of stuffs and fabrics not yet deprived of their pristine odours by too frequent usage. Barely, however, had they time to seat themselves in accordance with the maid’s instructions and take in the details of their surroundings before the door was pushed open again, and the maid’s head reappeared to utter the enquiry:

“Miss Burford asks what name please.”

She took the name dubiously, and the door--not closed immediately on her retirement--was pulled mysteriously to, a few minutes later, by an unseen hand. Mrs. Holmroyd fancied she heard the sound of acute whispers and a furtive footstep on the stair, succeeded by muffled sounds above, that might have been somebody making hasty journeys between a wardrobe and a dressing table in some bedroom overhead. But she told herself she was not paying attention to such things, being engaged in framing suitable expressions of regret for having called (she was disposed to fear) at a time so inconvenient; and composed her countenance to that benignant look expectant of nothing, with which cultured callers sit in wait.

Whilst she sat thus the door opened swiftly, all at once, without warning, and a lady entered. In her hand she held a handkerchief whose formal stiffness suggested it had but this moment been shaken out of fold, which (on catching sight of Mrs. Holmroyd) she instantly applied to her nose and inclined her head over it with an air of distance, as if she bowed across a garden hedge. The salmon-tinted flesh upon her face and neck reflected cookery; her hair, drawn tightly from her brow and held in the grasp of a hard chignon behind the head, was sternly practical, suggesting that its owner viewed hair less as an object of adornment than of repression. How old she was seemed (in her particular respect) a question without relevance. Probably she had never been young. Her face was featureless; the dark broad eyebrows were its strongest though not perhaps its pleasantest character, beneath which the brown eyes moved with the restless activity of the hyperconscientious housekeeper. Almost their first act, after admitting Mrs. Holmroyd and her children into their brief area of recognition, was to make a rapid survey of the room, as if in search of domestic shortcomings.

“Well! I declare! Excuse me....” Without allowing Mrs. Holmroyd to explain the object of her visit she passed to the window and drew up the venetian blinds, with a minute eye on the carpet to regulate the light admitted by what its susceptible colours could with safety bear, smoothing the curtains at the same time with rapid touches of imperfect satisfaction as if her fingers burned to do their work more thoroughly than the constraint of visitors allowed. “Whatever is the girl thinking of! To leave visitors sitting in the dark.” She begged Mrs. Holmroyd to pardon the untidiness of the room into which she had been shown, and the disgraceful state in which she found everything. “I must ask you to excuse us, please. My maid is new. Well ... _new!_ I have had her three weeks. But she is no better now than when she came. She seems to have no idea. This room ought to have been thoroughly turned out yesterday. It was my day for it. But of course ... in view of the funeral....” She looked at Mrs. Holmroyd, who expressed her sympathetic understanding of the situation. “ ... The room had to be left. I really don’t know whenever we shall get straight with the house again.”

She smoothed the holland covering of the sofa and seated herself out of politeness to her visitor, with more concern for the cushions than if they had been human feelings. But it was plain to see this act of sitting was a mockery, imposing only an irksome restraint upon a nature so practical and energetic. Her interest, distracted between the exigencies of politeness and the concerns of housekeeping, came to an abrupt standstill at mention of the solitaire, which, Mrs. Holmroyd said: “I understand you to have lost, Miss Burford.” Miss Burford disclaimed ownership in so far as herself was concerned with an asperity that seemed to defend her commonsense against the charge of being responsible for such a loss, saying she knew and had prophesied how it would be.

The solitaire, it seemed, belonged to her father--“Councillor Burford,” she explained, adding the civic title for Mrs. Holmroyd’s enlightenment and her own gratification, and stanching pride with her pocket handkerchief that the information might have a moment’s grace in which to sink into her visitor’s intelligence. Only the previous Sunday, it transpired, the solitaire had been found on the dining-room carpet by the maid. “And as I told my father: if it could be dropped on the carpet in the dining-room, it could be dropped anywhere. He has,” she added, with a bridling of satisfaction, “a second pair for business. Why couldn’t he have worn those! They are quite good ones. To be sure, Alderman Bankett was an old friend. We have known him a number of years.” Having thus demonstrated the superiority of her feminine intelligence at the expense of her parent, she broke off to enquire: “Do you say the stud has been found?” Mrs. Holmroyd said, “I think my little boy has had the pleasure of finding Mr. Burford’s stud. I hope it may be so.--Oswald!”

Thus prompted, Oswald rose mutely from the chair edge on which he had reseated himself after Miss Burford’s entrance, and timidly produced the box containing his discovery. Taking the proffered box with more anxiety than thankfulness, Miss Burford undid the careful wrappings in which the treasure was preserved. Her fingers, strong and resolutely active, seemed perfect instruments of precision. Before the stud was half unclad, her face, darkened during the early operations, lit up with a gleam of certainty. Yes. She was sure. She could tell. She extracted the trophy with the triumph of a dentist for a tooth. It was her father’s stud.

Gratification at its recovery came only second (one could see) to that for the victory won by wisdom. With this damning piece of evidence she would be able in due course to confront parental folly and justify all her prophetic asperities. But the look of righteous triumph gave way to a startling change of expression induced (as it appeared) by some disturbance that her microphonic hearing recorded in a remote part of the house. She elevated the stud with a dramatic gesture, imposing silence.

“There! Did you hear that? What _is_ she up to? I _told_ her. Particularly. Excuse me, please. One moment.” Laying the stud incontinently on the sofa, she passed swiftly out of the room. After a brief absence Miss Burford returned with the same swiftness that had borne her away; her mouth distorted by what Oswald at first mistook for a smile, but which at close quarters showed itself to be something infinitely more complex and superior; being, in fact, the ineffable expression which confirms, on the part of prophetic wisdom, the realization of its worst fears. Miss Burford’s ear had not deceived her. She had known. She had expected it. One of her large, last new dinner plates. No thanks to the maid it had not been the meat dish. And she had expressly _told_ the girl. Her very last words before coming into the room had been: “Don’t go and break anything whilst I’m gone.”

With an uncomfortable sense of being, indirectly, responsible for this catastrophe, Mrs. Holmroyd expressed her deep regret, coupled with renewed apologies for having disturbed Miss Burford at so inopportune a time; which, she explained, was in her own case less of choice than of necessity. Accused by the delicate politeness of Mrs. Holmroyd’s voice and the ladylike grace with which she now prepared to take her leave, Miss Burford summoned all her forces of gentility. Her visitor must please excuse a state of things for which her kindness was not at all to blame.

“I am afraid I have not even thanked you for your trouble,” she said, and asked a number of questions with regard to the finding of the solitaire. After Mrs. Holmroyd, with an occasional reference to Oswald, had told her, “I believe ...” Miss Burford said, assuming a perceptible control over the edges of her mouth, “I am not _quite_ sure. I rather fancy Mr. Burford entertained some thought ... of offering a slight reward. I don’t know whether he has done so. Half a crown, I think, was in his mind. Not more.”

Parrying the suggestion with evasive eyes and a quickening of the voice, Mrs. Holmroyd begged Miss Burford not to mention it. “You are very kind.... But it is _quite_ unnecessary.”

Miss Burford’s mouth, pursed until then, appeared to derive confidence from her visitor’s polite refusal, and regained a measure of its arrested volubility.

“Some small acknowledgment,” she pleaded. “I feel sure Mr. Burford.... But of course. If you would _rather_. Still ... after all your little boy’s trouble. Perhaps you would allow me to give him at least ... a shilling?”

The little boy in question, being brought by these words directly under the influence of the heavy brows, dropped his eyes and relapsed discreetly into the arms of Providence. For, gentleman though he was; gentleman though he always strove to be, his heart beat in a cage of mortal clay. The reward had dwindled from half a crown to a single shilling. Did this sweeping reduction constitute so great a change in the intrinsic nature of the sum as now to reconcile it with gentility? It did not. His mother’s voice deprived the visionary coin of its last value. One shilling melted, like the substance of life itself, to nothing; a dead hope diffusing a sad autumnal odour; a memory to be trodden underfoot like the beech leaves in the Burford garden. All that was offered to him was a hard, dry hand that he moved mechanically up and down like a pump handle and relinquished. As they passed into the tepid outer sunlight and paid Miss Burford the final courtesies of leave-taking, she said to Mrs. Holmroyd, “Pardon me.... I’m afraid I’ve forgotten what name you gave. It was on my tongue when I came into the room. Not Hanson? To be sure! Holmroyd! What was I thinking of!--You don’t happen to know of a good servant, do you, Mrs. Holmroyd?” Mrs. Holmroyd, to her great regret, did not. With a few more words of thanks and superficial tributes to the mildness of the weather, they parted. Mrs. Holmroyd, shepherding her children in front of her, moved towards the garden gate. Miss Burford holding the door open no longer than sufficed to show her the visitors’ backs, closed it with an alacrity and silence almost sinister, and betook herself to the room just vacated at such a rate as to reach its window before the gate had closed upon them; from which point of vantage she subjected their persons to the dark and searching scrutiny that in their presence politeness had denied her. Nor did she relax the tightened guiders of her neck until they were no longer visible, when she instantly let down the blinds and went in turn to the seats her visitors had sat on; effacing the impress of their bodies from the holland covers with a critical hand, and even stooping to investigate the places where their feet had been. After which, and many touches of adjustment to the furniture--so minute as to produce no effect perceptible to any eye but hers, she left the room with an expression of disgust and proceeded to seek an outlet for her indignation in the kitchen.

Meanwhile Mrs. Holmroyd and her children walked back towards the town. They had but shortly left the Rockery House behind them, and were indeed still contained in the retrospective silence of their thoughts, when they encountered two substantial men--City Fathers, one might have guessed them at a glance--walking corporately abreast. The outer of these two, who stepped momentarily off the kerb to offer Mrs. Holmroyd better passage, having noted already the house they came from, bestowed a keen glance of enquiry on them as they went by. A few moments later, Oswald (stealing a backward look at these two figures that were so reminiscent of yesterday) was much stirred by the fact that they were come to a standstill before the very gate his own hand had just now punctiliously closed, and he imparted the intelligence to his mother in an excited undertone. Beryl spun round on her muff at once, and was not less agitated with what she saw, exclaiming: “Mother, see! They’re both looking after us.” Mrs. Holmroyd, walking with her head more consciously erect, and a higher colour in her cheek, reproached her children gently for the impropriety of an act whose tragic effect on Lot’s wife should furnish a lesson for all time.

Within, her pride reiterated: “A Shilling!”

“ ... Perhaps you would allow me to give him at least ... a shilling.”

3

That same afternoon, shortly after the little school had resumed its studies, there came a knock at Mrs. Holmroyd’s street door. All the scholars looked up with one accord to cry in chorus: “Please, Mrs. Holmroyd, there’s a knock at the door.” In which way they recited most of the happenings in the house and neighbourhood. “Please, Mrs. Holmroyd, somebody’s just put something through the letter-box.” “Please, Mrs. Holmroyd, the rag and bone man’s going by.” “Please, Mrs. Holmroyd, there’s a milk cart.” From time to time, too, it was the custom of their friends and relations to call during the course of study, to ask if one or other of the students might be liberated to pay some visit or to take a walk. A knock at the door, therefore, was always pregnant with possibilities and very welcome, and Mrs. Holmroyd had never any lack of volunteers to answer the summons on such occasions. This afternoon she turned her eye on Oswald, who rose obedient to the silent bidding and went downstairs. Filled with speculation, he opened the front door. No daylight came in with it. A wall of darkness seemed to seal the door-frame up and block his outlook to the street beyond. He found himself beneath the shadow of a human shape which appeared to be standing with its back towards the door, and as though made conscious of its opening by the inward suction of air, turned round to proclaim itself no less a personage than the gentleman who had moved off the causeway this morning, and whom Oswald had seen (on looking back) with his hand upon the gate of Briar Dene.

At close quarters, measured against a doorway that gave passage to Oswald’s person with such liberal space to spare, he seemed enormously enlarged. Across his waistcoat there swung a heavy chain of gold on a level with Oswald’s forehead, revealed to view by the fact that both his coat and overcoat were worn unbuttoned. He had a close-cropped square-cut beard in which black hairs and grey contested on equal terms; and his eyebrows, in which black still predominated, bore a striking resemblance to those before which Oswald had lowered his gaze in the holland-draped drawing-room this morning. “Now, my lad!” he addressed Oswald, “Does Mrs. Holmroyd live here?” The voice though blunt and businesslike was not unkindly. It dispensed unceremoniously with the letter H in both “Holmroyd” and “here,” and yet seemed not altogether devoid of a sort of authoritative substitute for the aspirate; a sort of assumptive H in the speaker’s eye and bearing; as if his dignity could not descend to humour the whims of words, which, for his usage must be broad and free of finery, built for solid wear and tear like the boots he stood in.

Oswald said politely that this was the house where Mrs. Holmroyd lived.

“Tell her,” the figure instructed him, “Councillor Burford would like a word with her.”

Thereupon, by rights, Oswald should have invited the owner of the name in a clear voice to enter, but whilst being perfectly lucid as to this part of his duty he felt the most inexpressible helplessness for the performance of it, being temporarily under the influence of the conduct of Councillor Burford’s own maidservant in a similar predicament this morning. Hardly knowing what precise step might now be expected of him he therefore opened the door to its widest extent, and flattening himself against the passage wall, by this means and a timid supplication of eye besought the Councillor to enter--which the Councillor did forthwith in a very deliberate and impressive manner, filling the passage so completely that Oswald had for safety to turn his nose sideways as the visitor brushed by. Nor could he, pinned against the wall by the Councillor’s broad shoulders, extricate himself from this painful position in order to close the door, for the Councillor, taking stock of his new surroundings with the critical absorption particular to a man of property, appeared to be oblivious of Oswald and the obstruction his own figure caused. Nothing, Oswald knew, constituted a grosser breach of politeness than to force one’s way past stationary individuals, but the situation was rapidly becoming desperate, and at last he was left with no alternative but to dive below the spreading skirts of the overcoat, whence he emerged palpitating on the farther side. Arrived there, it had been his purpose to throw open the parlour door, but a simultaneous movement of the Councillor served to block this avenue in turn, and Oswald solved a difficulty now become insuperable by running upstairs.

“ ... Councillor Burford, mother.”

She assumed appropriate surprise. “Councillor Burford, Oswald? Are you sure?” Yes. He was sure. So sure, indeed, that his head turned uncontrollably towards the landing, expectant every moment of a heavy tread. The look betrayed him to his mother, whom it prompted anxiously to ask: “Where is Councillor Burford, Oswald?”--and reading the truth from the open page of her son’s silence: “You’ve never left him standing in the passage, dear? O, go down at once, Oswald, and show him into the room.” Nevertheless her movements were so swift--or perhaps Oswald’s descending footsteps lagged a little--that she greeted her visitor in the passage before he had disappeared through the parlour door which Oswald held open for him. The Councillor still wore his square felt hat, as if imbued with the opinion that a passage entrance constituted no integral part of a house, and that to uncover the head in such a neutral space was a foolish waste of politeness; but he doffed it the moment Mrs. Holmroyd came down the stairs, saying “Good afternoon, ma’am,” in a voice that Oswald envied. “I’ve not called to intrude upon your time, ma’am,” he said. “But from what my daughter tells me I believe it’s you I’ve got to thank for bringing back that stud, and I felt I must just look round on my way to business to let you know I’m very much obliged. I rather fancy I met you as you was coming away from my house this morning, but of course I hadn’t the pleasure of knowing who you was, at the time.”

He broke the laws of grammar with the same resolute authoritative air with which he disregarded aspirates, yet the sound of the fault was less flagrant than any attempt at its written representation may convey. A character of rugged confidence in himself condoned to some extent his misuse of the mother-tongue, which he ordered with the brusque assurance of one used to be obeyed, and without compromise treated language as his servant and not his master.

“Of course ... you’d know I’d offered a reward,” he told Mrs. Holmroyd. “Five shillings was the sum I’d fixed in my mind. But my daughter tells me she couldn’t prevail on you to accept nothing.” He paused there as though to offer Mrs. Holmroyd an opening for any change of mind upon the subject, and reading unaltered resolution on her lips passed on: “So there’s no more to be said. Except that I’m very much obliged to you, ma’am. Very much obliged, I’m sure.”

Mrs. Holmroyd expressed herself obliged in turn for the Councillor’s visit, modestly renouncing at the same time all credit for the stud’s recovery in favour of her son, upon whom the Councillor turned an eye intended to be encouraging, but which, dissociated from any smile that Oswald could discover, proved a heavier and more embarrassing burden than his own eye could support without flinching; more especially as, after a period of silent inspection, the Councillor apostrophized him “Young man” with the enquiry, What school he went to?

The question involved some difficulty. Strictly speaking, Oswald went to no school--as himself was painfully aware; being already arrived at the outer fringe of that inward state of mind which shirks admission of the shameful fact of being educated at home in conjunction with a younger sister and infants of both sexes. All his schooling pertained to the future. He looked beseechingly at his mother for guidance in perplexity.

“ ... Just at present,” Mrs. Holmroyd interposed, and never was the sound of clarid water more welcome to thirsty soul than the gracious clearness of her voice to Oswald, “he does not go to any school.” Perhaps she felt as Oswald did the nakedness of the fact exposed thus feebly to the scrutiny of the dark brows bent upon it, for she threw over its frail limbs the phrase: “He is rather delicate.” It was a phrase Oswald had heard before, and in the same conjunction, that served as a sort of swaddling-cloth to truth. He stole a glance beneath his lashes at the dark Councillor to see what effect the statement made upon him; and, not without a certain pride to be possessed of such indifferent health, assumed a posture of delicacy in keeping with it. “He is only twelve,” he heard his mother say. “For the present I am educating him at home ... where,” she forced her lips to add, “I have a small school of my own. It is chiefly intended for delicate children who need rather more care and consideration than could be given them elsewhere.” The Councillor contributed a terse “Indeed!” in a voice that seemed to own small sympathy with the needs of sickly childhood. Oswald, still bearing the burden of the visitor’s regard, had an uncomfortable belief that it lay on him with a degree of disapproval only short of anger. At least the dark grey beard baffled him, giving access to no human expression that Oswald’s eyes could decipher in the rapid reference made to it. He therefore strove to reach the visitor’s softer feelings by a demeanour of sadness.

“Later on ...” Oswald was relieved to hear his mother say, “he will (of course) go to the Grammar School.” There was an air of fine conclusiveness about the statement, and particularly about the interpolated “of course” that surprised even Oswald. Never had he heard his mother allude to his scholastic future in such emphatic terms. It was true, then! Perhaps he would be going next term. There seemed something so masculine and vigourous about the thought of going to the Grammar School that delicacy seemed altogether incompatible with it. Whereupon he threw aside his facial sadness and the wasted attitude symbolic of weak health and assumed a convalescent, more heroic, mien which (surely) could not fail to commend itself to a spectator of such powerful discernment. But the Councillor only said “Indeed!” once more. “What’s he going to make, ma’am?” he asked--a question so irrelevant and difficult to answer that Oswald could but repeat it to himself with silent lips, keeping a sharp eye on his mother’s face.

“It is rather early to think about that just yet,” Mrs. Holmroyd remarked with indulgence.

“Not too early, if he means to make a good start, ma’am,” the Councillor declared. “They can’t begin too young. That’s my opinion, and I begun young myself--so I know. Make up your mind as soon as possible, m’lad,” he said, addressing Oswald, “and then stick to it. No chopping and changing. It’s the only way.”

The counsel was intended, doubtless, to display interest and good-will, and to bestow upon the finder of the solitaire, in lieu of silver, some solid piece of golden wisdom from one whose office lent a special weight and value to what he uttered. But the words tapped Mrs. Holmroyd’s conscience accusingly. They shocked her heart with a sudden alarm as though her son’s life had been threatened by a passing cab.

“He sings in the choir at St. Saviour’s,” she made haste to say defensively. “He is a voluntary member. And he helps me at home, too,” she added, feeling that the earlier testimonial found less favour in the Councillor’s eyes than she had hoped. “He is most useful to me.” Oswald’s pride, stirred not less by this tribute to his usefulness, overwelled the lips of silence all at once and became speech.

“I go errands on Friday,” he said, “and on Saturday as well.” He shaped the words shyly, offering the information not to Councillor Burford, whom he lacked courage directly to address, but (though not looking at her) to his mother. “With the basket.”

“Errands, do you?” said the Councillor, his interest at once excited by this practical and familiar word. “What sort of errands? Who for?”

“Only for me,” Mrs. Holmroyd answered quickly, with a flush that seemed to wish to interpose itself between the present conversation and some topic feared. But the fatal word “pork-pie” had already escaped from Oswald’s custody, and the Councillor’s gaze, directed on her across the upturned brim of his extended hat, seemed to demand an explanation. She gave it hurriedly, her words stumbling somewhat in the act. “I do not bake many. Only a few ... for those who, who care for home-made pies.”

“Pork-pies!” said the Councillor, tersely, but with interest. “What’s the price of ’em?”

Of all questions it was the one she dreaded most.

“It depends,” she said evasively, “ ... upon the size. I make them in several sizes. Some of my--” “customers” she could not bring her lips to call them; “clients” was no woman’s word; “acquaintances” made the commerce too promiscuous; “friends,” in this delicate connotation, seemed the only title left to her. “Some of my friends prefer a large pie, and some a small.”

“What’s the price of your small?” her visitor demanded.

She took a breath and murmured: “Eighteen pence.” Her eyelids flickered. She hated prices more than pies. She could give; she found it hard to take. To pay was gracious; to be paid, shameful.

“Eighteen pence,” repeated her visitor. He uttered the price so openly, and with so little recognition of its shameful inner meaning, that her heart took courage. And to this stolid Councillor figures were the fundamental facts of life; the principle underlying all reality. He saw no shame in them; they formed the basis of existence. They were, for him, the test of character; the very making of a man. And if Mrs. Holmroyd blushed--as blush she did--to breathe her eighteen pence, the blush was wasted. Eighteen pence, the Councillor’s face appeared to testify, was a very respectable, substantial, well-established figure; a sum not to be despised or treated lightly even by a prosperous member of the Daneborough Town Council. “Eighteen pence,” said he again, as if this were a financial matter calling for deliberation. Mrs. Holmroyd’s chief fear was that he would straightway place an order for a pie. Not because his appetite persuaded, but because she had been good enough to decline his proffered reward. But in this, too, her irresponsible finer feelings played her false. For, having said “Ah!” and “Indeed!” with great spaciousness, the Councillor directed his attention suddenly towards his hat, as if it had spoken to him, and said: “But I mustn’t detain you any longer, ma’am. You’ve your business to think of, and so have I.” With which, wishing Mrs. Holmroyd good-afternoon, and thanking her again (ma’am) he turned to go. Mrs. Holmroyd prompted her son: “Oswald, dear ...” and Oswald, quitting the company of the chair his politeness had brought forward for the Councillor’s reception, hastened to reach the front door in advance of the departing figure. But the broad shoulders and spreading overcoat effectually filled the passage, to the obstruction of all politeness; and their visitor let himself out without any rearward look. That he was not unaware of Oswald’s activity in the back-draught of his ample skirts seemed indicated by the fact that he left the door open behind him as though for this ensuing hand to close, and betook himself gravely down the street.

4

On Friday, Councillor Burford called again. He did not present himself as before, during academic hours, but on his way home to tea, which with him, as with most of the City Fathers, was a substantial repast exhaling the odours of hot meats. The little Spring Bank household was already seated at its modest meal. The scholars were dispersed for the week-end; the schoolroom was a place of echoes only, whispering round a defunct fire in a shrinking grate. But the sitting-room beneath, despite the patent scantiness of furniture, diffused a homely comfort; its walls and ceiling reciprocating the flickers of a cheerful fire, small, but ruddy red and stout of heart, that put out tongues of flame and piped, from time to time, exuberant music through the bars on flageolets of smoke.

The solemn footsteps arrested at the street door caused the little family to suspend its eating and seek each other’s eyes. Beryl cried: “Who’s that!” Oswald stared mutely over his teacup. Mrs. Holmroyd said: “I can’t think who it will be ... at this time. It is too early for the post.” But she knew it was Councillor Burford. She laid a restraining hand on Beryl’s wrist, already making preparations for a descent from her high chair. “Oswald will go, dear.” She lit another gas.

“Now m’lad.”

Yes. It was Councillor Burford’s voice that echoed in the narrow passage. Intuition had not deceived her.

“Is your mother at home?” Oswald’s answer was not audible, but they heard a leisurely foot introduced into the passage, and straightway the passage seemed to be choked with a gigantic presence rubbing both its walls. Mrs. Holmroyd hastily set down her teacup, half turning to the door. For Oswald had left this open, and the visitor, catching her eye over the descending teacup, drew back with apologies.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am. Your son didn’t tell me you was at tea.”

Mrs. Holmroyd assured him that no apology was necessary, their tea being nearly over--a statement that caused Beryl’s eyes to make a startled tour of plates and dishes.

“Please come in, Mr. Burford, and excuse the tea-table. This is our only room.”

“I aren’t going to disturb you,” said the Councillor, removing his hat, which he appeared to have the habit of retaining until the last possible moment. “I’m just on my way home to tea myself.” And saying this, as if it implied a resolution to advance no further, he stepped across the threshold and moved to the fireplace, where, planted firmly with his broad back towards its blaze, and the square felt hat held out brim uppermost in his large hand, he took a comprehensive survey of the accessories of Mrs. Holmroyd’s table; the teapot, the hot water jug, the jar of home-made jam, the sweet cake, the bread and butter and toast. The regard was leisurely and undisguised, and yet (to do it justice) it lacked all quality of rudeness. On the contrary, this overt look, which no more respected the finnicking conventions of politeness than his lips flattered language, or his dress paid toll to the follies of fashion, possessed a character of reassurance, as though his eyes were not displeased with what they saw. Indeed, one object on the table so far attracted his admiration as to cause him to indicate it by means of a movement of his hat.

“That’s a nice cream jug you’ve got there, ma’am.”

Mrs. Holmroyd’s eyes fell upon it, and a flush (born not of gratification alone) crept into her face.

“It belonged to my grandmother, Mr. Burford,” she said. She did not add that it had belonged to someone else, less connected with the family, since then, but the doleful thought was in her mind, and under pretext of touching the admired object with a soft, appreciative finger, she evaded the visitor’s glance. For there was something in the weight of it disconcerting to sensitive memories. But the remark, surely, had been no more than a coincidence.

“Do you use it every day then, ma’am?” the Councillor enquired.

She answered “Yes.... At least, nearly every day,” for Beryl was looking at her now, and eyes of innocence shine with such insufferable wisdom at times. “It makes a pleasant change.”

The Councillor remarked, “Indeed!” In its dryness and angularity the word seemed curiously reminiscent of the figure of his daughter, who, as if evoked by it, rose up ghostly between them. Mrs. Holmroyd understood the significance of the comment. It implied that no such piece of silver would be degraded into common service on Miss Burford’s table. But whether she stood rebuked or favoured by the comparison nothing in the Councillor’s face betrayed. He left the topic as abruptly as he had approached it, and his next words showed him to be far away in thought.

“About those pies, ma’am. Did I understand you to say you was baking on Fridays?”

A slight flush rose to Mrs. Holmroyd’s face as she acknowledged the task and day.

“I thought I hadn’t been mistook,” said the Councillor. “I’ve been talking it over with my daughter, and we’ve decided to give your pies a trial. We’ll begin with a small one, to see how we like it. If that’s satisfactory perhaps some time we’ll try another.”

There was a cautiousness about the order, intensified by its association with Miss Burford--as if this hard-faced lady had been a witness of Mrs. Holmroyd’s discomfiture--that stung her pride. But the offence chargeable in the Councillor’s words seemed to infect his answer not at all. He faced her with the straightforward mien of one neither intending nor suspecting offence.

“Eighteen pence I think you said it was, ma’am,” the Councillor remarked, and thrust a large hand into his trousers’ pocket, where some loose coinage disturbed by its intrusion made a painful jingle.

“O, please do not trouble about that, Mr. Burford,” she protested, “anytime will do. In fact, I would prefer....” What precisely she would prefer remained unspoken. But the large hand groping in the spacious pocket ceased its activities at once, as if (to be sure) Mrs. Holmroyd’s suggestion were a wise one.

“Just as you like ma’am,” the Councillor obliged her. “You can have the money now, or you can have it later. Why, as far as that goes,” he reflected, “perhaps, if you’re agreeable, we might work it off by contra. It’ll be as good a way as any. You’ll be wanting groceries, I suppose. Tea, coffee, sugar, rice, sago, baking powder,”--he ran through a glib list of domestic necessaries, including some prime Wiltshire and several recommendable sorts of cheese. “I only keep the very best, ma’am. It pays me, and it pays my customers best in the long run. I don’t think I’ve been favoured with any of your custom up to the present, but I shall always be happy to serve you. Or anybody. For choice and quality I’ve a business that takes second place to none in Daneborough.”

Mrs. Holmroyd betrayed a soft confusion in acknowledgment of her neglect of the Councillor’s business. It was true she had had no dealings with him up to the present. But she excused this apparent discourtesy by alleging the smallness of her needs.

“That may be,” said the Councillor, obviously determined to see in their smallness no bar to custom, “ ... but they mount up. Business is business, and there’s no call for you to buy a pennorth more of me than you want, just because I’ve a bigger stock to pick from. I’m ready to supply the big orders, and I’m ready to supply the small. There’s no difference in the quality whether you want much or little. If you’re satisfied where you are, ma’am,” the Councillor said with a fine display of magnanimity, “why! stay where you are. I don’t want to interfere with nobody else’s trade.” Mrs. Holmroyd breathed her appreciation of this laudable sentiment.

“But if,” he added, with a more decisive tone, as though perhaps afraid his recent toleration might be misinterpreted, “you think there’s anything in the grocery line could be improved on, why! I shall be glad to see you, ma’am. There’s not many customers comes to me once but what they come again. I aren’t in the habit of losing them.”

The matter was agreed. On the basis of a contra account established by virtue of an eighteenpenny pie, Mrs. Holmroyd consented to give the Burford shop a trial. His solicitation of her custom flattered vanity, and his sturdy handling of the subject put her gratefully at ease. Where herself approached the topic of her livelihood with shame, this borough councillor marched squarely to the subject of business with a tread as firm as that which took him to the Mansion House.

“And before I forget,” said the Councillor, rubbing a sleeve round the circumference of his hat. “Did I understand you, or somebody else, to say anything about a school?”

Profiting by the lesson just received, and the resolution built on it, Mrs. Holmroyd lost no time in confessing her ownership of the little school.

“What’s your terms, ma’am?” the Councillor enquired.

She was not yet, it seemed, so proficient in the new culture as to be capable of quoting terms without hesitation and a momentary dropping of the eyes. But she only dropped them to the table edge, which she stroked with a soft motion of the hand as if to mitigate the harshness of the sum mentioned. Thirty shillings, in short, the sum was.

“Per Term or Quarter, ma’am?” the Councillor asked her. She answered “Term” with the added comment that, reckoned quarterly, the sum amounted (virtually) to a pound. “How do you make that out?” the Councillor corrected. “Three thirties is ninety; ninety’s four pound ten. There’s a matter of ten shilling difference, ma’am.” She agreed instantly. To be sure. Mr. Burford was quite right. Of course.... And stroked the table edge again. It was another lesson in practicality that she must take to heart. Actuated by which resolve, inasmuch as the Councillor’s last word had been “Indeed!” and nothing more favourable to thirty shillings had passed his beard since then, she said: “Of course ... in the event of two pupils from one family....”

“Aye, but it isn’t two,” the Councillor disillusioned her promptly. “It’s only one. In fact, it’s not even that. It’s an enquiry. That’s all it is.” Mrs. Holmroyd quite understood the situation, and expected nothing more of it than had actually transpired. At the same time, if Mr. Burford thought that the terms mentioned were more, perhaps, than those he had in mind would be disposed to entertain, she might consider some small....

But to her disappointment the Councillor flatly withstood this hint of a reduction; “Terms is terms, ma’am,” he said uncompromisingly. “And if folks doesn’t feel inclined to pay ’em that’s no reason why you should make ’em any less. It isn’t business. You could have as many pupils as you liked if you’d take ’em for nothing.” He delivered the homily with the terse satisfaction of a man who takes pride in his own common-sense, displaying it for Mrs. Holmroyd’s edification as Miss Burford might have shown the furniture reflective of her care. And Mrs. Holmroyd’s agreement seemed so emphatically assumed in what he said that she could do no other than assent to it, albeit this subscription to a fixed and arbitrary price caused her dependence to quake as if the principle thus put into her hand for self-defence had been a fire-arm which (even in extremity) she doubted her courage to discharge. Nor was her faith in its protectiveness increased when the Councillor, still talking over his extended hat, went on to say that in the case under consideration “Probably it wouldn’t make a ha’porth of difference if you reduced your terms or not. There’s so many schools nowadays, ma’am. Here’s all the Church schools and the Corporation schools and the English schools and the Grammar School and private schools in every street. People can have edjication for nothing nowadays, and when they can get it for nothing it’s not very likely they want to pay for it.” Not, he explained in a tone displaying some slight, but only slight, consideration for Mrs. Holmroyd’s academic feelings, that he was in favour of all this Edjication himself. “It’s overdone, ma’am. There’s too much of it. It’s a craze. People seems to think edjication’s going to be a cure for everything. It’s not. What it does in nine cases out of ten is to fill folks’ heads with nonsense. They’d rather waste their time learning things they can’t understand and wouldn’t be no good to ’em if they did, than turn to honest work and do the things they can. Where’s all the domestic servants and shop assistants going to, ma’am, since edjication’s been introduced? Here’s my daughter, ma’am. She gets a servant in one day, and the girl’s mother comes to fetch her box the next. Why? Just because my daughter expects to have things clean and decent. Some day there won’t be any servants to be had. They’ll all be milliners and school-teachers. That’s what edjication’s got to answer for.”

In the instant of departure the observant eyes that had more than once rested on Beryl’s solemnly uplifted face in their constant journeys round the room, admitted her to a glance of definite recognition at last.

“Your daughter, ma’am?” he made enquiry.

Mrs. Holmroyd, gratified with his notice of her child, said “Yes,” and lit up the object of his attention with an indulgent smile as though commending it under this favourable light to the Councillor’s regard.

“You’ve only these two, then,” Mr. Burford remarked; and when she had confirmed the number: “Let’s see,” said he, “I think I’m right in supposing you’ve lost your husband, ma’am?” If she had not answered him by words, the look of sorrowing admission with which her face adapted itself to the enquiry would have spoken for her.

“He has been dead ... nearly two years,” she said softly; and the impulse proving too strong for her devotion to withstand, she could not refrain from calling attention to the presentment of the best of husbands.

“That is his photograph on the mantelpiece ... just behind you, Mr. Burford. It does not do him justice.”

He turned hat in hand, and gazed a moment on it; she, intently watching. But his only comment was an ultimate “Indeed!” which, truth to tell, proved poor requital for the needs of love.

“I’ll bid you good evening, ma’am,” the Councillor said, turning from this melancholy topic to matter of fact with evident relief. “Don’t disturb yourself. I know my way out.” To Oswald, awaiting him in the doorway he said, “Well m’lad! Have you thought any more about what I told you? Have you made up your mind yet?”

With burning ears Oswald had to confess the shameful fact “Not yet,” being so completely unprepared for a repetition of this perplexing question as to have no other answer ready for it. “It’s time you did,” the Councillor admonished him. “Every day you lose you’re letting some smarter lad get a start of you.” It was a terrifying reflection, that shook the fabric of Oswald’s peace of mind. He wished he could decide whether their newly made acquaintance spoke sportively or in earnest. But the square beard divulged no secrets, and for Oswald’s age humour is as a locked door unless a smile be the key to it. The broad conciliar figure launched itself from the doorway and merged its contours into the gathering mist. Quick! Let this door be closed; let the closer of it hasten back to the parlour; let him find his gloves, his muffler, cap and overcoat, and begin without a moment’s waste to overtake this constant stream of smarter boys whom each succeeding second of inertia saw started on the road to fame ahead of him.

5

On Saturday there was no school. The restless movements of imprisoned scholars, sniffing over slate and page like rabbits engaged upon green food, gave way to the sound of water and the vigour of scrubbing-brushes symbolic of the charwoman, who, wrapped in a large black shawl that her wrinkled arms wound round about her from within, and treading painfully on feet that years of imprudent intimacy with damp floorboards and washhouse flagstones had made into repositories of rheumatism and barometric pains, came each Saturday to scrub the schoolroom floor and discharge those coarser duties to which Mrs. Holmroyd’s respectability had not yet bowed. Once in each fortnight too, she came to undertake the heavier washing, bearing underneath her shawl a pair of ancient pattens, with which Oswald and Beryl indulged in glorious foretastes of their own growth during the dinner hour. At eight o’clock, or earlier, a muffled wrap bestowed upon the street door by the washerwoman’s knuckles through their folds of shawl, announced her advent. Respectfully the street door opened. A voice affirmed: “It’s only Me’m!” And feet were heard, most punctiliously, to brush themselves upon the mat.

This knock, and voice, and these feet, were Elizabeth.

Her hair when she removed her faded bonnet of antiquity, was silvery white. Her eyes were drawn, and the flesh falling away from them hung below each iris in crescents of red. But the face was not withered, and to those old enough to be conversant with the processes of age its features showed clear traces of earlier beauty. The speaking voice that issued from the sunken lips was singularly gentle and lent to her soft enunciation of the word “mum” a quality not servile. Seldom did Mrs. Holmroyd note the white head bent above her floor but that conscience smote her for being the instigator of its task. These silver hairs shone like prophetic texts to her, which with many an inward tremour she applied to her own life, asking: “How will it be with me, when someday my forces fail?” For she saw that the world demands, with stern injustice, the hardest labour from the least fitted. The aged and the weak, descending through the successive strata of more tolerable occupations reserved for the strong and able, sink inevitably at last to those uttermost depths of toil that only age and feebleness could stoop to undertake. Elizabeth had no vices save a jug of ale for her midday meal (that she fetched at the required moment from an adjacent hostel beneath the all-sufficing shawl) and an intemperate thirst for work. Two husbands had she buried in her time; each, in turn, a helpless burden on her, and each as inconsolably lamented as if all virtue had died with him. Now, in her declining strength, the only favour she asked of the world was liberty to earn her bread. The only fear she had, was not of work but that the world should disbelieve the working capabilities of white hairs. More than anything she dreaded this aspersion on her strength, and there was something tragic in the physical efforts her frail form put forth to demonstrate its fitness for toil. She prayed to die as she had lived; a worker. And yet, for all her protestations of strength and her display of a spirit that seemed immortal, there were signs that the flesh began to fail. Her eyes lacked their ancient sharpness for spying cobwebs or penetrating corners. Her vaunted scrubbing-hand, for all its vigour, suffered lapses and betrayed the conscience it sought to serve, leaving inexplicable spots uncleansed, that Mrs. Holmroyd’s self by stealth removed.

For years she had charred in Daneborough’s selectest circles, passing from one domestic cataclysm to another with faith and enthusiasm unimpaired; perpetually toiling on the dusty underside of the seamy canvas of life, and so perverted by long habit that she had come to regard blue mottled soap and pancheons for flesh-shrivelling water as the insignia of some holy faith. Scarcely a kitchen of Daneborough but she was acquainted with; scarcely a family but she had worked for. She knew to its deeps the domestic economy of some scores of pretentious houses, and those dread domestic secrets that society spends its life in trying to conceal. The turned carpet, the patched stair, the worn blanket, the frayed curtains, the niggard larder--she knew which households suffered from these secret maladies, and could lay her unhesitating hand upon the cupboards in which their skeletons were kept. Among other members of the Corporation she had charred, at one time, for the late lamented Alderman Bankett, until his relict--knowing by personal experience the disabilities of old age, and suspecting that Elizabeth could not, for all her protestations, remain much longer exempt from them--mercifully discharged the charwoman’s white hairs from work so much beyond their strength. And Elizabeth had charred for the late Mrs. Burford and her daughter, too, until--in a moment of unpardonable weakness--her pride could not deny itself the gratification of imparting that, in her younger and more comely days, she had been sought in marriage by the Councillor’s progenitor, and that had he but pressed his suit a little longer Miss Burford might have acknowledged Elizabeth for grandmother. The statement, being indisputably true, served naturally as a paralyzer of relations. “From that time’m,” Elizabeth confided to Mrs. Holmroyd, “it was no use me trying to suit her. I could read it in her face. She never rested while she got shut of me.”

With which the face of the enthusiast, rent with a hundred seams and convulsed beyond recognition, would be flung into her apron--that shook hugely and horribly with silent sobs. On Oswald this dramatic scene, not infrequently enacted, had a marrow-curdling effect very disturbing to the lower jaw and rendering deglutition difficult. What stirred him most of all in this recital was the prepotent fact that the extinct founder of the Burford fortunes had begun life with a handbell and muffin basket. Baskets, in fact, seemed to lend foundation to more than half the fortunes of the families of Daneborough. With such examples to inspire him, what was there (aided by the sausage basket) himself might not achieve?

“It’s true’m!” Elizabeth was wont to assure his mother, fearful lest so wonderful a story might defraud her of the credit and the sympathy that were her due. “It’s as true as I’m stood here. He asked me three times. He asked me last time at the corner of Cattle Market. He had basket on his arm and bell in his hand, and he puts basket down as it might be there, and when I shakes my head he picks basket up again in a temper and rung bell fit to break it. But would I have him? Not me’m! Not likely. I wouldn’t have given up my two husbands for such a one as him. Not if you’d paid me.”

And though Elizabeth might wrap tumultuous sobs in her tormented apron to think how harshly she had been used by this granddaughter-in-hypothesis, it must at least be admitted that such a relationship, unsupported by anything in the table of affinities, was one that exacted a niceness of handling beyond the competence of most human nature to bestow upon it. Perhaps in acting as she did, Miss Burford took the only human course; for if the enthusiast had so far lost sight of the virtue of discretion as to impart such a confidence to Councillor Burford’s daughter, was she likely to be less communicative to servant-maids, whose obedient respect was hard enough to claim already?

“I know what it is’m!” the enthusiast averred, withdrawing a withered, shaking hand from out of the folds of her shawl, her lips writhing one above the other in their efforts to retain composure and repress the rising sob. “She’s done with me. She’s finished with me. She’ll never let me work for her again. And I shan’t go and ask her’m. I shan’t beg. I’d die sooner.”

“O, surely, surely!” Mrs. Holmroyd said, seeking to pour the vials of hope and comfort on the stricken woman, “it is not so bad as that, Elizabeth. There must be some mistake. You should not look on the dark side of things.”

“She promised to let me know’m,” the shaking shawl replied. “I know what that means. I know what it means to be let know. That’s what they all say when they want to get shut of me. Everybody’s getting shut of me.” Her reddening eyes swam down to the responsive shawl. “ ... _You’ll_ be getting shut of me next’m.”

And the dreadfullest part about it was that beneath this fleshless, bloodless sentiment, Mrs. Holmroyd descried the outline of the bony skeleton of truth. Yet the precariousness of her own existence, that should have taught her wisdom, taught her to be merciful instead. Without mercy, indeed, how could she dare to hope? The eye of her apprehension perceived Elizabeth as a terrible extension of her own self, displaying in most poignant form the tragedy of her own desires and fears. Never should this door be closed against her so long as her failing limbs and lurid fervour had strength to reach it. Oswald and Beryl she imbued with an ultra reverence for these silver hairs that some dread day (who knows?) might be her very own. Always they addressed the folded shawl and faded bonnet as Mrs. Betson, and asked her scrupulously how she did, and were so deferent and well behaved that now and again the ancient charwoman could not swallow her meat for the lump in her throat, and set down her midday beer untasted on the table, overcome with momentary gratitude for the kindness this household showed her, and begging Mrs. Holmroyd:

“O, mum! Don’t get shut of me for Childer’s sake. I’d sooner be let know by any place but this.”

6

Of all days in the week the one that Oswald and his sister loved the best was Saturday. Sunday dwelt a day apart, rather to be respected than beloved; unreckoned with the other friendly human days on which mankind has freedom to enjoy itself. If rain must fall on any day, by all means let it be a Sunday; piety being independent of the weather, and Sunday bringing with it no market penny as Saturday did. For Saturday was market day, and whilst the aged enthusiast charged herself with responsibility for their home, Oswald and his sister went a marketing with their mother, one on each side of her; Beryl on the inner side of safety, Oswald on the outer and protective flank, preserving as a gentleman should the guardian place each time they crossed from one causeway to another by a manœuvre almost military in its precision. They did not wear their Sunday best, but a modification sufficient to mark the status of the day, for the cream of Daneborough’s housewifery would be abroad with purses, grocery books and satchels, and Mrs. Holmroyd looked forward as much to the taste of public pride in her two children as the enthusiast looked forward to her midday ale. Each glance of praise bestowed on Oswald or on Beryl went straight into her heart, like the amber beverage into the enthusiast’s stomach, warming it and filling the recipient with comfortable thoughts of God. She gave Him thanks to find no children in all the town looking nicer than her own. Often when they were thus out together, she would seek occasion to let them walk in front of her that she might indulge motherhood to the full sight of them, and let her eye feast on this treasure that belonged to her.

For this forenoon shopping furnished but a further instance of her pride. Indeed, the next-door neighbour openly rebuked the prodigality that chose to purchase at a time when all the proudest purses in Daneborough were on parade, and said: “You’re very foolish, marm, excuse me!” It was the next-door’s wiser way to fare forth late at night, when Mrs. Holmroyd’s children lay abed, taking with her a carpet bag as if departing on a visit to the sea-side. With this she attacked the market at an hour when its powers of resistance began to flag; when the flaring lamps of paraffin began to spit and falter, and the fishmongers, hoarse with a whole day’s crying of “Now you fish buyers!” had ceased to fling pump water over their weeping stalls, or with watering-cans to try and coax the gaping cod and halibut back to life under the delusion that they were in their native element once more. Instead, they now displayed alacrity to thrust their flaccid remnants into any hesitating bass that paused before them, or into the market perambulator that passed by, charged with green vegetables and sleeping childhood, crying: “Here you are, missus! It’s been waiting for you. Fresh from the sea. You needn’t go any further for a bit of prime halibut.”

And the butchers too, in smocks that had been snowy white this morning, but were daubed all over now with the bloody finger-smears betokening a busy day, would be similarly reckless in their disposal of last legs and beasts’ internals, before the market closed. Sometimes, approaching midnight, if the application of an eye to Mrs. Holmroyd’s letter-box revealed the glitter of an inward light, the next-door neighbour would administer a muffled summons, on fire to claim the triumph of some dubitable purchase at a price that should have stirred all righteous ears to envy.

“There marm! And there! What do you say to that! And look you here! Is that a piece of good fresh meat? Smell it marm. As fresh as when it was killed. What do you think I paid? You’ll never guess.” And Mrs. Holmroyd never guessed. She never even learned the first rudiments of the lesson that the next-door neighbour’s rhapsodies essayed to teach her.

“You ought to come out marketing with me, marm!” the next-door neighbour urged, filled in this hour of conquest with the proselytizer’s zeal. “I’d learn you how to go about things. You’d soon pick it up. Pork, too, marm. You’d buy it for half the price you pay at Waxford’s if only you’d go at a proper time.”

It was the next-door neighbour’s pride, this nocturnal marketing. She gloried in it. To feed on meat at pence per pound cheaper than the folly of the morning buyers paid for it brought her more joy than a noble deed does to the virtuous. Nor could she comprehend the curious obstinacy of her neighbour, who, for all that Mrs. Holmroyd seemed to share her triumph and applaud her wisdom, yet pursued each Saturday the trodden path of error; going out in the forenoon with her children to buy her Sunday’s dinner from the High Gate butcher, and her fish from the High Gate fishmonger, and her vegetables from the High Gate greengrocer, all of whom, in the next-door neighbour’s parlance: “makes you pay for the gold lettering on their window, marm.” And it was useless that Mrs. Holmroyd sought to let her heart believe she did these things, in some sort, for her children’s sake. She did them, as the next-door neighbour vexedly divined, for pride. Perhaps, in this, she was not totally to blame. A culpable providence had scarcely helped her to be humble.

For when she came to Daneborough, she had, all told, no more than thirty pounds, and of this sum the greater part transformed itself into the Spring Bank home. But Providence, like an irritable teacher, alternately too lenient and too firm, and so spoiling the character committed to its care, inspired (in Mrs. Holmroyd’s favour) a frail annuitant to die. This was a maternal great-aunt whose death advantaged Oswald’s mother by the fabulous sum of eighty pounds, some shillings, and those odd pence in which lawyers and business men of principle delight to prove integrity. The reversion of this pittance that came to Mrs. Holmroyd not a day too soon--for already the quarter’s rent was due--sufficed to set the beneficiary’s fears at rest, restore her faith in heaven and place Aunt Caroline among the saints.

In due course, the financial remains of Aunt Caroline were committed to the bank. They were interred in the Banker’s Vault as eighty pounds, some shillings and the scrupulous odd pence. But the deposit note that Mrs. Holmroyd brought away as her certificate of burial was but for seventy pounds. Already the awful process of decomposition was set in. Before long, the mourner stood by the side of Aunt Caroline’s mortal resting place once more, and the Deposit Note when she retired said sixty-five. Now the wretched mourner began to see the true significance of death and to wish Aunt Caroline were still alive.

For the knowledge of this money at the bank had wrought in her a curious moral harm. It bred in her the feeling that her present life was specious and deceitful, as if she were living it by too mean a standard below the level of necessity. When she baked her pies or took the money for the little school, the memory of this hidden store rebuked her. It encouraged her to entertain a false ideal of independence. What were a few pennies paid for better meat, measured against such a background at the Bank? How could she deny her children milk and butter of the best or shame them by unneedful shabbiness when this sponsive sum protested? It lent a countenance to all her native generosities, to all those beautiful impulses of love and kindness that overgrew transplanted prudence like rank and native weeds. She was, all else before, a woman and a mother. Of business she knew nothing. Least of all could she comprehend that implacable form of business imposing the stern denial of every better impulse. Perplexedly endeavouring to be practical, she clung to the creed of her heart’s childhood: that kindness is a sort of providential currency, purchasing what it gives; that the eternal Banker never dishonours one promissary note of love, that the bread cast fearlessly upon the waters will come back, as it is written, after many days.

7

Councillor Burford’s shop stood in the High Gate almost opposite to the Bank so familiar to Mrs. Holmroyd’s fears, and but a stone’s throw from the Mansion House, of whose severe detachment and superiority it seemed to have borrowed not a little. Two bayed and consequential windows, each endowed with the abdominous convexity of an alderman, imposed their corpulence upon the pavement, and, scorning the meretricious finery of modern trade, attested a sober, well-established business. Nothing in the shop’s external features had been changed since the death of the first Burford, who might have risen from his cubicle in the cemetery and walked to his ancient place of business in the High Gate without suspecting that twenty years rather than one night had passed since last he hung his hat behind the counter and tied the strings of his apron into a concise bow across the pit of his stomach. This resistance of the shop to popular encroachment formed no small part of its proprietor’s pride. Just as the next door neighbour vaunted her nocturnal marketing, and Mrs. Holmroyd drew satisfaction from purchases made by day, so the Councillor reposed pride in his unaltered windows transected into a multitude of panes that spoke their owner’s long descent and attested an unbroken business lineage of fifty years. For the ostentatious nakedness of plate-glass that defiled so many frontages competing with his own he had no more tolerance than for a woman indecorously underclad, whose immodesty displayed more breast than bodice. The vulgar tendencies of contemporary trade, flaunting its wares without reserve before the eyes of all and sundry in a shameless effort to seduce inconstant custom and tempt those feeble-minded purchasers whose judgment fell before profusion, he steadfastly opposed. Business was no affair of trumpery window-dressing and unblushing price-tickets that ogled every passer-by. These things prostituted it. Quality did not lift its skirt in public places and show ankles of seductive cheapness to lure debased admirers. Quality, like a prudent woman, stayed indoors, displaying herself alone to those imbued with her own virtue that sought her there. The soul of business, in the Councillor’s conception, dwelt not in conflict but in character. Its foundations were personality. Customers had recourse to him as clients interviewed a doctor; seeking qualities and prices from the lips of his experience, and accepting the value of his judgment in all the things he dealt in, before their own. The big bowed windows, that might have been loquacious with labels, preserved instead the grave discretion of a surgery; such goods as they acknowledged were communicated soberly to the world without other recommendation than themselves. Yet in case these sober utterances might fail to make impression on the thoughtless, above the door--in characters for all to read--was gilded the date of the shop’s establishment, proclaiming without a doubt that here was no mere upstart trade.

But though the Councillor’s pride took stand unyielding before this frontage, and he said “It shan’t be done no different whilst I’m alive,” by which he made allusion to his son, who had betrayed at one time, tepid indications of a leaning towards plate glass, his pride (on the other hand) swelled with the consciousness of those internal modifications that bespoke the business’s expansion. The living room behind the shop wherein the Burford family ate their dinner when the Councillor was a boy and the Councillor’s father carving the midday meal could keep an eye upon the counter through a sort of retail hagioscope or one-pane window, prepared to wipe the gravy from his mouth at any moment on the appearance of a customer and pass into the shop, still masticating with a certain grandeur as he served,--all this was swept away, and but a transverse girder demarked the line once drawn between domesticity and trade.

Elizabeth remembered well these early premises and had often been served across the counter by the one-time aspirant for her hand, whose passion, constrained by marriage and the declining fortune of the once-desired, lost itself at last like an indistinguishable tributary in the broad delta of business dealing. His eye towards the end, could rest upon the faded object of his earlier adoration with the dilute politeness for a casual customer, taking her coppers and talking of the weather visible beyond his windows as though no other topic had ever come between them, whatever his inner thoughts might be. Thus it fares with all romance, that is either slain or outlives itself. And there is no more painful spectacle than a superannuated passion propped on reality and crippled with the rheumatism of disillusionment. Yet when the founder of the Burford business died, Elizabeth craved respite from her day’s employment to see his body taken back to earth, standing by the cemetery gates whilst tears more frequent than the minute bell dropped on her faded shawl. Hers was the last eye, indeed, to look upon the coffin before the clods obscured it.

God bless us, what have we here but pride again? What took her to the cemetery but her pride, agreeably garbed in weeds of sentiment, “to see the last of him” and replenish its meagre store with the memory that this occupant of a polished coffin had more than once besought her wrinkled hand, and that had but her hand been less exclusive she might have wept beneath a widow’s veil and gone home in a pair-coach to spill tears over funeral biscuits instead of trudging on tired feet to the wash-tub?

Her loyalty towards the dead man took the form of a pious doubt of his son’s ability to succeed him. “He’ll never be his father,” was her expressed opinion. “He’s nothing of his father in him.” And at that time, perhaps, there seemed some ground for the prediction. “The Shop,” old Joseph Burford might have affirmed in the historic language of a deceased monarch, “c’est moi.” He had made it. He was it. All the majesty of the business seemed incorporate in his own person. When he quitted the counter to take his meals the shop assumed an empty and uncertain air, like a face with its mouth open. The younger Burford seemed no substitute for the elder, whose delegated authority he wielded with such diffidence as to deprive the instrument of its function. It was too obvious that he shone by reflected light, deriving the greater part of lustre from his father’s eye, whose brightness also extinguished him. Even in the weighing of a pound of tea or the rashering of bacon, the paternal optic hovered hawklike over his uncertainty, ready to pounce upon a fault. The younger Burford expressed a cypher in the shop. Customers of standing asked the elder Burford how he did, and asked the younger Burford (in the elder’s absence) how his father did. They never asked the younger Burford how the younger did, for there seemed as yet nothing sufficiently established about his identity to justify solicitude.

But with his father’s death a noticeable change was wrought in him. He assumed his father’s gold watch; his father’s apron; his father’s trenchant tones and authoritative eye. The transition was rapid. From the moment that he became the accredited recipient of condolences on his father’s death, making subdued but suitable acknowledgment; imparting to customers the circumstances of his father’s illness and latest hours; his age, and the length of time he had been established in business--which, he took the opportunity to assure them gravely, would “be carried on as usual, with the same regard to quality”--the younger Burford disappeared. It seemed almost as if the son were buried, rather than the father. When customers enquired for “Mr. Burford” it was the son who looked up from his counter with acknowledgment of the name. His figure, gradually expanding, absorbed and incorporated the business as his father’s had done before. When he was out of it the shop seemed empty. From his presence teas and coffees drew such authenticity as they had; hams lacked all virtue unless he handled them; customers lent no confidence to bacon until the Burford hands had laid their blessing on it, with the unction of a bishop. The mechanical laudations of his hirelings behind the counter fell flat and lukewarm by comparison with the master’s manner. When they displayed a piece of “rolled” or “smoked” their tepid commendations seemed to diffuse dubiety on both sides of the counter. “Thank you ... but I’ll wait for Mr. Burford. Mr. Burford knows exactly what I want,” was a frequent formula. The assistants were resigned to it. They even seemed to await it and welcome it when it came, as a merciful solution of their difficulties; thankful to lay the merchandise down and escape the responsibility imposed by it. Not infrequently they prompted customers whose hesitation increased their own: “Perhaps you’d like to see Mr. Burford. He’ll be at liberty in a moment....” and looked unfeignedly grateful when the recommendation was accepted.

Thus the second Burford came in time to be the repository of hundreds of domestic tastes and idiosyncracies, as a lawyer comes to know the secrets of his clients. He knew whose palate exacted fat bacon, and whose streaked; who favoured chicory; whose taste in teas inclined to China or Ceylon; what cheeses, and the state of their maturity, respective customers demanded, with a wide discrimination in tinned merchandise, jams, biscuits and dried fruits. Long before the elder Burford’s death he had taken unto himself a wife and become the father of a son and daughter. His wife’s death in some sort paved the way to a municipal career, which he appeared to choose as an alternative to re-marriage. Certainly he could have espoused no second wife more fitted to consolidate his business. The smallest article he sold seemed stamped with the integrity of the Council Chamber. To be served by a full-blooded Councillor, and ma’amed augustly by a City Father is not displeasing to the populace. For the expenditure of a trifle it might feel itself in contact with the Mansion House and enjoy a brief intimacy with the power that imposed the rates. Elizabeth’s prediction was disproved. Old Joseph Burford’s son had over-stepped his father. Some day the Parish Church bells would peal and he would walk behind the mace, no longer Mr. Councillor, but Mr. Mayor.

8

The shop was familiar enough to Mrs. Holmroyd. Scarce a Saturday but she had passed its windows and bestowed a glance upon the merchandise displayed behind its many panes. She had never shopped there, however, and the consciousness of this, added to the consciousness that her visit was expected, seemed to imbue this errand with something of formality. A slight, but perceptible, feeling of nervousness crept over her as she opened the old-fashioned door, glazed and checkered like the windows on each side of it, and led her family across the threshold. In the earlier days of the Councillor’s father a dribbling bell on a loose neck would have announced her entry with insensate laughter. Before his death this obsolescent sentinel of custom had already given way to a spring gong. But even though the spring gong struck but once, that once (with the growth of custom) became so continuous and distracting that it was dispensed with, like its predecessor. Now only the door interposed between the counter and the outer world, but the present proprietor clung tenaciously to this as to a last tradition of self-respecting trade, and stubbornly opposed the growing fashion of the open frontage that made a place of business as common as the street, and gave admission to dogs with no manners to speak of, and the undesired.

Already the two counters coped busily with their Saturday morning’s trade, and the half dozen high, uncomfortable chairs were occupied by parcels, sitters, or umbrellas.

Councillor Burford occupied the place of honour behind the first counter on the right hand side of the door, over which he presided in solitary state, merely snapping his fingers for assistance when he needed it. With his Saturday’s white apron tied round his ample midway, and wearing his Saturday’s white shirt, its sleeves rolled up above the elbows, and the V-shaped opening in his waistcoat cut deep enough to let two studs be seen, he displayed a strong resemblance to his late father. Upon his nose at its lowermost extremity sat a gold pince-nez, whose function at first sight seemed scarcely apparent inasmuch as its lenses oscillated a couple of inches below his eyes, and he appeared to look at everything and everybody above them. These glasses were a phase of Councillor Burford with which Mrs. Holmroyd and her family had not yet made acquaintance, but they were well known to all frequenters of the shop and members of the Council Chamber. Now and again he lifted them from his nose, which they straddled precariously like an indifferent rider on a steed too big for him, and raised them with a gesture of deliberation as though, once these hindrances to sight had been removed, his unobstructed judgment could clearly see. Judgment thus afforded the sight it looked for, he replaced them on the extremity of his nose, where a visible groove on each side of it was by long usage fretted for their reception. But lengthy deliberation seemed not a pronounced characteristic of the Councillor, whose decisions appeared to need no distant seeking, but were all ready for immediate delivery like the goods he sold, and required only to be served out. At the time of Mrs. Holmroyd’s entrance he was engaged in conversation with the wife of the Hill Street Doctor whose son sang in St. Saviour’s choir. A biscuit canister stood upon the counter, on which his bared forearm rested with an air of confidence.

For one thing Councillor Burford never was. He never was servile. He was none of your bowers and scrapers, your handwashers and wringers of aprons. His politeness bore ever a certain air of brusquerie; his brusquerie a certain character of politeness. The two qualities were inseparable in him. He addressed his customers with a voice only less peremptory than that in which he spoke to his assistants. It was rare that he lowered it. His phrases, terse and trenchant for the most part, were sliced with the blade of sharp decision and served in such a way as he would stab the knife into a slab of butter and offer its point to some hesitating patron with a curt: “Try it yourself, ma’am.” And his ma’ams made no invidious distinctions. He never shirked them even to aprons and shawls, nor by slurring sought to disown their utterance. On the contrary, when Councillor Burford said “Ma’am” the word cut through the shop and had a curious effect of emphasizing the utterer’s own importance rather than acknowledging hers to whom it was addressed. His “ma’ams” implicated nothing personal; they subscribed simply to a convention and compromised his own respect no more than the “dearly beloved brethren” of the pulpit commits the preacher to love his fellow men.

Behind the counter on the opposite side of the shop facing his father, the younger Burford served, and assisted reminiscent history to repeat herself. Here, save for a little march in time and some internal change, all was as it had been in the ancient Burford days. Dignity and self-importance turned automatically to the right; modesty and vacillation, after a spasmodic moment, shrunk to the left, or hung irresolutely on their heel before the communicating counter served by mere assistants, who took the dregs of custom, packed up consolidated groceries, and hurried to their master’s elbow at the cracking of his thumb and finger. It was instructive to note how completely the Councillor’s personality permeated his shop; how it controlled and actuated the movements of his helpers, as if they had been prolongations of his own limbs rather than independent human beings. Despite his thirty years the younger Burford had been trained in such subjection to the elder’s word, referring every doubt to the paternal certitude, that within the precincts of the shop he seemed to doff all individuality with his coat and hung his judgment meekly on his father’s nod, just as he committed his coat to the hook behind the private office door. Merchandise confided surreptitiously to his inspection from time to time by doubting assistants was not less dubiously eyed by him, and, after mysterious whisperings behind a hand, taken up to the high altar to be passed or vetoed by a terse pronouncement on the Master’s part.

The junior Burford had just been up to the chief counter to collect authority for the disposal of a box of fairy candles when Mrs. Holmroyd entered the shop. Noting this unfamiliar presence he accosted her politely on his way back to the subordinate counter with the enquiry: “Are you being attended to, Madam?” His voice, though aspiring to a higher plane of culture than his father’s, lacked the parental ring. It had no timbre of self-confidence, and its politeness was plainly but a servile substitute for personality--to which he would not dare to aspire during his father’s life. He used the unabbreviated “Madam” with an air of such repression as made the two syllables sound feeble by contrast with his father’s one. Mrs. Holmroyd was on the point of making answer to the younger Burford--“Mr. Arry,” as he was designated in the shop--when the Councillor, still reposing his sleeveless forearm over the biscuit canister, raised his voice out of the general level of his conversation with the doctor’s wife to say: “I’m attending to Mrs. Holmroyd myself in a moment.” The announcement appeared to catch the younger Burford in the back. With a hurried murmur of apology he quitted Mrs. Holmroyd and obliterated himself behind his counter. After a few brief moments the doctor’s wife departed, bestowing an intent regard on Mrs. Holmroyd and her children, that seemed to ask of memory if these were patients of her husband or not. Oswald plucked his mother’s sleeve and drew her ear towards his lips that he might whisper who this rustling lady was who passed them in a waft of petticoats and scent. Already the Councillor, pushing the biscuit tin dismissively aside with the utterance of a name that caused it to be run for by a white apron and borne away across the shop, invited Mrs. Holmroyd: “Now ma’am!”

He stood awaiting her, all business; overlooking his precarious glasses that shook to the least word or gesture; his pencil and duplex entry-book in hand. Mrs. Holmroyd advanced to the counter, her children following, and unwound the little paper scroll enumerating their week’s supplies. The list was not a long one. It struck her painfully, in fact, as being too curt and unimportant for the impressive attention bestowed upon it. Its end came with startling abruptness, particularly as the pencil had taken up an expectant posture on a fresh line, and the Councillor’s voice demanded: “And the next, ma’am.” There was no next. She murmured her regret, with a gentle air of cogitation that seemed to seek requirements overlooked. The Councillor, still holding the pencil to his note-book, peered over his gold-rimmed pince-nez into space, as if lending his own more active and qualified mind for the assistance of her introspection and prompted memory with such articles as his wide experience taught him a housewife might be likely to require.

“Soap, ma’am? No soap. Candles? No candles. Dried fruit? No dried fruit. Currants? Raisins? Sultanas?”

All these, he gave assurance were of the very best. Her conscience smote her in the end to let so many best of things go by, as though she were insensible to quality; and feeling at length that some more suitable acknowledgment of the Councillor’s trouble on her behalf was called for than unvarying negation, she let a wavering choice be seen at the suggestion of a cream-cheese.

“Fresh in from the country this morning, ma’am!” the Councillor affirmed. “The very best. You won’t be disappointed. I can recommend them.” His thumb and finger snapped like the hammer of a pistol. “Fletcher!--Two cream cheeses for this lady to look at. Large and small. Sharp.”

One of the white aprons thus apostrophized, pushed another obstructive apron flat against the wall and bore the ordered cheeses to the head counter, each outspread upon a hand. The Councillor, slipping his pencil behind an ear, turned up the green rush wrapping with fingers of expressive admiration, and displayed the delectable texture of cool cream to Mrs. Holmroyd’s gaze with a gesture so convincing that refusal was unthinkable. She thanked him. They looked lovely. She would take one.

“A large one, ma’am?”

In the matter of pork pies the Councillor had betrayed no hesitation. He had said, as Mrs. Holmroyd’s recollection quickly prompted her “Let’s begin with a small one.” But in respect of cheeses he posed the question with the larger in his hand, as if her answer were assured, and she chose “the large one, please.” It seemed that all the practical lessons learned from Councillor Burford counted for nothing when she tried to put them into practice against their master.

His busy pencil added up the items of her bill. “Sixteen and ninepence, ma’am.” She laid down a sovereign, that left her softly as if it had been a sigh. He rang it on the counter, caught it dexterously again and rapped it smartly into the till. “Sixteen and nine, and three’s seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Nineteen and six. And six’s Twenty. Thank you, ma’am. Rather better weather again this morning. The things shall be sent on to you at once. Boy!”

Up to this moment the Councillor had gazed at Mrs. Holmroyd’s two children with an eye so distant and rejective that, for all the recognition it paid them, they might have been at home. But as their mother turned to go, he raised the wagging pince-nez from his nose, and extending it indicatively across the counter in their direction, asked: “Do you young people know the way to eat sweets?”

The young people, awed by the sudden application of that smileless eye, and embarrassed by turbulent desires, hung their heads with one accord. Oswald contributed a whispered “thank you.”

The Councillor prized the stopper of a big glass bottle, loosened the stubborn contents with the point of a great knife, and thrust his hand within the flask as far as the swelling forearm flesh would let him, with a great action of liberality--as if there were no limit to what generosity desired to bring forth. Once or twice, in the endeavour to dislodge these refractory sweetmeats, he smote the bottle with a resounding flat hand and shook it forcefully. It was therefore not devoid of a sense of disappointment to Oswald and his sister that after such promising preliminaries no more than half a dozen sweetmeats rewarded the Councillor’s labours on their behalf. But he dispensed these across the counter, three into each politely upturned palm, with an air of condescension that restored magnificence to the offering, saying, as though to allay Mrs. Holmroyd’s unspoken fears:

“These’ll do them no harm, ma’am. They’re genuine boiled sweets. You can’t beat ’em. All pure sugar. Fourpence ha’penny a pound. The very best.”

She thanked the donor warmly and prompted her children, “What do you say to Mr. Burford?” They said “Thank you” in turn, still under the conflicting emotions stirred by the gift.

“Good morning ma’am.--Now ma’am?”

The second Ma’am was directed to Mrs. Holmroyd’s successor. No allusion had been made to the pork pie. Mrs. Holmroyd’s pride was glad of that, having been haunted by the fear that this subject might be raised in public to her discomfiture. She left the shop with a feeling of curious satisfaction for something accomplished; for some purpose--she knew not what--achieved.

9

Left to the milk pudding, hash and peeled potatoes in the kitchen; her pail, scrubbing brush and marbled soap in the schoolroom upstairs, the enthusiast had not passed the morning without incident. More than once, under stimulus of what she had to tell, she hurried to the front door, and screening her red eyelids with a steaming hand against the sunlight that mixed imperfectly with the November air, she gazed long and earnestly down the street, as if, by the sheer intensity of her regard, she sought to bring her tardy mistress home. The moment Mrs. Holmroyd crossed the doorstep, Elizabeth appeared at the passage end; her arms and apron in such commotion as might have been occasioned by a high wind.

“O’m! What do you think! You’ll never guess!”

At first sight the emotions agitating the aged figure appeared to Mrs. Holmroyd’s eyes so tragic that she had a momentary sinking of the heart. But Elizabeth’s countenance, shaking off the conflicting moods that mobbed it, emerged from the momentary tumult with such a look of triumph as gave her back half a score of her most active years. She seemed revitalized; her face shone with the high serenity of a saucepan lid.

“Miss Burford’s been. I’m to go and char for her on Tuesday.” “O’m!” she exclaimed, discarding the impediment of her coarse apron and uplifting both hands to heaven. “I wish you could ’a seen her face when I opened door. You never saw anybody so took aback in all your born days’m. She hadn’t a word to say for herself. She went all colours. She could ’a dropped. She says, ‘Dear me! What!... Why, is that you Elizabeth?’ ‘Aye, it’s me’m,’ I tells her. ‘I thought you’d given up going out working,’ she says after a bit. ‘I should ’a done,’ I says, ‘if _some_ folks had had their way wi’ me’m. But I’ve a few friends left’m. I’ve never wanted a day’s work since you said you’d let me know.’ She coughs aside of her hand and says: ‘I’m glad to hear it, and to see you looking so well.’”

“ ... And then’m, she asks if you was in, and I tells her you wasn’t, and she says: ‘So you work for Mrs. Holmroyd, then?’ and I says: ‘I haven’t missed a Saturday with her for many a week. And Monday’s once a fortnight, regular.’ She says: ‘O’ and ‘Really’ and ‘Indeed.’ ‘What was I doing on Tuesday?’ I tells her Nothing as I knew of’m, and she says: ‘Do you care to come and work for me?’ ‘Not unless I’m wanted,’ I answers. ‘I don’t care to go nowheres until I’m asked’m.’ O’m! It would ’a done you good to see look she gied me. I know her. I haven’t spring cleaned beside of her for nothing. She would ’a liked to toss her head up and walk away, but she swallows her pride and says: ‘There’s no question of you not being wanted.’

“Aye ...” the enthusiast continued, “ ... and I knew in a minute what was cause of her asking me. Servant’s left her. She’s all with herself. She wouldn’t ’a had me back without she was forced. She hasn’t forgotten’m. And she hasn’t forgiven. She didn’t say a word about it to me, and I didn’t to her, but it was in her eye all time.”

The triumph consequent upon Miss Burford’s visit so thrilled and occupied Elizabeth that the primary object of her calling was quite lost sight of. Her reading of Miss Burford’s mind did credit to her eyesight. The discovery of this claimant to her grandfather’s misplaced fancy in Mrs. Holmroyd’s house was indeed a matter of unpalatable surprise to Councillor Burford’s daughter, who had derived deceptive security from the charwoman’s absence, deeming a danger lessened that is not seen. But here, to her mortification, she found the enemy entrenched in the least suspected place of all. For the safeguard of a grandeur that might otherwise foolishly compromise itself, she would have liked to know how much of the secret of the first Burford’s ridiculous attempts at misalliance had been imparted to this newcomer. Some knowledge of the situation was, in fact, essential to her future line of conduct with Mrs. Holmroyd. If the secret were inviolable (which she had too small a faith in the integrity of her sex to suppose) dignity might assert itself; if betrayed, then dignity would need to be diluted with a little diplomatic friendship. People who possess secrets to our disadvantage cannot be altogether treated as strangers.

As for the real object of Miss Burford’s visit....

“Lor’m!” the enthusiast exclaimed when Mrs. Holmroyd ventured to enquire concerning it at last, “ ... I thought I’d told you. She came about the pie.”

The pie?

“She won’t be wanting it’m. Leastways, not this week. She said it was her father’s mistake. She’d told him, but men was all alike. She didn’t know what her father wanted to meddle with such things for. He’d nothing to do with it. She’ll take a small pie next week instead, if it’s all the same to you.”

Next week. If it was all the same to her.

The pie that was already made. The extra-large small pie for eighteen pence with which Mrs. Holmroyd had sought to propitiate this new customer and extend the boundaries of her hopes. The pie that had been her justification for this visit to the Bank and to the Burford shop this morning. Oswald and Beryl, staggered by the tidings, yet knowing not what precise attitude to adopt in face of it, studied their mother’s countenance as if it were a sum.

She was very dignified. She let no sign be seen. Drawing off her gloves with sweet serenity she thanked Elizabeth for delivering the message. “I am so glad Miss Burford called and that you are to work for her again. I always said it had been a mistake, Elizabeth.”

But Miss Burford’s was not the only mind that the new conjunction of relationships had troubled. Mrs. Holmroyd, too, saw elements in this re-shaping future to vex her peace. Not less than the hard-faced daughter of the Councillor had she a secret ambry of the soul to guard, hiding its bony relics from the eyes of men. And before the enthusiast took leave that night, though swathed already in the faded shawl and bowed to the attitude of humble resignation for the attended sacrament of silver, Mrs. Holmroyd took advantage of the pious curtsey and murmuring lips of gratitude to breathe the name “Elizabeth!” with a lowered urgent voice.

“Mum?” responded the enthusiast.

“If you go to Miss Burford’s on Tuesday ... you will be sure ... not to say a Word.”

“What about’m?”

“About the.... About the service you did for me the other week.”

“Service?” enquired the enthusiast, perplexedly. “You don’t mean ... cream jug’m?”

“Hush, Elizabeth!” Mrs. Holmroyd turned an apprehensive face towards the kitchen door, left partly open behind her. “It is strictly between ourselves.”

“Lor’m!” the enthusiast consoled her, “I’d clean forgot while you reminded me. It’s not the first time I’ve fetched things back for people--yes, and put ’em in for them as well. I did it regular for Mrs. Coldthorpe, and never breathed a word to nobody. _She_ could trust me’m. She’d no need to warn me. You’re the first that ever has.”

More and more disquieted with the enthusiast’s evasion of her fears, Mrs. Holmroyd felt a dreadful apprehension seize her.

“Elizabeth.... Have you broken your word to me! Have you told ... anyone already?”

To her dismay signs of agitation began to invest the shawl. It heaved convulsively.

“I know what it is’m!” she heard a suffocated voice exclaim. “You’re wanting an excuse to get rid of me. I’ve seen it coming on. You’ve never been same since you called at Rockery House. She must ’a told you something then. You’ve made it up betwixt you.”

At which the shawl, overcome with its own emotion, danced grotesquely as if it blew, empty, on a clothes line; nor could it be prevailed upon to partake of comfort until the rejected pie was insinuated beneath its fringe, when the tears of reproach changed their grief to gratitude, and the sobs became articulate enough to cry:

“O! mum. You’re too good to me. I don’t deserve it. You’ve only got to say the Word and I won’t go there at all.”