THE SUITOR

1

Although Mrs. Holmroyd was now become a regular attendant at his shop, the weeks waxing in light and warmth towards Easter only served to establish Councillor Burford’s custom of calling at the little home in Spring Bank Gardens from time to time. Any day after the lapse of three his footfall might be listened for towards teatime, and his broad figure awaited between the two posts of the parlour door. The purpose of his visit remained perpetually undefined, and seemed in the end to repose so implicitly upon its own justification that ultimately the Councillor did not even trouble to explain that he had “just called round, ma’am ...” which served, in earlier days, as his invariable substitute for explanation. He developed a comfortable sense of liberty to fill the doorway or walk into the parlour, (standing always hat in hand with his overcoat thrown open and his broad shoulders to the mantelpiece) and watch the group at table as if they were the objects of his special interest and conciliar care. His eye would dwell on Mrs. Holmroyd’s wrist as it arched delicately in pouring out the tea; or on Beryl’s smaller hand as, recovering from its first constraint at the Councillor’s appearance, it tucked away a spoonful of rich red home-made jam into her determined and appreciative mouth; or on Oswald prudently partaking of the politest small pieces of bread and butter in case the Councillor might surprise him with a question too direct and too peremptory for a mouth unwisely overfilled. The conversation at such times followed a routine as periodic and established as the Councillor’s own visit. Enquiry was always made in regard to the behaviour of Mrs. Holmroyd’s gas. Was that the full pressure, ma’am? It seemed to the visitor’s municipal eye to be burning somewhat blue. Some unreasonable burgesses complained that the Daneborough gas was dirty, and made a mess of the ceiling. He begged strongly to differ with them, ma’am. Such people was unpractical and destitute of common sense. They didn’t know what they was talking about. If they was in the Council, like him, they’d understand the difficulties of the Corporation and the benefits conferred upon them. Them that grumbled ought to have a private gas company to deal with, and then they’d have something to grumble about. The Daneborough gas, ma’am, was second to no gas nowhere. It was as clean and as pure as gas could be, and as cheap. If people didn’t take the trouble to clean their burners, or let water get into their pipes, or tampered with the meters, they must expect trouble. Water and landlords were also themes of his, and it was rare he could supervise the little tea-table without gratifying an impulse to identify his own groceries. The sugar (excuse him, ma’am) of which a sample would not infrequently be taken up for critical inspection at the end of the sugar-tongs, was proudly confirmed as a specimen of his best granulated lump. “A splendid sugar, ma’am. You’ll find it last half as long again as the common rubbish some shops offer you at a ha’penny cheaper.” The tea, too, rarely failed to attract comment, and when Mrs. Holmroyd said: “May I not tempt you with a cup of your own tea, Mr. Burford?” he never declined but that the hesitations of his hat before he clapped it finally upon his head betrayed a struggle. To a family so long unfamiliar with the presence of an adult member of the male sex at its meals, he looked in this intimate conjunction an impressive mass of masculinity. His chest and shoulders overshadowed the small table. His elbow, when he laid it on the edge of the cloth in attendance on his cup and saucer, seemed to assume possession of the board. Noise in eating, as Oswald knew, was an offence unpardonable; but the Councillor ate and drank, as he spoke and acted, with emphasis and authority, and what he did (once done) appeared as little questionable in him as unpardonable in another. The crossing of his extended legs before the fire had, for Oswald, the authority of a text of holy writ, and though the spreading of one’s legs towards a comfortable blaze was a habit to be deprecated in company, especially before ladies, it seemed in Councillor Burford’s case to signify something to be accepted and bowed down to like a dogma that reason sniffs at but faith snaps up and bolts intact. The moment Councillor Burford dusted the scattered ash from his vest and trousers, and smoothed himself with a view to departure, saying: “Well, ma’am! But this isn’t getting me any nearer home....” Oswald hastened behind the visitor’s chair with the solicitude of a head waiter, prepared to possess himself of the Councillor’s hat and coat. Into the latter garment he essayed, manfully, to help the risen guest, being nearly swept off his feet by the violence with which the burly visitor assumed it; a procedure involving almost as much danger for the assistant as the shoeing of a horse.

Contrary to Mrs. Holmroyd’s fears--which, thriving on solitude’s too fertile soil, had made her dread the moment when Oswald’s music lessons must be confessed--the Councillor accepted the intelligence with surprising fortitude. He merely said: “Indeed, ma’am!” as he buttoned his overcoat. “Are you decided to make a musician of him?” It is true this question troubled her, that had the effect of trampling (like a rude foot in a flower bed) on dreams and aspirations too young and tender to bear the weight of such reality. But as the trespasser appeared unconscious of what he had trodden on her politeness drew no attention to the footmark, and strove to hide, even from Oswald, the least sign that she had noticed it. It was a little early yet, she answered, to say what use Oswald would ultimately make of his music. Mr. Rencil expressed himself highly pleased with Oswald’s progress.

“Mr. Rencil should know, ma’am,” the Councillor remarked. “If he doesn’t, he ought to. Music’s his business.”

But the question was not pursued. The Councillor, somewhat to Mrs. Holmroyd’s concern, accepted her judgment in this important matter for final. She wondered if the facile acquiescence of her visitor proclaimed he had lost patience with her, and was resolved to waste no more advice on one so incapable of appreciating it. Her misgiving grew when two successive visits passed without enquiry as to Oswald’s future. Even Oswald, for all he feared the point-blank challenge of the Councillor’s eye, developed consciousness of neglect, and speculated uneasily as to the reason why their guest interrogated him no more.

One evening, after Oswald had helped the Councillor into his heavy coat and the Councillor had tried on, according to custom, his blunt crowned hat, he turned back from the doorway to Mrs. Holmroyd with the remark:

“You never call to see my daughter, ma’am.”

The statement was so incontrovertible that Mrs. Holmroyd, taken by surprise, could only admit it.

“Why not?” asked the Councillor. “You ought to some time. It would be a change for you both.”

Mrs. Holmroyd, to whom the suggestion had never presented itself, pleaded the difficulty of leaving her school. “Besides ...” she said, “I never thought ... Miss Burford has not asked me.”

“Hasn’t she ma’am?” the Councillor enquired. “I understood she had done. If she hasn’t she’s meant to. But you know what Annie is. Mention visitors and at once the house isn’t fit for ’em. She wouldn’t let nobody see into it until it’s been cleaned down from top to bottom. It’s always being cleaned down from top to bottom, and next day--if you believe what she tells you--it’s not a ha’porth better for doing. But you don’t want to take no notice of her, ma’am. _I_ don’t.... She’ll be writing to you, I fancy, before so long. I hope you won’t say No to the invitation when it comes.”

With that, deciphering the movement of Mrs. Holmroyd’s lips and the expression on her face as favourable, he turned to the door again and brushed past the attendant Oswald into the open street. They heard his footsteps fading rhythmically into space. Always the abstraction of so great a presence from their midst seemed, at first, to leave the little parlour lonely, and accentuate the solitude of their tiny circle. Instinctively they drew together after his departure to compensate the void by closer demands upon each other’s company.

2

The prospective invitation from Miss Burford lagged with the same leadenness that the prospective visit had done, which it replaced as a topic of enquiry on the Councillor’s part when he called on Mrs. Holmroyd, asking: “Have you heard from my daughter yet, ma’am?” and assuring her, “You will do, before long, I know. She’s anxious to write to you. I fancy there’s some cleaning going on to-day.” When at last the promised letter arrived, which it did (as Mrs. Holmroyd partly expected) by the hand of Mrs. Chandler’s granddaughter, who knew (and confided to her schoolmistress) precisely what was in it, Mrs. Holmroyd behind the gratified surprise assumed to fend the keen eyes probing her, felt the resignation attendant on a fear confirmed. With liberty to act according to the dictates of her heart, much rather would she have declined the invitation tendered in Miss Burford’s extra-super handwriting, on the special stationery employed for ceremonious occasions, exhaling in the hand a faintly formal odour between soft soap and dried lavender, like some spinstral scent on its dignity. But the Councillor, calling that same evening to propound his question, “Have you heard from my daughter, yet?” made refusal impossible. And for her children’s sakes she must be careful to sting no susceptibilities, to throw away no friends. Nevertheless, standing once more before the door of Rockery House, a melancholy feeling possessed her, like the trepid expectation that attends the answering of a dentist’s bell. The last time (her reminiscent sentiment reminded her) that she had stood upon this step was on a soft and sunlit day in late November. Then her two children had been with her. She missed them now.

The servant-maid who answered to her ring was not the one that had admitted her on the occasion of her first visit, albeit pertaining obviously to the same species, and stamped painfully with the Burford hall-mark; irresolute and anxious-eyed. She and Mrs. Holmroyd gazed enquiringly at each other for a space--victims, alike, of the paralyzing Burford régime, though neither knew it. Acting under evident compulsion and shrinking palpably from the impertinence imposed upon her, the maid supplicated Mrs. Holmroyd’s name with as much shame as if she had been begging alms. “Mrs. Holmroyd” she repeated for her own assurance, and was horrified to find that in merely closing the front door behind the guest according to the strict method laid down for her, she had forgotten it. Not daring to confess so fearful an offence, and invoking the deity’s aid in vain, she improvized a substitute for the name forgotten, and announced the visitor to the drawing-room as Mrs. Scholes.

By the death-like silence brooding over the house, and in particular beyond the sealed drawing-room door, that seemed to guard nothing but seclusion, Mrs. Holmroyd had plucked up hope to believe herself the first and (preferably) the only guest. But she was quickly undeceived. Already the electro-plated kettle simmered discreetly on an occasional table over its lugubrious blue flame. The imitation Crown Derby tea-set was displayed in mathematical array. The afternoon tea-stands of wicker-work stood charged with plates of fragile bread and butter, sliced to extinction in the effort to express refinement; a primrose coloured Madeira cake, and finger biscuits of the sort with which Mrs. Holmroyd’s weekly visits to the shop in the High Gate had familiarized her. Disposed about these starved emblems of a hospitality unnatural and ill at ease were seated in varying postures of polite constraint some half dozen female figures. Save for a little colour in their millinery the assembly might have been funereal. One or two of the guests were already embarrassed with cups and saucers which penalized their movements and lent anxiety to their eyes, so that between what they held and what they sat on they would have enjoyed more liberty on a gibbet in a high wind. Still, sustained by the gratifying thought that they were partakers of the sacrament of fashion, whose rewards like those of true worship itself must be purchased by present discomfort with a view to future and not immediate enjoyment, they submitted to the ordeal with pious fortitude; holding their uncomfortable cups as if they had been hymnbooks, and uttering their “Really’s” “Dear me’s” and “You don’t say so’s” in the restrained tones for liturgical responses.

The announcement of Mrs. Scholes to this solemn assemblage furnished an agreeable distraction for the worshippers, in whose eyes a look of curiosity was kindled, and over whose lips the name “Scholes” passed in undertones of enquiry. Miss Burford, whose dark brows had touched each other in a frown of perplexity at the maid’s announcement, repeating: “Mrs. Scholes!... Scholes! I don’t know anybody called ‘Scholes.’ What does she want? Is she collecting? Surely you’re not bringing her in _here_?”--stabbed a glance at the maid that would have pierced a half-inch door, on catching sight of her visitor.

“Mrs. Scholes indeed!” she exclaimed in tones of ineffable disgust. “You mean Mrs. Holmroyd. Why don’t you keep your ears open!” She tried to melt the look of acrimony in a hostess-smile of welcome, but it lay undissolved beneath dilute graciousness like a crystal of washing soda.

“I couldn’t think who in the world she meant, Mrs. Holmroyd! Please step forward. (Mrs. Scholes indeed!) Do take a seat. Mrs. Holmroyd--Mrs. Bingham. I don’t know if you’ve met Miss Hanson before. Mrs. Palethorpe.” She introduced her visitor to all the assembled company, which inclined from its chairs with a wary eye on its teacups like ladies on horseback, and led her to a small occasional seat by the fireplace with the assurance that she would find this chair very low and very uncomfortable, and Mrs. Holmroyd was not to hesitate to say so. Meanwhile, silent and increasingly crimson, the maid took up a position by Miss Burford’s elbow, ready to receive the cups dispensed and transport them tremulously to the attendant guests. The preternatural politeness of Miss Burford’s voice in its solicitude respecting the tea-tastes of her company was constantly infiltrated with undertones of rancour intended for her servant, whom she bade sharply to stand further back.

“Do you want to tilt my elbow when I am pouring out the hot water?”

This running commentary on the maid’s behaviour, conducted in a suppressed and waspish whisper that posed as being inaudible to the outraged feelings of her guests, was in reality directed to the room at large, which it invited to share Miss Burford’s trials--for, without these, indeed, her office as hostess would have been insupportable. Every time she raised her eyebrows or bit her underlip, or frowned, with an appealing eye to the company, she drew attention from the protested shortcomings to her own superiority, and mounted on the maid’s delinquencies to a pedestal of injured pride, where she could insinuate her own high standard of domestic proficiency for admiration.

Miss Burford’s tongue, in fact, turned invariably towards the kitchen. Other topics she tolerated; they seemed as alien to her nature as a new hat or stiff new mantle; but this topic boiled in her blood. At sound of the word “Servant” she quivered to be let loose upon the subject. Her bosom was so distended with matters to impart that her ear had scarcely patience to imbibe the tepid talk of others on a topic so eminently her own. Let but the narrator pause to cough or try to recollect some unremembered name, Miss Burford’s lips, unable longer to restrain the seething crowd behind them, would instantly appropriate the topic in the first person singular--as if she were continuing, and not usurping it. Would they believe this? Would they credit that? The maid could not even blacklead! Only this morning Miss Burford had had to go down on her hands and knees before that very grate and do it all over again.

Having handed round all the cups and saucers with a hand so unsteady as to make the crockery chatter like teeth, the maid had been dismissed to the kitchen (whither Miss Burford, in conversation, immediately followed her). But even this grand theme, engrossing though it was, suffered no less than any other from the morbid restlessness of Miss Burford’s hospitality, that seemed never content save when it stopped her guests from drinking, with demands for their cups, or choked them over a crumb with peremptory alternatives of finger biscuits or Madeira cake. No assurance had power to allay her cares; no moment was free from the threat of interruption. She feared the tea was weak. She feared the tea was strong. She feared it was too sweet. “Mrs. Holmroyd! You are scarcely touching your tea. It must be quite cold. Do let me make you another cup. Don’t eat that biscuit if you don’t care for it. Let me give you a scone instead. Or some Madeira cake. You’re making a very poor tea.”

Dropped into the beverage of common talk Mrs. Holmroyd’s first few words floated like ice in claret cup, with a serene air of detached perfection that seemed to chill the medium they swam in. If her dress were simple and her manners unpretentious, her tones revealed the quiet confidence of a culture too surely founded in itself for affectation. When she had spoken the other voices, quick to take the standard of her tones as a challenge, remained silent for awhile out of desire to avoid immediate competition. Miss Burford re-formulated in her mind each sentence that her new guest uttered, with a minute and jealous appreciation of the difference between their contrasted speeches, and a growing distrust of her own grammar and aspirates. Not only, too, for the Councillor’s daughter did Mrs. Holmroyd represent the last arbitrament of diction by which Miss Burford’s blunter accents stood condemned, but a qualified referee of social amenities. Not knowing how much Mrs. Holmroyd knew of the complex usages of society, Miss Burford found herself in the dilemma of striving to propitiate standards of whose exactions she was ignorant. She watched Mrs. Holmroyd’s holding of her cup and saucer; noted the application of her lips to what she drank; the fastidious curl of her fourth finger. To the hostess this new guest was the enervating unknown quantity. She had reduced the social knowledge of her other visitors to a decimal; their values were fixed and known. They, too, like herself in social matters strove after a draped ideal; uncertain as to what, beneath the formal folds, they worshipped. To them, as to her, these afternoon teas--constituting a superfluous and quite uncustomary meal--were but vague gropings after grandeur, that the fingers of aspiring fashion reached out for and were for ever left wondering whether, by any chance, they might have touched it unaware.

But Mrs. Holmroyd was not long in sounding the depth and gauging the strength of the nonconformist undercurrent that flowed through Miss Burford’s drawing-room. It was uncompromisingly Wesleyan. With sabbath habitude Miss Burford and her father, it seemed, attended the grim stone chapel whose forbidding frown darkened Monastery Street and preached perpetual commination sermons in stone. Miss Burford taught on Sunday in its schools. All Miss Burford’s friends were members of the place of worship in Friar’s Gate. Mrs. Palethorpe (it transpired) was the Minister’s wife; Mrs. Brighouse was the wife of a Wesleyan Councillor lately elected to the Chamber. The attitude they displayed to all religions outside their own, and particularly to that from which their own immediately derived, was one of stigmatic disapproval. When Mrs. Holmroyd, directly challenged, confessed to worshipping at St. Saviour’s, a momentary silence fell on the assembled company as if a situation of some delicacy had been created by her words. Miss Burford broke the silence by remarking that people must be allowed to choose their own worship--with a significant pause which seemed to say she wondered that Church could be anybody’s choice. She also invited Mrs. Holmroyd to express her personal opinion of Canon Quexley. And when the visitor admitted with a slight flush that she had no speaking acquaintance with the Vicar of St. Saviour’s, Miss Burford confessed she had always found his face very hard and worldly. She agreed that this might be owing to his lack of beard, which she found unpleasant in a man. “It makes men look,” she said, “so bold, in my opinion. It is not natural. It was never meant to Be.” Religion was touched on no deeper than this--which constituted, perhaps, the deepest point Miss Burford ever reached in it. The true comfort of a religion consisted, for her, in the license it gave to animosities and the sanctification of intolerance as pious principle. Only to mention St. Gyles’s was to make her mouth harden instinctively. The glint in her eye at such a moment betrayed the secret feud that divided Daneborough; a division made all the bitterer and more obstinate because it had come to be coincident with social frontiers. The dividing stream ran through the borough like a great cloaca, invisible, but charted; parting every social, commercial, municipal and political constituent of the town in twain.

3

Tea being disposed of and the company disencumbered of its cups and saucers, there crept into the drawing-room after awhile the thin but unmistakable odours of the cooking of animal flesh. Miss Burford’s nostrils, being for some time past expectant of it, were the first to single out this subtle savour, which intimated the preparation of the Councillor’s more substantial meal. Its detection was betrayed by an acute intensity of eye whose fixed stare sharpened itself to a needle-point piercing every other gaze in its quest of infinity. Reclaiming herself, with violence, from a concentration of all her faculties threatening to be cataleptic, she cloaked her feelings (half disclosed under a great restlessness, in which anxiety struggled like some captive animal in a bag); raised her voice with design to draw attention from the tell-tale odour, and turned distracted looks towards the clock. The assembled company, having its own teas to think about, and grown aware that conversation was beginning now to strain like the last obstructed driblets from a teapot, exclaimed: “Surely! That’s never the right time!” and rose precipitately to its feet, despite Miss Burford’s luke-warm protestations that they were to take no notice of her clock, which (she was magnanimous enough to declare) might be a minute forward. Nevertheless, as though submitting regretfully to the decision of her guests, she rose with alacrity from her chair for fear they might be tempted to change their minds, and was among the first to stand upon her feet, darting glances at the crumpled cushions and the crumbs that fell to the carpet from her visitors’ laps in rising. Not being of the elect company of Miss Burford’s acquaintances, whose spirits seemed volubly to mount now that the ordeal of the tea was over, following Miss Burford in a loquacious throng to the hall, Mrs. Holmroyd tarried slightly behind the rest under feint of fastening her gloves. The voices in the hall meanwhile, dropping loquacity for confidence, and even descending into whispers as if matters of private consequence were being discussed, caused her to protract still further the preparation for departure. Whilst she stood thus, hesitating to intrude upon the circle of a conversation so obviously restricted, it was enriched all at once by the addition of a deeper voice. She heard Miss Burford’s father telling the last of his daughter’s visitors that he was glad to see them, ma’am, and that the days were lengthening nicely now. The front door closed amid a profusion of Good Evenings and “Don’t let it be so long before you call and see me again”; the substantial, well-known tread crossed the hall to the hat-stand, where the Councillor’s blunt-crowned hat seemed to be deposited with an accompanying “Ah!” of satisfaction. “Who’s in the drawing-room?” the Councillor’s voice enquired. “Anybody?” Miss Burford’s answer was inaudible. It might have been no more than a warning contraction of the lips, or brow, or a silence-imposing hand: but that the information had been given was attested by the Councillor’s unequivocating “Indeed!” with which he acknowledged it. “Is she the last?” His broad shoulders filled the drawing-room door, and his broad hand preceded him into the room with the greeting: “Now ma’am. Very happy to see you. I hope my daughter’s looked after you and made you properly at home.”

Behind the ample figure of her father Miss Burford, closely following, seemed reduced of a sudden to a smaller and less significant stature; as if some of the importance her presence usually expressed had been absorbed into the larger presence. Her mouth was tightly closed; she held one hand contained within the other, with an effect of keeping curb upon herself. The eye that paid uneasy visits to her father’s face seemed attracted to it by the fear of some disclosure or parental indiscretion, as if she kept a nervous watch upon his words, conscious of her utter impotence to mould or stem them. Mrs. Holmroyd, withdrawing her hand from the large grasp in which for a moment it had been embedded, thanked the Councillor for his kind enquiry, and expressed the very great pleasure this visit had given her. Miss Burford (she said) had been indeed most hospitable; most kind. Had the two women stood alone, such a tribute would have gratified the Councillor’s daughter into strings of volubility, disclaiming any merit for so indifferent a meal. But the presence of her parent restrained her lips from speech. Only (though Mrs. Holmroyd did not notice it) a look of ambiguous disgust showed for a moment in her steadfast dark eyes, like a vortex spot betraying deep, swift waters, as though to protest scorn of hollow mockeries and the insincerity of human life. But the odour from the kitchen becoming almost impassioned at this juncture, brought a look of new concern into Miss Burford’s face.

“Good gracious!” she exclaimed. “What _is_ the girl doing! Excuse me Mrs. Holmroyd. I declare I cannot leave her for a moment.” With which she retired precipitately from the room, uttering protesting “Marys” as she went.

“Sit down, ma’am” said the Councillor to Mrs. Holmroyd, ignoring the domestic tragedy as a thing beneath his notice. “Make yourself comfortable. I didn’t come in to disturb you.”

Mrs. Holmroyd, adjusting the fingers of her glove, affirmed that she had but that moment risen, and was on the point of departure.

“Not on my account, I hope, ma’am,” the Councillor urged. “There’s no need for you to hurry away because other folks has gone. Annie gets plenty of chance of seeing Them. You don’t visit us so often. In fact ... I was thinking.... Just take a seat again, ma’am, whilst I speak with my daughter for a moment.”

He was already on his way to the door when Miss Burford returned, her face hot from the oven. The damage, it seemed, was not irreparable. But thank goodness she’d smelled it in time. Her panegyric was interrupted by the Councillor’s enquiry:

“What’s there for tea to-day, Annie?”

The question caused her eyes to contract as with contemptuous indignation for her father’s stupidity. But for the presence of the guest she would have cried “There! I knew you would do it! I knew you would ask me Something!” Instead, she answered with acerbity: “It’s what you always have on Thursday.”

“Steak, is it?” interpreted her father. “Well, there’s nothing better than steak if it’s tender. Is there.... Can we offer Mrs. Holmroyd some tea, Annie?”

Reddening and darkening, his daughter said: “But Mrs. Holmroyd has been offered some tea! She’s just had some. She’s declined to have any more.”

Mrs. Holmroyd, hastening to relieve the tension and set Miss Burford’s anxieties at rest, interpolated--“Oh! thank you, _thank_ you, Mr. Burford. Your daughter has given me a most excellent tea. I could not possibly stay. My children will be expecting me.”

The Councillor said: “A small tea, I fear, ma’am. Not like one of your own. It won’t last you long. You’ll want another when you get back, I know.”

Relieved of the danger, and reading Mrs. Holmroyd’s refusal as definite, Miss Burford’s brow recovered some degree of its composure--at least so far as the visitor was concerned. In reference to her father, judgment seemed patently reserved. It was true, she said, that they had very little to offer Mrs. Holmroyd. But of course.... If Mrs. Holmroyd would _really_ stay, and Miss Burford thought for a moment she could persuade her.... Mrs. Holmroyd extended her gloved finger instead, smiled with ineffable gratitude and took her leave. The Councillor and his daughter accompanied her to the door, that the former opened for her.

“I’d have walked back with you, ma’am,” he said, “if we could have prevailed on you to stay. But you must come again some time when Annie’s properly ready for you.”

In the background Miss Burford stood, a witness of her parent’s exasperating politeness, her mouth sealed with the irate consciousness of a hospitality compromised, and obviously resenting the false position into which her father’s foolishness had forced her.

Her smile, maintained by force, forbade Mrs. Holmroyd’s tact to look at it again. Mrs. Holmroyd knew that the lips, shaped to bid her formality’s farewell, were hardening already for expostulation the instant she was gone. And indeed the door had no sooner closed than Miss Burford turned the full force of her dark brows and indignant mouth upon her parent to exclaim:

“A nice idea! Whatever did you want to go and ask her to stay to tea for?”

His voice fended her resentful tones with a blunt impatience that seemed to warn her his authority was in no mood to be questioned.

“Why shouldn’t I? Is a man accountable to his own daughter for everything he says or does in his own house?”

“You know the Dining-room is all upset.”

“All upset is it? It oughtn’t to be all upset. Other people’s dining-rooms aren’t all upset. Where are we having our tea?”

“In the dining-room, of course.”

“In the dining-room? Why couldn’t Mrs. Holmroyd have had tea there and all? If the room’s fit for me to sit in it ought to be fit for anybody.”

“You!” said his daughter with unmitigated scorn. “You’re a man. You never see anything. You haven’t eyes to tell you whether a room’s clean or dirty. I can clean it a hundred times without you ever knowing the difference.”

“Clean!” the Councillor retorted. “It’s clean, clean, clean, and still we’re never clean enough. We’re cleaning every day of our lives, and yet we’re no nearer being fit for decent folks to come and look at us than if we’d never started. Here it’s a good couple of months since I first told you to write and ask Mrs. Holmroyd to call on you....”

“Why _I_ should be asked to entertain your lady friends I really don’t know,” Miss Burford protested tartly. “Mrs. Holmroyd is no particular friend of mine that I’m aware of. Surely to goodness I’ve enough visitors without her.”

“And supposing even it was a gentleman friend,” her father argued. “What would you say then? What do you always say? You’d say he trod dirt all over your carpets, and made the whole place smell of stale tobacco, and that it was not a bit of good you trying to keep the house clean. I tell you,” said the Councillor, without raising his voice, but speaking in tones of remonstrant sincerity, “there’s not a bit of comfort in the house. It might be anybody’s house but mine. I can’t smoke in it. I can’t have my friends in it. I’m sick of it, Annie. Sick of it.”

“Thank you!” said Miss Burford in a voice of suffocated injury. “Now I know what I’m thought of. That’s all the thanks I get--working to the bone to try and please you.”

“Working to the bone pleases no man,” her father told her. “It doesn’t please me, and I’ve told you so scores of times. I don’t want you working to the bone. I want comfort, and the more you work the less I get of it.”

“And you’d be the first to complain,” his daughter flung at him, “if I took you at your word, and let the place go dirty.”

“You’ve just said,” the Councillor reminded her, “that I haven’t eyes to see whether it’s dirty or clean. You can’t have it both ways.”

“There’s no pleasing you,” his daughter cried. “Here I’ve been slaving all day to get ready for Somebody I scarcely know, and when she comes and has her tea you’ve no more sense than to go and ask her a second time, as if I hadn’t offered her enough to eat. It’s ridiculous. It’s making everybody a laughing stock. All the best knives and forks locked up, and only the old table-cloth out, and the silk table-centre folded away upstairs, and the cream jugs in the drawing-room....”

“Forks and nonsense! Who wants your best forks and fal de lals?” her father said contemptuously. “Not me. Not Mrs. Holmroyd. Not you, even, judging by the number of times you ever make use of ’em.”

They were in the drawing-room amid the remnants of the late social gathering. As Miss Burford carried on her part of the controversy, sullen faced and heated, she passed angrily from chair to chair, putting them rudely to rights as if they had been Sunday School scholars, cuffing a chair here, and a chair there; shaking cushions with vexation; stooping to remove crumbs; scanning the carpet for traces of shoe-dirt, scooping up imaginary soil and debris with the brass shovel and committing them to the fire with an ostentatious “pfff!” of repulsion, that the Councillor might see what toil the entertaining of his guests entailed, and how interminable were the struggles and tribulations of housekeeping.

“Mrs. Holmroyd’s house is no great credit to her,” she threw at him. “I have never seen her tea-table. You seem to know more about that than me.”

The Councillor, standing before the fireplace, dropped a curt: “That’ll do. Let’s leave Mrs. Holmroyd alone if we can’t be civil about her.”

“It’s you that can’t let Mrs. Holmroyd alone!” Miss Burford said. “Not me. It was you that made me ask her.”

“To be sure I did,” the Councillor acknowledged. “I thought she was a lady you might be glad to know. A lady whose manners you might copy with advantage.”

“Thank you!” said his daughter with a dessicated mouth, like one of her father’s own dried fruits. “I’m too old to be taught my manners by Mrs. Holmroyd.”

“It seems so,” said the Councillor tersely. “Is tea ready?”

For a moment Miss Burford flushed up at her father’s peremptory closure, as if disposed to challenge this abrupt suppression of her wrongs, but one look at his face caused her to accept the issue with a voice and countenance of injury.

“It’s in the oven. You’re home very early.”

“I’m ready as soon as tea is,” the Councillor said. “I want to get back to the shop. There’s a Council meeting this evening.”

He quitted the drawing-room, leaving his daughter engaged on the task of scrutinizing the contents of the cups closely as she did so, to assess by the quantity of sugar undissolved and the vestiges of tea, to what extent her catering had been appreciated. Into Mrs. Holmroyd’s cup she looked with a curl of the lip almost contemptuous, as if the tea-leaves visible betrayed a nature sinister and dubious.

“Pshaw!” she said to herself at last. “I don’t believe it. He wouldn’t be such a fool.”

4

One result of Mrs. Holmroyd’s ill-fated visit to the Councillor’s house was that both the Councillor and his daughter avoided all further mention of her name.

Its obstinate suppression marked the continuance of their feud. Neither would capitulate by uttering it. Nothing seemed farther from their lips than the name of Holmroyd; nothing showed less remote from their eyes. The word perpetually floated in the table-space between them, like some disquieting spectre whose very sustenance seemed their own silence. Out of this silence, heaped up with the indignations that grow to greater stature for being unspoken, their misunderstanding mounted. The Councillor in his shop and Miss Burford in her kitchen assiduously raised its walls and strengthened its obstinate buttresses. The moment she heard her father’s footstep in the hall Miss Burford darkened her visage to the forbidding shade at which he had seen it last. She kept a countenance of injury in stock for his special edification, which--each time she came into his presence, or he into hers--she instantly assumed. One look at his daughter’s face served to harden the Councillor’s own. Each assumed the character respective, and met like masked adversaries in a duel of obstinacy.

Petty quarrels between father and daughter, issuing out of the clash of idiosyncracies too closely compacted, were not unknown, though usually they proved of short duration. But the feud between them now was of a different constitution, and each knew it. It could not be reduced to a word; a hundred words could not compose it. They had fought on one pretext, but the real object of their fighting lay undivulged. They had quarrelled and used woundful words, and crossed hard arguments, and yet the substance of their grievance remained intact. Each nurtured concealment as well as injury, and a breach upon dissimulated grounds is hard to heal.

After this fashion the chief part of a week went by. Only essential matters were discussed, and those but briefly. Meals lasted no longer than the time it took to eat them. With each last mouthful the Councillor drew forth his big gold watch, glanced at its dial, and with this mute reference to the flight of time and calls of business, rose straightway from his place. Not to be outdone, his daughter rose as promptly and transferred the cruet to the sideboard. If their lips were on speaking terms their eyes were strangers. Such looks as passed between them were accidental, or on the daughter’s part darkly clandestine. It angered her to find with what complacency her father carried on this conflict of dissimulation on her own lines. Armed with a great shield of masculine indifference that seemed to hide his daughter from his sight, he paid no more attention to her paltry moods than if they had been small-print insertions in the obituary column. What her eyes sought to hide or glittered to express, to him alike made one. He occupied a large and comfortable oblivion, in which, to her alternate wrath and resignation, she ceased to be.

Unalterably on his side, inconstantly on hers, the division deepened. What had been but a trickle of pent-up passion on the night of her historic tea-party became, after some days, a swollen stream of dark misunderstanding, swift and (as it seemed) unfordable. Flinging the weapon of anger finally aside as a thing powerless to reach or harm him, she gnawed the crust of martyrdom instead; posing--if but he would have looked at her--as the wronged and injured daughter. And to heighten the enormity of his disregard of her she cleaned his home more recklessly than ever, trying--with that perversity of her sex that drives male logic to desperation, and renders even prelates profane--to bring him to subjection by the very methods he found the most detestable. She bore her martyrdom abroad. She took it visiting with her. The grievance, condensing from its first nebula commenced at last to solidify into a shape; to find a definite expression before her friends. The mother of Oswald, by Miss Burford, was designated: “That woman,” or “You know who I mean.”

Meanwhile, if the Councillor talked little,--so little, indeed, that not one word of this domestic difference ever crossed his lips--he thought no less than his daughter; prosecuting his own path of indefatigable reflection. The episode of the tea-party, disclosing his daughter’s latent antagonism to Mrs. Holmroyd had brought him up abruptly on his heel. It confronted him with the untimely necessity to interrogate his own mind; to define what (for his own immediate comfort) he had been hoping to preserve indefinite. In this state of uncertainty he shunned the house in Spring Bank Gardens under pretext of a pressure of affairs that he tried (for justification’s sake) to impose on his own credulity. When he drew his watch from his waistcoat pocket after meals, and quitted the table as if Time summoned him, he did so to escape more than the discomfort of his daughter’s company. From her he fled not only, but from himself. He tried to temporize with his own thoughts, anxious for any basis to believe that his daughter’s jealousies had played her false, and that her spitefulness had misjudged him. He had proceeded, throughout, so circumspectly that it came upon him as a shock to find how far her woman’s intuition had outstripped his pedestrian commonsense, taking short cuts to forestall him on the road he trod with such immeasurable prudence. To have one’s own intentions read, before they are half formulated is humiliating to the broad mind reposed in the sense of its incontestable security. He had supposed that purpose was possessed of ample space and time to work in, subject to no external pressure, and limited by nothing more urgent than his own slow-moving will. And all at once he found the issue shrunk to the dimensions of a hand, with scarce turning space for a mind indulged so long with delusive belief in its own liberty.

So, not knowing yet what his ultimate course of action was to be, he resolved meanwhile to take no step to bridge the difference. This widening antagonism (he shrewdly thought) might serve his purpose, after all, far better than any reconciliation. If he took any extreme step, who needed to be surprised? His daughter had nobody but herself to blame.

Not that he minimized the gravity of the step contemplated. A widow with encumbrance might give pause to admirers far less practical than Councillor Burford. But his admiration for the mother of Oswald and his confidence in her womanly qualities outbalanced prudence. And despite his avowed contempt for education, and his intolerance of unprofitable culture with which he justified his educational deficiencies and scorned, in self-defence, those superior attainments that took levy of his limitations more contemptuously in return, his heart was well acquainted with the secret bitterness that comes of the knowledge of a lack of learning. If, out of a dogged determination to hide his weakness from the world and justify deficiencies by trying to show them conscious and deliberate, he lauded the wisdom of the father that had preserved him from the ills of education, he felt the need of it with each day of advancement in his business and the Council Chamber. Little did Oswald imagine that there were moments when his politeness pricked their burly visitor’s pride like a fine needle, causing him an exquisite regret for opportunities irrevocably lost.

Now, by means of marriage he might possess himself of education in the person of his wife. Looking at her as she sat at table, his admiration constantly assured him: “What a Mayoress she would make! What a wife for a Councillor!” He compared her with the wives of his acquaintances; contrasted her soft and cultured speech with theirs; took pride in her complete yet uninsistent womanhood, as for a thing acquired already, whose possession exalted ownership. Such a helpmeet during his mayoral term of office would prove invaluable, reflecting lustre on official prestige. He wondered her widowhood had not been earlier assailed, and his silent courtship entered that inevitable phase when he began to suspect each passing week of danger. Often, when he called at Mrs. Holmroyd’s house, “just to look in, ma’am ...” the true purpose of his visit was the need to reassure himself that no change had compromised the situation; that she was, as he had left her, solitary and unsought. The chief deterrent was her children. Not without an interest deeper than Mrs. Holmroyd or her son divined did he concern himself with Oswald’s future, seeking (for his own guidance) to appraise the mother’s aspirations for her child. Her attachment to her children, he had the wit to know, must not be suffered to suspect itself in jeopardy. This quality in her, at least, was quite unfeigned. Her other qualities, for the very reason that they moved him to admire, caused him to doubt. In invoking the aid of his daughter to introduce Mrs. Holmroyd into his house, he believed that circumspection had succeeded in deceiving both. Once their intimacy was established he would (he felt) have better, closer opportunity to study Mrs. Holmroyd, supplementing his own imperfect vision with his daughter’s keener eyes. Now he knew that her inexplicable delays in asking Mrs. Holmroyd to the house had formed a part of policy, and that her eyes had seen much deeper than he deemed. Circumspection, then, was a failure. Further to practise it would be futile. Only two courses now lay open to him; the first, to rebut his daughter’s insinuations; the second, to ignore them. For the time being he chose the second. Above all he deemed it inexpedient to come to close quarters with his daughter on a point where his own opinion needed time for formulation. Until he knew his own mind he must avoid hers.

5

In his domestic life no less than his civic or commercial the Councillor had been--before his feet began to deviate to the house in Spring Bank Gardens--the most regular of men. The main divisions of the day and night might by his goings and comings be measured with exactitude. Within his house this punctuality found an admirable co-adjutor in Miss Burford, whose exactitude stripped Time of none of those terrors with which poets and imaginists have endowed him. On the contrary, she devised new rules and furnished him with new decrees to reinforce his despotism. Tables were set and tables were cleared with the ruthless precision of clockwork. If the Councillor dared to return by a few minutes late or early, it was only at the risk of his daughter’s stern displeasure. To be late was a crime involving the inevitable ruination of the meal. No power of earth or heaven could avail to save it. Ruined it must be. Ruined it should be. Ruined it invariably was.

To come home earlier than expected, on the Councillor’s part, was a crime scarcely less abhorrent. The sound of her father’s footstep, anticipating scheduled time, drew Miss Burford’s visage from the oven with a look of blazing consternation: “What’s that? Never the master! At _this_ time?” She met him with a face like the dial of a barometer when it affirms “Stormy.” That the Councillor expressed himself in no hurry extenuated his offence not at all. Miss Burford knew better than that. And, to demonstrate the consequences attendant on parental thoughtlessness, Miss Burford would set all the domestic machinery in most violent commotion. The maid would be dispatched on a dozen distracting errands to the dining-room, and be as peremptorily recalled to the kitchen for the execution of some forgotten task that her mistress had completed in the meantime, and was now become but a text for reproaches. Cooking was recklessly accelerated, and the oven-odours forced to such an intensive pitch that they fled like refugees to every quarter of the house, protesting the woes and wrongs of their oppressed race. The maid spun wildly in the midst of them, disturbing their acridity with her petticoats as if she were a draught incarnate; shutting doors to keep the smell of cooking in, and opening windows to let it out, and dropping breathless “Yes’ms” and “no’ms” and “what’ms” on all sides of her along with loose hairpins. Being an unimaginative man, the Councillor was mercifully spared those rackings of conscience that might have tortured less complacent parents, and merely characterized these demonstrations as “Annie’s way,” deploring their consequences more for her sake than his own. He ate with gusto, despite his daughter’s flurried face, refusing to let his own discomfort be constrained by hers, or any argument conflict with food.

On the next Saturday but one after his daughter’s party, he showed the completeness of his emancipation from all domestic control by making no return for tea. The offence was unprecedented. The kettle whistled loudly on the hob; a fleshy haddock, steaming in milky juice, wasted its savours on a deepening void. Indignation withdrew from any intercourse with vulgar words, and occupied unspeakable remoteness. The maid and haddock communed in the kitchen. Miss Burford sat in awful dudgeon in the dining-room. Seven o’clock struck and brought no sign of him they waited for. The haddock, giving up all hope, sank its voice to a whisper. The maid’s face, through continuous application to the kitchen clock, seemed to reflect its blankness.

“You can clear away,” Miss Burford ordered her.

“Clear away?” the maid repeated, in tones of stupour.

“You heard what I said,” Miss Burford told her.

“Shall I leave the cloth on’m?” the maid enquired, “against master happens to come back?”

“Leave nothing,” her mistress ordered her.

She did, without further question, as commanded. She left nothing. The kettle went upon its hook. The haddock, by this time scarcely warmer than a human hand, was transferred to the larder. Miss Burford’s face discouraged looks and forbade enquiry. It was incredible the alteration wrought in a house of metronomic custom by the absence of its master.

A quarter of an hour might have elapsed when the dreadful silence of domestic speculation was broken by a sudden ring at the front door bell. It formed part of Miss Burford’s principle to be inordinately startled by every unexpected ring for which her mind could furnish no immediate explanation. On such an evening as this it was certainly not to be expected that her anxiety could condescend to wait until the significance of the ring should be brought back to her at second hand, garbled by a servant’s lips. She therefore followed the domestic skirts as far as the passage corner leading to the hall and heard in the stillness that succeeded the opening of the front door a voice articulate a message carefully rehearsed.

“Please!... Mr. Burford wishes to let Miss Burford know....”

She knew the voice. She knew the fashion of the message; the manner of delivery. Trembling with indignation violently suppressed, she left her point of vantage so far as to gain sight of the maid’s white apron-bands and the dim figure half obliterated on the doorstep beyond, uttering the sharp word:

“Stop!”

The maid, startled into an audible expression of surprise, fell back from the door, turning a vacuous face in the direction of her mistress.

“Who is it?” Miss Burford demanded. “Who is that speaking?”

The servant said: “It’s the Sausage Boy’m. With a message from Master. Master wishes to let you know....”

Her mistress suffered her to say no more. “Tell the boy to take his message to the back door,” she ordered, in tones vibrating with anger. “I will not have errand-boys ringing the front bell. Do you hear?”

The maid, whose chin had dropped to her brooch under the vehemence of this exhortation, turned to the space in front of her and re-echoed Miss Burford’s words with a feebleness that confessed itself utterly overcome with the force of them.

“You’ve got to go round to back door,” she told the messenger. “Missus says you aren’t to ring front door bell.”

A period of uncertainty seemed for a while to hover on both sides of the hall step, and was still hovering when the front door (very dubiously) closed at last without a sound.

“I will not have,” Miss Burford reiterated when the maid, returning from her mission, faced her.... “I will not have messages left by errand boys at the front door. I have repeatedly told you. You seem to take not the least notice of what I say. What is the back door for? Go and open it and tell him to deliver his message properly.”

The maid, still floundering in depths of wonder, betook herself to the appropriate door for errand boys, followed by Miss Burford, whose lips showed very hard, compressed and pale.

“Well?” she demanded after awhile, for the back door was now thrown open, and no murmur of any message, subdued by the deliverer’s consciousness of shame, as yet came to her ears. “What is it? What does the boy say for himself this time?”

“He’s not saying nothing’m,” the maid replied. “He isn’t there.”

“Isn’t there!” Miss Burford cried, incredulous. “What do you mean? Isn’t there? He must be there. Where is he?”

“I don’t see him nowheres now’m,” the maid said after a brief reconnaissance.

“Don’t see him!” repeated her mistress. “But surely to goodness.... You heard what I ordered you. Go round to the front at once. Perhaps he’s stood there yet.”

The maid sped round to the front of the house by the garden path. Miss Burford, not less agitated, hastened back to the hall and flung open the front door with her own hand. The light from the hall lamp fell only on the maid’s white apron, cap and baffled face, advancing at the same moment to meet it.

“Well?” Miss Burford demanded with the acuity of concern. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know’m,” the girl answered, breathing heavily, in part as a result of recent haste, and in part as a sacrificial offering of breath to propitiate the irate Power awaiting her; knowing it to be her recognized and bounden duty to take the blame for all sins committed in this domestic temple. “He’s not in garden. I’ve been as far as gate. He’s not outside. He must be gone.”

6

Yes. He was gone. The maid had read the scroll of fate aright. The Sausage Boy was gone.

But why had he gone? With what intention had he gone? By whose authority had he gone?

Proud with the bearership of this important tidings, and knowing nothing of the tremendous significance contained in it, he had paused for a while before the Burford house and rehearsed his message to the garden gate. The garden gate having pronounced upon it favourably, he took it next to the front door, repeating it in turn to the starred and tinted glass, and his confidence now being high he prepared to recite it before the maid with no small pleasure in his own performance. To such extent as he was suffered to proceed, in fact, he had complimented himself not a little on the execution of his task, and his confusion may therefore be imagined when the voice of Miss Burford abruptly broke him off in the middle of it and he heard himself commanded ignominiously to the back door. If the sky, with all the stars, had fallen flat upon his luckless head, he could not have been more utterly confounded. Hitherto Miss Burford’s treatment of him never failed in a certain quality of indulgence. Nothing, to be sure, could overcome the native hardness of her eyes and mouth, the piercing look; the sharp-edged tone. Rarely, however, had he rung before but that (the door being opened) he heard her voice behind the maid enquiring: “Who’s that? Is it the Sausages?” And she had asked after his mother, and how his sister did, and once (in a spasm of generosity) had given him an embarrassing finger biscuit that turned all to crumbs in his pocket through much handling on the way home.

At first, therefore, he could not believe his ears. Speechless he stared into the hall, striving by looks alone to assert identity. His eyes reached Miss Burford’s eyes, that spurned them for all she realized whose eyes they were--with a severity he had never observed upon her face before. He heard the words she uttered mumbled over to him by the servant-maid, and all at once the only thing in front of him was the cut-glass asterisks and tinted radiations of the front door, distorting and multiplying the grotesque movements of the maid’s white cap and apron behind it.

“Tell the Boy to take his message to the back door.... I will not have errand boys ringing the front door bell.”

The words resounded through the awful crypt of ignominy. “Errand Boy.... Errand Boy!” She had said it. She had meant it. The words were for him, for Oswald Holmroyd; the son of the best of fathers.

And all at once, infinitely greater than the shame imposed on him, a fierce, hot, devouring pride rose out of the miry depths of his outraged self, and filled him with such an indignation as he had never known before. He was no Errand Boy. He was a Gentleman. Gentlemen did not knock at back doors for anybody. No! Not for Anybody.

And without a moment’s hesitation he turned him round, marched down the garden path and reached the road--making very sure to close the gate punctiliously behind him to show how true a Gentleman he was. An errand boy would have taken pains to leave it open. He heard sounds about the house as though some errand boy were being sought and called for, but he paid them no heed. The night was dark, yet a great and blinding brightness led him onward, like a star.

7

As the mere sound of Canon Quexley’s voice, or one brief ejaculation of his canonical cough, was sufficient to bring the most unsteady Prestwich out of the influence of vocabularies and make straightway a subservient and snuffling verger of him, so this single touch of the inexorable served to chill Miss Burford’s wrath like cold tap water, and bring it back with a shock into the confines of her own body whence it had so recently emerged in a supreme attempt (it seemed) to spread beyond all mortal barriers and join issue with infinity.

The boy was gone. With his message delivered no further than “Please, Mr. Burford wishes to let Miss Burford know ...”--the boy was gone. Disquiet peered out of her eyes in place of indignation. She dispatched the maid to the kitchen with a disgust too deep to seek expression.

“Get back with you,” she simply said. “If I’m to have messages that are meant for me I suppose I must answer my own door and take them for myself in future.” The maid, thankful to escape so lightly from the consequences of her mistress’s mistake, retired to the kitchen without the need for any second bidding. Miss Burford betook her trouble to the dining-room, where, leaving the door ajar behind her that she might command all sounds from hall and kitchen, she plunged into a sea of speculation.

Not alone for quarrel’s sake during these latter days had she sought to bring to a head the feud between herself and father. Behind his stubborn silence danger dwelt for her. His independence, his aloofness, his disregard of all the gins laid out to trap his elusive anger; his unremonstrant acceptance of the discomforts of domestic life--all these things charged the atmosphere about her with explosive forces. What rash projects were being wrought to maturity behind her father’s outward unconcern. What mine lay even now prepared to burst beneath her feet? Already she had begun to suspect that the Councillor’s avoidance of all occasion for compromise issued from a source far deeper and deadlier than obstinacy. It showed design. Whatever plans he had, he intended they should be matured apart from her. And his choice of this messenger to-night lent substance to her worst fears.

Very early she dismissed the maid to bed, with a solicitude for the girl’s repose that expressed no more than her own anxiety to have a free course and an open field when the Councillor returned. It was half-past ten when the Councillor came home. He retained in his mouth the assertive half of a cigar which he puffed with ominous complacency as he hung his hat and coat upon the hall-stand. In itself such a procedure was portentous. Not for years had he defied his daughter’s feelings with more than the clinging odour of the last cigar discarded on his way home or at the gate, that--even so--gave her pretext to sniff his garments with obvious disfavour. This evening she did not even sniff.

“It’s you,” was all she said.

“It’s me,” said her father. Without amplifying his acknowledgment he walked into the dining-room and turned up the gas.

“What!” He wheeled from the globe to the table and swept his eye across it. “There’s no supper for me, then!”

“Supper?” said his daughter with a look and voice of triumphant expostulation. “At this time of night? Of course there isn’t.”

He repeated her words in the interrogative. “Of course there isn’t?”

“Of course there isn’t,” Miss Burford said again more doggedly. “I didn’t know what you would be wanting. How is it likely? You go your ways without the least regard for me. I don’t count. I’m the last person to be told Anything.”

“But you got my message,” he said, breaking into her words unceremoniously. “Didn’t you?”

The question, if it did nothing else, gave her at least assurance of one thing. Her father was ignorant of her treatment of the Sausage Boy. To such extent, therefore, her wrath was to the good, having no need to fear the employment of this dangerous arm against her.

“A nice idea!” she said. “Sending messages at half-past seven, with the fish cooked and wasted. No wonder decent girls won’t stop. They won’t put up with such goings on. I don’t blame them.”

The Councillor drew his chair away from the end of the table and sat down upon it with a heavy gesture of weariness.

“I’m just about tired of all this, Annie,” he said. It was the announcement long waited for, that she had his permission to divulge her wrongs.

“You’re not more tired than me,” Miss Burford retaliated, touching a corner of the table-cloth for no reason whatever, save to emphasize her indignation. “Ever since ... for the last goodness knows how long, life hasn’t been worth living.”

“I’m about tired of it,” her father said again. “When a man comes home after a long day’s business....”

His daughter plucked that last word from his lips and tore it to nothing, with a tone.

“Business!”

“Yes, Business!” her father asseverated. “_My_ business. Not _your_ business. Not anybody’s business but my own.”

“Do you pretend to call Mrs. Holmroyd business?” she taxed him.

“Who’s talking about Mrs. Holmroyd?” he demanded. “What’s Mrs. Holmroyd got to do with it?” His colour had risen and deepened and his eye, exerting itself to quell his daughter’s sceptic look, grew defiantly hard.

“You know best what Mrs. Holmroyd’s got to do with it,” she answered. “You see a deal more of her than what I do.” She hazarded the stroke. “As like as not it’s where you’ve just come from.”

Her intuition, misled by anger, played her false.

“Is it?” he demanded emphatically. “That’s where your cleverness is wrong, Annie,” he said decisively. “I’ve come straight back from business. I was sat working in my office while ten minutes ago.”

“But you’ve been to Mrs. Holmroyd’s house to-night. Don’t tell me you haven’t.”

The Councillor half rose from his chair and flicked the ash of his cigar towards the fireplace. It fell short of the fender and spilt itself in grey powder on the hearth-rug. But though this disgraceful act must be redeemed before she went to bed to-night, Miss Burford knew better now than to comment upon it.

“I’m fifty-nine years of age,” the Councillor declared. “Going on for sixty. If I’m not old enough to take care of myself and manage my own affairs at my time of life it’s not likely I ever shall be.”

“You’re certainly old enough to set folks talking about you,” his daughter threw in.

“_Your_ friends, I suppose!” said her father.

“No. Not my friends!” Miss Burford contended, though a darkening flush betrayed the shot struck home. “Other people. People who are no friends of mine and don’t talk about things just to please _me_.”

“Let ’em talk to please who they like,” said her father. “I’ve no time to bother with such people.”

“No,” his daughter acquiesced. “You go off to business, and goodness only knows where, and leave me to bear the brunt. They don’t say what they think to You. They say it to me. What else do you expect--carrying on the way you are.”

“Carrying on!” said the Councillor, stung by the expression. “What do you mean, woman? Have you taken leave of your senses?”

“No, but I think you have,” Miss Burford blazed at him. “You’re not the same man. Everybody remarks it. You think because that woman lets you do as you like in her house that you can do the same at home. You used to have some respect for yourself at one time, and come back at decent hours, when people expected you. Now you’ve none.”

“That’ll do!” said the Councillor. “That’ll do, I tell you! When it comes to ‘that woman’ as you’re pleased to call her, I won’t sit in this room and hear her insulted. Neither by you nor by anybody else. Do you hear that? Mrs. Holmroyd is a lady.”

“O, thank you,” said Miss Burford with an acid politeness. “That means to say I aren’t.”

“No,” answered the Councillor with blunt directitude. “You aren’t, Annie. You never will be. You never was.”

“Whatever I am or may be,” his daughter flung at him hotly, “I’ve got you to thank for.”

“Perhaps you have,” the Councillor replied.

“You should have given me a better education then,” his daughter cried. “If you’d wanted me to be a lady you should have made me one.”

“You can’t make a lady,” her father said with emphasis. “A lady makes herself. It’s born with her. It grows up with her. It’s part of herself. If you’d had as much edjication as Mrs. Holmroyd, you’d have used it, like you use the house, to make everybody else uncomfortable.”

“Thank you,” said his daughter. “If I don’t know what I’m thought of now, I don’t need to blame _you_ for not telling me. I know I’m a bad cook, and a wretched housekeeper, and an ungrateful daughter--for you’ve told me so lots of times. But that’s not all. There’s something else, surely! What is it?”

“It’s this,” said her father. “I’d begun to forget what a home was intended for; what it ought to be--until I saw one for myself at Spring Bank Gardens!”

“Oh! There!” remarked Miss Burford. “I knew we should get back _there_, at last.”

“Yes, there!” said the Councillor. “I believe you think there’s only one house in Daneborough--and that’s this, that’s supposed to be mine. You never enter other houses but what you come back and speak scorn of ’em. But there’s more comfort in Mrs. Holmroyd’s parlour than there is here with all the rooms put together. Go any time you like and the place seems ready for you. It never changes. Mrs. Holmroyd isn’t a rich lady. She’s a poor lady. She’s probably a good deal poorer than she’s willing to admit. But what’s on her table you’re welcome to. It doesn’t take her two months to make up her mind to ask anybody to a cup of tea and a piece of seed cake. She has her children at a word--and not a rough word either. A look’s enough. When you was their age there was no controlling you. You wouldn’t be said. They only talk when they’re talked to, and it’s a treat to hear ’em. I’ve spoken against edjication. And I’m ready to speak against it now, in a general way. There’s far too much of it. It gets into the wrong hands,--into the hands of them that was never meant by Nature to have it, and that only harms themselves and others with it. But when I see what edjication can do for people, it makes me think. I’ve never seen Mrs. Holmroyd in a temper all the time I’ve known her. I’ve never seen her put out, even. She’s not for ever worrying to know what people will think because there’s a hole in the carpet, or the sofa springs are broke. Why? Because of her edjication. Because she’s a mind above such things. Because a lady’s always a lady, and there’s no mistaking her. That’s why.”

“And are you such a fool,” said his daughter, with a contempt upon her face that seemed to despair of the Councillor’s intelligence, “ ... as to think yourself clever enough to judge what sort of a woman Mrs. Holmroyd really is by what she chooses to let you see? Do you think she’s always just the same as what she pretends to be for _your_ benefit, when you call?”

“For _my_ benefit?” asked the Councillor. “What nonsense are you talking now?”

“If I don’t know my own sex by this time,” Miss Burford said, “I’m very sure _you_ never will. Pshaw! I could slap the faces of some of them. But wait till they get you. Wait till they have you like _that_!” She twisted her thumb and forefinger tyrannically together. “And then what do they say, and do, and look like!” Her indignation, replenished from some invisible source, rose up once more, threatening to overflow its banks. “Don’t think I’m to be talked over to that woman by you. Don’t think I haven’t seen through her already, and you too. If you fancy I’ll submit tamely to remain in this house when once she sets foot in it, you’re very much mistaken. Both of you. So now you know.”

The Councillor, with three or four rapid puffs, sucked the last goodness out of his cigar and threw the chewed stump into the fender.

“So now I know!” he said, rising to his feet and pushing the chair back once more against the table. “Aye. That’s quite right, Annie. Now I know. And are you sure,” he taxed her, with a sudden access of anger in his cheek, “--that Mrs. Holmroyd’s so anxious to set foot in this house and share its roof with such as me and you?”

There was something in the defiance of her father’s face and question that rudely buffeted Miss Burford’s confidence, but she abated nothing of her certitude or acrimony.

“I should hope you’d never be such a fool as to give her the chance,” she answered.

“What!” her father said. “Is a man so much of a fool because he risks being made miserable by a wife rather than a daughter? A wife’s a wife when all’s said and done. If I could be as sure as you profess to be ... I’d take my chance, Annie. Fool or no fool. But I lack your confidence. Mrs. Holmroyd has no ambition to make herself a grocer’s wife.”

“What!” exclaimed his daughter indignantly. “Do you mean she’s impudence enough to set up her nose at a Town Councillor?”

“Aye,” said her father. “If it comes to a question of what you say it does--she has. Money looks for money, and breeding looks for breeding, and edjication looks for edjication. Councillor Burford and his daughter may think themselves very great people among folks with no more edjication than themselves, and no more money--or even less. But as soon as they leave their own circle and meet edjicated people--they’re nobodies at once. And they know it, Annie, if they’re wise.”

His daughter’s eyes had dilated with a curious understanding, half-defiant, half triumphant, as her father spoke.

“What?... Do you mean?” ...

“I mean what I say,” he answered quickly. “I know Mrs. Holmroyd better than what you do. We’re friends. And that’s all. That’s all we’re ever likely to be. It would take a better man than me and a better home than this to tempt her to be anything different. Now I’m going to bed.”

They exchanged Good Nights with voices relapsed from the vehemence of disputation to the weariness of prosaic reality.

“I wonder!” said Miss Burford with the deepest introspection as she took the fire-shovel and hearth-brush to the spatter of cigar ash on the rug. “Has he lowered himself to ask her? Has she had the impudence to refuse him?” ...

“Pshaw!”

She was glad now, in this hour of her reprieve, that she had sent the Sausage Boy so ignominiously about his business. She despised her father, but she hated Mrs. Holmroyd.

8

The Councillor had not partaken of tea at Mrs. Holmroyd’s as his daughter suspected. Such, to be sure, had been his purpose, but procrastination is the thief of confidence not less than of time. Between thoughts of Spring Bank Gardens and his daughter’s darkened face awaiting him at home, the insidious moments crept over his faculties like paralysis. Irresolution lays hold of all men at its own hour and in its own place. Standing upon the doors of destiny this large figure of flesh and blood whom Oswald venerated as a being invulnerable to fear, was the victim of as many doubts as the Sausage Boy’s own self when he rang or knocked at unfamiliar doors.

If Miss Burford had been startled by the belated ringing of the front bell, Mrs. Holmroyd was scarcely less surprised to hear the Councillor’s well-known footstep in her passage somewhat earlier. Elizabeth had been and gone, leaving the school-room damp and chastened. Tea was long since over. Oswald had returned from delivering the last of the week’s pies--sadly reduced in number. In the centre of the kitchen floor stood Beryl’s bath, ready to send up its wreaths of vapour for the reception of her small body. Already she sat upon a chair before the fire. Oswald, having returned the basket to its place at the cellar-head, occupied the music stool in the parlour, practising five-finger exercises from the open pages of “Pleasant Paths to Musical Proficiency, adapted to the use of Small Hands by Arthur Rencil!” As he played, he counted conscientiously aloud, for had not Mr. Rencil told him that to count aloud was already half way toward playing with talent, and that all the Great Composers had been incorrigible Counters from their Cradle? In fact, he recommended Oswald to count to his footsteps in walking, and to go up and down stairs in every conceivable time--duple, common, three-four and six-eight in a bar. Much (he said) could be accomplished in this way, and Oswald’s loyalty being somewhat quicker than his sense of humour took the Organist at his word. He counted so cheerfully when he practised that, at a distance, it sounded more like a singing lesson; and if his vocal ardour showed a tendency to flag his mother’s voice was ever ready to exhort him gently:

“Oswald.”

“Yes, mother?”

“Count dear!”

Whereat his voice, thus called on, straightway rose again to fill the room with fervour.

“One _And_. Two--_And_. Three--_And_.”

He counted with the more enthusiasm to-night because of his music lesson received this morning, and because--being the deliverer of a medium pork pie at the Organist’s brass plate--the Organist in person had found him there and led him into the up-stairs room by an ear, with the announcement:

“Ethel! This is the rascal who rings our bell. I’ve just caught him in the act. What’s this in his basket? It’s a pie. Alice, come and take it away from him. We’ll have it for breakfast to-morrow. I’ll teach him to ring my bell as if he were the Water Rate.”

Not only that, but the Organist’s little daughter--who was bigger than Beryl and infinitely more beautiful than Miss Bankett--after whispering in her mother’s ear, brought Oswald two pieces of fruit cake. (She had solicited but one alone, for Oswald’s sake. It was her mother who said there must be two--remembering Oswald’s sister.) The two pieces, wrapped in cream-laid writing-paper, were put by the Organist’s daughter’s self into Oswald’s side-pocket with the carefullest regard to safety, and he left this house of dreams like a blind man, lit only by the internal brightness of his brain. For long ago, this history must confess, the granddaughter of the late Alderman Bankett had abdicated her throne within the empire of the Sausage Boy’s affection, in Alice Rencil’s favour. By comparison with the Organist’s little daughter, indeed, Miss Bankett’s voice was harsh; her eye hard; her manners cold and variable; imparting capricious confidences with the condescension for coppers, and turning on the recipient next moment the coldest eye of charity. There was something almost Burfordian in her self-content. When she subjected the Sausage Boy to scrutiny he could never quite be sure whether her look bespoke friendship, indifference or contempt. But the Organist’s little daughter looked at him always with the commingled softness of her parents’ eyes. No embarrassment ever mitigated the directness of her gaze, which, however, was only insufferable when there were present other witnesses of it. She looked straight into Oswald’s eyes, offering her gaze to his as she might have given him her hand to clasp and hold. Sometimes over her very slate in his mother’s school their eyes met thus, and though Oswald was far too conscientious a son and student to lend encouragement to the least scholastic breach, or waste of time, the look--troubling one side of his nature--afforded wonderful incentive to the other. Regardless of all previous vows, this was now the widow who stumbled to his aldermanic grave-side in her cumberment of tears and crape, supported by the sympathies and mourning of a town. And if the young lady with the straight legs and the exceptional capacity for sulking displayed a tendency to demonstrate her best behaviour where Oswald was concerned, she expended her efforts in a lost but admirable cause.

“Ma’am!”

The sound of the Councillor’s voice, confirming his footsteps, brought the music and the counting and the vivid dreams by which they were accompanied to a sudden stop, and caused Mrs. Holmroyd with celerity to draw down her sleeves. Hastily commending Beryl to the protection of her own rectitude, that must on no account touch the blazing fire--or play with matches,--she went to receive her visitor before he should advance further. He stood blocking the passage by the parlour door.

“Perhaps you’re busy, ma’am,” he said uneasily at sight of her. “I’m a busy man myself. Saturday’s no night for calling, I’m aware. There’s a shopful of customers waiting of me any time I care to go back to ’em. But I just.... Is that your son inside the room? I thought I couldn’t be mistaken. I wonder.... Do you think you could spare him to do a small errand for me? No farther than my own house, ma’am,” he assured Mrs. Holmroyd, sensible of the maternal solicitude expressed by the mere suspicion of a pause before she answered--

“To be sure. I think so, Mr. Burford.”

“I’ve been that pressed at business to-day, ma’am,” the Councillor explained, “that I’ve had no time to get back home for tea. I just want to ease my daughter’s mind and let her know I shan’t be home while late.”

And as Oswald, furnished with his mother’s sanction, and armed with cap and gloves and overcoat, took word for word the message from the Councillor’s lips, committing it to the safest pocket of his memory, and turned to go, the big voice suddenly recalled him.

“Wait a moment my lad! (With your permission, ma’am.)”

Whereat the large hand sought most unexpectedly Oswald’s own; opened the small fingers that made a polite movement of resistance and withdrawal, and impressed on the palm of Oswald’s glove something hard and circular, over which it closed the reluctant fingers as if to seal reception with finality. “There! Now get along with you.”

9

It was the first time that Councillor Burford had called at the house in Spring Bank Gardens since the night of his daughter’s tea-party, and though meanwhile he had twice commented on the weather in his own shop, and transcribed Mrs. Holmroyd’s needs upon his duplex tablet with an effusion so spacious that personality seemed somewhat lost in it, Oswald’s mother could not resist the feeling that this unexpected visit derived its motive (and some of its embarrassment) from the evening just over a week ago when he had incurred his daughter’s obvious displeasure by inviting her to high tea. For the Councillor was patently ill at ease.

“I’ve meant calling on you for some time, ma’am,” he saw fit to explain in crossing to the fireplace. “But as a matter of fact.... Why, to tell the truth, I’ve been rather busy. Busier than usual. My own daughter was only saying to me last night that she didn’t seem to see nothing of me at home in these days.”

The mention of his daughter, succeeded by a silence on the Councillor’s part, as if his conversational reserves in this direction were at an end, prompted Mrs. Holmroyd to ask after the health of her hostess of a week ago.

“Thank you,” the Councillor replied, “she’s very well.” The word “well” however, appeared to stick in his throat, for he said (stroking his felt hat): “When I say ‘well,’ I should say she’s middling, ma’am. Only middling. That’s all she’s been for a goodish while now. But you’ll know what Annie is,” he told his listener, “as well as me. If she isn’t worrying herself she’s worrying other people. I think the house is too much for her. She can’t manage it.”

In these words, thrown out as it were into space whilst the Councillor rubbed his coat sleeve meditatively round his hat, Mrs. Holmroyd fancied her visitor insinuated a general apology for any shortcomings in his daughter’s social qualifications that might have been divulged last week. Not wishing to participate in the least dissection of Miss Burford’s character she contented herself with a face and phrase of polite regret that his daughter’s health left so much to be desired, and by way of quitting the topic graciously bade the Councillor sit down. He put up his hat at once, like a barrier, against the suggestion, protesting:

“No, no, ma’am. I didn’t come to sit down. Saturday night’s no night for a chair. I haven’t sat down in a chair of a Saturday night before the shutters were put up for five and twenty, thirty, five and thirty years and more. Sunday’s my day. I don’t say No to the easy chair of a Sunday afternoon.”

She had hoped he would refuse, for all her mother’s heart was pulled towards the kitchen where her little daughter sat. Oswald was gone away, and to the little sitter on her lonely chair she feared the kitchen might become a very vast and formidable space.

Yet having declined the proffered seat and so allayed anxiety, the Councillor to her sudden consternation, sat down upon it. At that her mother’s heart could be denied no longer. She begged him to excuse her ... but her little girl was sitting all alone ... before the fire. Might she just call her into the room. To Mrs. Holmroyd’s deepening concern he jumped to his feet at once.

“Not on my account, ma’am!” he said. “I said I hadn’t come to detain you, and what I have to say can be said as well standing as sitting. It won’t take me a moment. It’s just a small matter of business I’d like to speak to you about.”

A small matter of business. But small matters of business, Mrs. Holmroyd knew, were capable of infinite extension. And her mother’s heart submitted to the kitchen-tug. With a hurried apology, declaring she would be not a moment gone, she betook herself to the source of her solicitude.

“Beryl!”

The small voice answered. The small and solitary figure, seated before the fire in an attitude of adorable obedience, touched the heart it so disquieted. She put the guard before the fire, folded back the edges of the bath mat, imposed new loyalty and confidence with a kiss. For a short while Beryl must be good. She must touch nothing, fear nothing. The doors were open; her mother was close at hand and ready for the slightest call. She went back to the sitting-room to find the Councillor seated once more in the chair so recently vacated. Her advent brought him to his feet again.

“We was just talking about my daughter, ma’am,” he said, reverting to their conversation’s earlier phase. “And I was saying....” He crossed the room and closed the door with a push of his flat hand as if oblivious of the least external charge on Mrs. Holmroyd’s care. “And I was saying, ma’am,” he repeated on his way back to the fireplace, “that the house seems more than she can manage. It isn’t for want of trying. She’s always trying, is Annie. She tries too hard. She thinks a house can’t be kept in order unless a woman makes herself a martyr to it. She never seems happy unless she’s miserable. If I carried on at business like what she does at home ... I might just as well shut the shop up. That’s not what the house wants. I know what it wants better than she does. It wants a mistress.

“ ... Now I flatter myself I’m a business man, and I can take a straight business answer. Yes or No, when it’s given me. You’ve seen the house, ma’am, and you know what sort of a house it is. And you’ve known me now for longer than a day, and you must have formed your own conclusions as to what sort of man I am.”

Up to this point Mrs. Holmroyd had contributed a look of sympathetic attention to the Councillor’s words without the faintest knowledge of their import. And it came upon her with the dislocative jar that racks the semi-sleeper on his bed to find herself all at once paying serene interest to what amounted in truth to a proposal. Dreadful doors and windows of enlightenment seemed simultaneously flung open in her consciousness. Through a hundred gaping inlets the incredible truth reached her. Of all contingencies this had been the least suspected. The thought of her children, the memory of her husband--rendered more precious if possible by the approaching sanctity of Eastertide--smote her conscience as if, in some degree, it were to blame for what had happened. All her soul rose up to protect the sacred things committed to its care. The Councillor passed an uneasy sleeve around the circumference of his hat.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said contritely, “ ... if I’ve spoke too abrupt or took you in any way by surprise. I was hoping you wouldn’t be altogether unprepared for what I had to say.”

Mrs. Holmroyd begged him: “Pray do not mention it,” and added after a pause in which he showed no disposition to speak again: “You are very kind, Mr. Burford. I ought to be deeply sensible of the confidence you place in me.... But it is quite, _quite_ impossible.”

“Not impossible, I hope, ma’am,” the Councillor besought her. “Impossible’s a hard word. Perhaps I’ve come upon you at an inconvenient time. Saturday’s an awkward night, I know, for anything. It’s no sort of a night even for my business. I’d sooner see customers any night but that, and it’s only customers that can’t help themselves that ever comes on it.... But I’m a plain straightforward business man, and I like to go about things in a plain straightforward way. When a thing’s on my mind I want to have it settled. As soon as you came into the shop this morning I says to myself: ‘Let’s get it settled to-day. Get it settled before Sunday. Here’s Good Friday coming on, and Easter Monday after it, and nothing more’s to be gained by waiting.’

“ ... I don’t want to boast about myself, ma’am,” he continued, “but I’ve got a good business of my own, and I venture to think I can offer you a comfortable home. You’ve seen it. You know what it is. There’s not a finer view in Daneborough. The front bedrooms look right across the Town Acres to the Race Course. With your eye for scenery, ma’am, I don’t doubt but what you’d enjoy the view. As for myself, I don’t make no pretences. I’m just what you see me. I’m blunt and plain and straightforward. What I say I’ll do, I do; and what I say I won’t do, I don’t do. I think I can claim the respect of all my fellow townsmen. They’ve honoured me with their confidence by giving me a seat on the Council, and so far as one can see it won’t be long now before I’m honoured with the mayoralty.”

Troubled with his confidences, that acquired a simple and childlike quality in issuing from so large a man, Mrs. Holmroyd had lacked the heart to interrupt his pleadings, hopeless though she knew them to be.

“O, please, please, Mr. Burford!” she begged at last. “If my personal esteem is anything ... you have it. But you scarcely understand. My Husband....” Her voice dropped at the solemnity of the word like a worshipper upon a knee. “My husband has not been dead two years.”

“Why, for the matter of that, ma’am,” the Councillor consoled her. “I’m a widower myself, as you know, and I buried as good a wife as any man might wish to lose. We’re both in the same boat. I think we ought to be able to understand each other the better for that. We can’t go on living with the Dead for ever, ma’am. It’s not in Nature. The Living can be bad enough at times. We’re neither of us so young as we were. I don’t know for certain; I’ve never presumed to ask you; but I suppose you’ve touched the thirties, ma’am. And I shall be fifty-nine come Whitsuntide. I think we’re old enough to make up our minds for ourselves, without troubling a deal about what other people thinks or says. I know you suit _me_ very well, ma’am, and I’d hoped I might have suited you well enough to justify you giving me a trial. You’ve given my goods a trial, and I’ll make bold to say you don’t regret it. I don’t think you’d find me in any way inferior to what I sell.”

There was little she could say; little she could do--beyond deepening the sadness in her face to translate a resolution sorrowing and unshaken.

“It is no defect of confidence on my part, Mr. Burford,” she told him. “You are right in thinking you have that. Implicitly. But ... what you ask demands so much more than that. I can scarcely tell you all that my husband meant to me; all that we meant to one another. Even to speak of such a matter ... with his face looking at me from the mantelpiece ... seems dreadful.”

The thought, indeed, oppressed her. This disparity between the living and the dead was too abrupt. Had the burly Councillor recalled in any wise her husband’s virtues or shared even some familiar imperfections made dear by death, she might have trembled at the prospect of a living memorial to one so loved, that should bring back however feebly the happiness of the past. For one brief moment, indeed, an awful thought assailed her, that came unbidden and vanished in a flush of shame. What (she wondered) would have been her treatment of this offer had it come to her through such lips as those of the Organist of St. Saviour’s? The thought, swift as a winged arrow, pierced conscience in its flight and brought two slow tears of anguish to her eyes. Believing himself the instigator of them the Councillor quickly turned attention to his hat.

“I won’t say your feelings doesn’t do you credit,” he said, rotating his hand about the crown. “Great credit. They’re such as any edjicated lady might be proud to own.... But I won’t detain you any longer. I didn’t tell ’em where I was going to when I left the Shop, and I daresay they’re wondering what’s got me. With your permission ... I’ll leave you.” He paused and added: “To think over what I’ve said at leisure, ma’am. Take your own time. I know I’ve spoken a bit sudden. You’ve all Sunday before you. Give my words your best attention then, ma’am, and look at them from a common-sense, practical point of view, in the best light you can. If you’ll allow me I’ll perhaps call round in the course of the week. Say Tuesday or Wednesday. Or Friday, if you’d like that better. Your little boy will be at the choir practice then, I believe.”

Mrs. Holmroyd tendered her deep and humid gratitude for this final testimony of the Councillor’s thoughtfulness. But she begged he would take her answer now. She begged he would not compel her to reopen a subject possessed of so many painful associations for her. He fixed on his hat a look of prolonged reflection, as though the two of them took counsel together.

“Then you feel it must be ‘No,’ ma’am,” he put to her.

She answered: “If you please, Mr. Burford.”

And unable once again to contain the disquiet welling up within her heart, she undid the door his hand had shut and breathed her little daughter’s name to the silence beyond.

“Beryl!”

The small voice answered, and the small feet showed a quickness to respond, but she restrained them.

“No, no, I was not calling for you, dear. Wait awhile, Beryl. Don’t go near the fire. Mother will not be long.”

She did not shut the door again. The Councillor looked at it (she thought) as if for very little his obliviousness of the precious guardianship it stood for would have led him once again to complete the work with a brusque hand. She said, apologetically; “I always leave the door ajar, Mr. Burford. So that I can hear my children, in case they call.”

“I’ve noticed you pay ’em a deal of attention, ma’am,” he acknowledged.

“Perhaps you may think me foolish ...” she began.

“I don’t know,” he admitted with candour. “It’s difficult to say one way or another while your children grows up. That’s the test. If folks’ children grows up to be a pleasure and a comfort to their parents, no care has been too great to give ’em. My daughter was brought up in my way, ma’am. My way wasn’t your way ... at that time. I’m apt to think I don’t get a great deal of comfort nor yet too much credit with her. A family’s an investment, and one doesn’t know whether it’s a good one or a bad one till time shows. With some you can invest all your affection in it and still it won’t pay you a ha’porth of interest. And with others every blessing you indulge them with comes back at a hundred per cent. If your family returns you half the attention you’ve given ’em, ma’am, you ought to be a rich and happy woman some day. I hope you may be. Good-night, ma’am.”

He held out his hand. Mrs. Holmroyd stirred within herself by these last words and by the remorse for a plea so rigidly refused, gave him her compassionating fingers in return. The broad hand engulfed them and held them for an appreciable space of time.

“I’m venturing to conclude, ma’am,” the Councillor remarked in a lowered voice, “that what has just transpired is in strict confidence between ourselves.”

The shocked look upon her face answered him without the protestation of her lips.

“To be sure!” he said, relieved. “I shan’t say nothing about it. And _you_ won’t. There’s no call to make nobody as wise as ourselves. Silence doesn’t cost nothing, and it’s worth a bookful of words.”

... “There’s another thing,” he added, clearing his throat, for the unwonted subjugation of his usually uncompromising voice to a whisper had the effect of rendering it husky and unmanageable. “We’re both of us common-sense practical people. I hope that what’s took place won’t be allowed to make no difference between us.”

Mrs. Holmroyd assured him, “O, certainly not. Certainly not, Mr. Burford.” She thought of Oswald and Beryl and her little school.

“I’m glad to hear you say so, ma’am,” the visitor said. “I felt sure it’s what you would say. I hope to merit the continuance of your custom, ma’am, and by strict attention to business combined with civility and promptitude, to retain your confidence. There’s nothing you happened to overlook when you was ordering this morning? Tinned fruits? Sardines? No? Then you think that’ll be all to-day. Very good, ma’am. Don’t trouble yourself to come to the door.”

The effect produced on Mrs. Holmroyd by his departure was curious, and unaccountably depressing. He drew the front door behind him with manifest concern to make no noise, but even so the knocker responded to its closing with a faint and apathetic echo. Mrs. Holmroyd heard the Councillor try the knob, to be sure of its security behind him. Then his footsteps faded into silence, seeming less firm and resonant than usual. They passed out of hearing almost at once, and the desolation of a great solitude succeeded his departure. Filled with the sudden horror of life’s loneliness Mrs. Holmroyd’s heart turned with a despairing hunger towards her children.

As the Councillor left the house behind him, his overcoat unbuttoned; his two hands plunged into the respective pockets; his beard upon his breast; his broad feet moving leisurely; he was absorbed in the task of sweeping his mind clear of all its debris, and readjusting life once more to those realities it had, of late, lost sight of.

“It makes things easier with Annie,” he reflected as he passed down the street. “Not that I’m under no obligation to consider _her_. She doesn’t put herself out to consider me. She says I’ve got the shop, and she’s a right to the house. She has it to look after. Aye! that’s all very well. But I’ve got to live in it, and I’ve got it to pay for. And them that pays the piper has a right to call the tune. She can have her own tunes as much as she likes when I’m away. But when I’m at home, she’ll have to listen to mine.”

At the bottom of the street, before passing out of it, he looked back wistfully into the darkness that held Mrs. Holmroyd and her home.

“Aye!” he acknowledged to himself, “she’s a highly estimable woman. She’s one in a thousand. One in ten thousand. If she’d only consented to be what I asked her, I could have thought myself a very fortunate man. With her at the head of it, home would have been something like home to go back to. Not an empty farce, smelling of furniture polish and dusters like it is now.”

“Well!” he reflected, (walking on again) she had refused him. By her answer at least was she freed from the odium and unworthiness of his doubts. Her friendship towards him had screened no policy. Her welcome dissimulated no design.

“She’s treated me very well,” he consoled himself. “A man needn’t want to be refused politer. She’s done everything possible to respect my feelings. I couldn’t have asked for more consideration if it had taken place in the Council Chamber.”

“After all,” he reflected as he neared the lights of High Gate, “she’s said ‘No.’ But what’s ‘No’? No isn’t world without end. No is No to-day and Not Quite Sure to-morrow. Both for her and me. I’ve perhaps been a little premature. Time soon shows up a bad bargain, but a good one has nothing to fear from it. Any bargain that’s worth having is worth waiting for.”

Subdued, but not despondent, he mounted the three steps between the bulging windows in the High Gate and passed into his shop at last.

“Boy! Move these boxes. Do you want Customers to fall over ’em?” “Good evening, ma’am. Are you being attended to?” “Now my lad, don’t push in front of people there. You won’t get served out of your turn.”

10

“One--AND. Two--AND. Three--AND.”

It was the voice of Oswald. He sat on the music stool once more, before the open music of “Pleasant Paths to Musical Proficiency adapted to the Use of Small Hands by Arthur Rencil,” on the lower portion of whose pages the gas-light silhouetted his head. Out of the kitchen came the babble of voices and the splash of bath water. From time to time he paused consciously, with his hands immobile upon the keys, that he might hear them. They ministered in some mystic incommunicable way to his content; they were, although he did not know it, the divine sustenance on which his aspirations fed. Without this mother and this sister life was nothing, ambition had no meaning; his dreams were worthless merchandise lacking a market. These two, whose voices comforted and inspired him as he worked, lent life whatever sweetness or significance it had; touching the future with the wonder reflected from their own faces.

And whilst he listened to them through the notes played and the beats counted, they listened in turn to him, who was (not less) a part of their very selves; an extension of their own identities; an amplification of life, of hope, of home.

“Oswald!”

“Yes, mother.”

“Count, dear!”

Count? Ah, to be sure! He had momentarily lost sight of this material obligation in the sublimity of his thoughts. He sat on the music stool before his mother’s ancient piano, primly garbed in its high-necked, pleated pink bodice of a bygone age, but his fingers operated a keyboard in eternity, and his music caused the very stars to stop and listen. This was Oswald Holmroyd no longer. This was surely Mr. Rencil. These, beyond doubt, were Mr. Rencil’s eyes that looked at the page through large lensed spectacles. These, incontestably, were Mr. Rencil’s fingers that depressed the keys. Did not Oswald’s mother and his sister notice? He played the notes again, to confirm the Rencil-like quality in them.

“Mother?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Are you listening?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Did you hear that?”

“Yes, dear. It was beautiful. Count, dear!”

“One--AND. Two--AND. Three--AND.”

Illimitable wonders dwelt in these words. Words? They were no more words than he was merely Oswald. They were planets that left his lips and floated away to take their place in the firmament of eternal glories. Across his counter the Councillor plied a busy naked arm. In the sombre dining room, lit by its subdued and solitary gas, and darkened by Miss Burford’s wrathful face, Miss Burford paced like a caged leopard, awaiting the nox irae. But in the tranquillity of Mrs. Holmroyd’s little home a serene content, like the soulful fragrance that issues out of the vesper throats of flowers after the heat and burden of the day, mounted up to heaven on Oswald’s counting.

“One--AND. Two--AND. Three--AND.”