Front matter (continued 2)

“You’ve not seen enough of our county, yet, to tell us how it impresses you, Mr. Beaumont, and I don’t know anything of Yorkshire, except that it is mostly moors and mills. Huddersfield, I suppose, is all smoke and mills?”

“We’ve mills enough in and about the town, but we haven’t much to complain about in the matter of smoke. For one thing, the surrounding hills are so lofty, and the moors on their summits so extensive, that the breezes sweep down the valleys or over our heads, and of a summer day you can stand in the main street of the town and see above your head sky as blue and as little obscured by smoke as looks down upon your fat pastures and rustling cornfields. You must go to Sheffield for smoke, not Huddersfield.”

“But your people,” said the Squire. “They’re a rascally set of malcontents, I have always understood—Chartists, atheists, and Communists.”

Edward laughed pleasantly.

“I am by way of telling our people they are the most intelligent and the most independent in the world. I’ve no doubt, though, there are some Chartists among them, or those who were Chartists in their youth. As for Republicans, well, you know, we go in for practical measures up our way and leave Utopias to the dreamers. As Pat at Donnybrook Fair, if he sees a head he hits it; so we just hit the abuses we see.”

“But aren’t the mill-hands, generally speaking, a very godless set of men?” asked the Archdeacon. “I have always looked on my brother clergymen who accept livings or curacies in the West Riding more as missionaries than incumbents, and, indeed, they tell fearful tales of the irreverence and slackness of the common people in the manufacturing towns. Dissent, we know, is simply rampant in the West Riding.”

“I should scarcely have regarded dissent as a sign of want of spirituality,” said Edward, with a quiet smile. “I have always regarded it as a rather disagreeable sign of excessive spirituality—religion run mad.”

“But the mills, Mr. Beaumont,” interposed Miss St. Clair, who, perhaps, thought the conversation was tending in a direction best avoided. “One reads stories of the awful lives of the factories. It must be so wretched to live all the weary days amid the din of the wheels and the fluff and dirt and grease of the wool.”

“If you were to stand, Miss St. Clair, as I have often stood, of a dark and wintry night on the ridge of one of our valleys, and looked down upon the great mills, their windows all glowing with light, and heard from within the deep voices of the men, and the sweet, pure, trained notes of the women and the girls, blended in some well-known hymn, or even taking their parts in some familiar and more complex song, you would not think the weaver’s lot a very wretched one. Depend upon it, there’s a lot of poetry in a mill, only we haven’t yet been happy enough to produce a poet. But I profess it is strange to find you commiserating our mill-hands. We in the West Riding have always thought it was the poor hinds of the country who called for commiseration. I don’t know that we regard Huddersfield as an Athens of the North, but we certainly have thought of parts of Lincolnshire as a sort of Baotia. I’m afraid we have been wasting a lot of very genuine sympathy. Perhaps I don’t know much about Hodge. I hope to know more before I leave Lincolnshire. May I hope Miss St. Clair will be my instructress?”

“Confound his impudence!” thought the Squire. “Do you hunt, Mr. Beaumont?”

“No! our’s is not a hunting district. Besides, I haven’t the time for it.”

“You shoot, of course?”

“Oh! I’ve knocked over a grouse or a hare or two. But, to tell the truth, I am no sportsman. When I go on the moors I’d rather lie down in the sun and admire the view than blaze away at the birds. And as for sport, rather badger a witness than hunt a fox, any day.”

“We can’t all badger a witness,” suggested Eleanor.

“Besides, a fox likes the run as much as the hounds do.”

“So I’ve heard,” conceded Edward; “but never from the lips of Monsieur Reynard. I never heard of a witness enjoying badgering. But, there, I’m no sportsman, only because I can’t get sport conveniently—I’m no sentimentalist.”

“It’s marvellous,” said the Archdeacon, “what a lot of ‘anti-everything’ people there are. You have nothing to do nowadays but declare you like something, and a society is sure to be formed to put it down. There are people who won’t smoke, or drink a glass of good wine, or honest beer, or eat flesh meat, or play a hand at whist, or go near a racecourse, or handle a gun, or touch a cue. It is Puritanism run mad.”

“They’re generally a set of low Radical Methodists,” opined the Squire. “You never find such absurd fads among Church people.”

“Of course not,” agreed the Archdeacon. “All the same,” demurred Edward, “I don’t see the connection between sound doctrine and roast beef, or between Church polity and a hand at whist.”

“It’s a mental habit, my dear sir,” explained the cleric. “A man begins by dissenting from the Church of his fathers, and by a natural process begins to question their diet.”

“Depend upon it,” said Wright, with conviction, the battles of Old England were never fought, nor its empire built, on carrots and cold water. Look at your Frenchman.”

“I’ve known some very charming French-women,” protested Edward.

“We spent a month in Paris last autumn,” said the Archdeacon, “and I hadn’t a decent meal all the time I was there.”

“Oh! Papa!” protested Eleanor. “The cooking is exquisite.”

“A woman doesn’t understand cooking,” declared her father. “It is well known that if the matter had been left to Eve, we should never have progressed beyond tea and bread and butter.”

“At any rate, Eve invented costumes,” suggested Edward. “The Palais-Royal was founded in Eden.”

“Don’t speak disrespectfully of Eden,” said the Archdeacon.

“I don’t. ’tis there we meet the first lawyer.”

“You mean the serpent.”

“Teste Coleridge,” said Beaumont. “You remember the lines, Miss St. Clair?—

“I never knew before how much we have to reproach you with, Mr. Beaumont.”

“But if there had been no lawyers there would have been no—Archdeacons, shall we say?”

“Oh, then, we’ll forgive them for the sake of the Archdeacons. You won’t keep me sitting by myself in the drawing-room too long, papa,” and Miss St. Clair swept through the door which Beaumont opened. “I declare we women have always to leave the table by the time men find their tongues.”

“’Tis a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance,” quoted Edward, as he bowed before her.

“Fill up your glass, Wright,” said the Archdeacon. “That Burgundy’s all right, if you prefer it. But I’m for the vintage—what does our Lincolnshire bard sing?—

Did you see the Standard this morning, Mr. Beaumont? I see the rumour grows more persistent that Gladstone may dissolve any day. He will go to the country, of course, on the Extension of the Franchise?”

“And Parish Councils,” added Beaumont.

“Cursed rot,” muttered the Squire. “That man will ruin the country. See if he don’t disestablish and disendow you, Archdeacon, before he dies.”

“Mr. Gladstone’s a good Churchman, I always understood,” demurred Edward.

“He’d rob his grandmother for power,” vowed the Squire.

“Perhaps Mr. Beaumont is an admirer of his?” queried his host.

“My grandfather was a Whig, my father a Liberal, and you may write me down a——”

“‘Not an ass,’ that’s the correct quotation, I believe.”

“No! a Radical.”

“That’s worse!” said the Squire, with emphasis.

“Radical lawyers are raræaves are they not, Mr. Beaumont?” asked the Archdeacon.

“Black swans. Black enough, I suppose, Mr. Wright thinks. Well, yes, in the country, men of my branch of the profession are generally Conservative. I don’t know why, except it be that they have the sense to know on which side their bread is buttered.”

“Of course,” said the Squire; “the law and the land.”

“But in my town,” said Edward, “there’s only one landlord and we can’t all live on him. But we manage to butter our bread pretty well all the same.”

“No more wine, Mr. Beaumont? Then we’ll see if Miss St. Clair can give us a cup of tea.”

CHAPTER IV.

The time passed very pleasantly at Caistorholm Vicarage. Edward rose betimes each morning, and was often deep immersed in the intricacies of the Skerne Iron Works Company’s accounts long before his host had quitted his downy bed, and could with clear conscience enter into those delights of country-life that were to him all the sweeter because unaccustomed. The glories of the Vicarage garden were on the wane, but its orchard was prepared to yield its juicy fruits. The fields were fast ripening for the sickle. The great calm and hush of those pastoral scenes stole over his senses like a young child’s sleep. There were no revelries, but there was constant interest. The Archdeacon had suggested a dinner-party, but Edward had been so emphatic in his declarations of preference for quiet, the project had been abandoned. A neighbouring vicar or rector dropped in occasionally for luncheon, and was easily persuaded to stay for dinner. Edward had, at first, spoken rarely and with reserve about matters social and political—doctrine was avoided by common consent. Strange, one may pass a month in a clergyman’s house and never hear religion discussed. Presumably the household has so long taken fundamental dogma for granted that the possibilities of wide divergence amounting to repudiation is not so much as thought of. Edward saw with amaze men of unquestioned scholarship and intelligence equally indisputably above the average grow warm and excited in discussing the Eastward position, incense, lights, stoles, birettas, man millinery generally. He itched to tell them that the vast bulk of those who should be their flock didn’t care a brass farthing about genuflexions or ecclesiastical trappings. What the human soul yearns to understand is the Divine rule and ordinance, if rule and ordnance there be and not blind chaos; to know if man be indeed Imaginis Imago, or but the last if not the final link of a chain long drawn out with a protoplasm at one end of it; if there is indeed and in very sooth a God our Father, who sees and loves and can be moved by prayer, if man have in truth an immortal spirit or is like unto the beasts that perish; if it be true that after death comes the judgement, when the gross inequalities of this world shall be made right and virtue shall indeed reign. Edward knew, as any man with ears to hear may know, that the avowed scepticism of mankind is a mere speck of dust compared with the huge mass of practical perhaps unconscious, infidelity that pervades society. It filled him with impatient scorn that men who should be leaders of thought, able to give counsel and enlightenment to those who grope in darkness, should spend the priceless years in mumbling twaddling homilies and in agitated harassment about stage effects. He could not interest himself in the question how far a beneficed incumbent may go on the road to Rome without jeopardising his living. He longed to tell these clerical traitors who let “I dare not wait upon I would,” that in this country any man worth his salt, who had a message to give, need not be uneasy about the forthcoming of the salt. He could go back to Yorkshire, he reflected sardonically, and find a score of half-educated weavers who had borne hunger and thirst, imprisonment, and stripes for conscience sake, and were ready to do it again and glory in the doing. But, then, hunger and thirst and imprisonment and stripes are one thing to a man to whom hunger and thirst and oppression are the daily lot, and quite another to a sleek, soft man who basks in the sunshine all his days and counts himself piteously poor and an object of commiseration on five hundred a year.

“Why, don’t you all turn dissenters?” he asked of a clerical party one evening, as they lingered over the desert. “You all find fault with your Bishop. The poor man can apparently do nothing right. If you were dissenting ministers you would be your own bishops.”

“I fancy, my dear Beaumont, the dissenters have their Trust deeds.”

“Oh, Trust deeds—a fico for your Trust deeds. They talk about driving a coach and six through an Act of Parliament—why, a regiment of soldiers could walk through a Trust deed. ’Tis an instrument as little resorted to for the purpose of torture in a Nonconformist church as the thumbscrew in the Tower of London. Besides a man isn’t a fixture in a Dissenting Church. When he has talked himself dry, or made more enemies than friends, he can always change pulpits with another fellow who has talked himself dry or made more enemies than friends.”

“There are our social status and influence to be considered,” said a sucking young curate just emerged from the Bishop’s Hostel. “Our mere position invests us with a sacred authority never wielded by a mere dissenter.”

“Your social position is largely the result of social factors. The Established Church draws its ministers mainly from families socially established, and they receive not only the education and culture, but also the social stamp of Oxford or Cambridge. The dissenting parson is often the son of a grocer or a shoemaker, and receives a surface polish and a surfeit of theology at a training college, but seldom loses the smell of the ancestral shop. Your clergyman is a gentleman first, a clergyman afterwards. Turn all your well-born scholars into Methodists, and your half-educated social inferiors into the Church, and you would reverse the present social positions of the established and the nonconforming divines.”

“Then you think our present social superiority, and therefore our greater influence for good, for, of course, it is only to be valued for that, is a matter of birth and education.”

“Largely, but not entirely. You see, your present status is official. You owe your posts directly or indirectly to the Crown. You are part of the machinery of the State. And it is surprising how mere officialism and the possession of authorised and acknowledged titles impress the popular imagination in this country. You see it all through. Dub a man M.A. or LL.D., and the general man will persist in thinking him a better scholar than another who far surpasses him, but has not received the hall-mark of a University. So put a man in uniform with epaulettes and dub him an officer. He bears a social cachet, though he may be a poltroon and a blackguard. It is largely an affair of clothes and names and State-connection. You clergymen, if you really care about retaining your social importance, would commit social suicide if you got yourselves disestablished, even if you retain those endowments and other fleshpots you are so concerned about, but which appear to me the element you could most easily compensate under a system of voluntaryism.”

“Then you think, Mr. Beaumont,” asked the Rector of Fillingham, “our policy is to let well alone?”

“Yes, if you’re let. I think if I were an incumbent with a fat living I could swallow my bishop and make no bones about it. Remember the dissenting parsons have their deacons, and I can conceive of nothing more galling than for a man of principle and education to have to trim his sails to suit the views of a coarse, uneducated deacon with all the soul of a village tyrant, just because he happens to have more money than some of the humbler worshippers. I should preach either him or myself out of the conventicle.”

“Ah! he would be your bishop,” laughed the Archdeacon.

“Those dissenters are just the plague of my life,” confided one of the country vicars from a neighbouring parish. “Just fancy, Mr. Beaumont, there aren’t five hundred families in all my parish, and yet there is besides mother church, a Wesleyan chapel, a Congregational and a Baptist. It turns my modest glass of wine and my crust to gall and ashes when I think of it.”

“Oh! I know something of the feeling, Vicar. You don’t suppose I like to see people taking their cases to the man next door, who, I am persuaded is not half so fine a fellow as I am. But you can’t go begging for communicants, any more than I can go touting for clients. Besides, what does it matter in which church a man saves his soul alive, so long as it is saved. Ut palata, sic judicia is of universal application.”

“Ah! but can a man be saved outside the true Church?” asked the young curate from the Bishop’s Hostel.

“That’s a question the next Roman Catholic parish priest might have something to say about,” rejoined Edward. “Anyway, people seem willing to risk it. Don’t you think, Archdeacon, instead of trying to filch flocks from the folds, the shepherds of the Church could find quite enough to do in casting their crooks about those wandering sheep that are utterly lost in the wilderness?”

“Pray condescend to particularise, Mr. Beaumont,” begged his host.

“Well, a day or two before I came down here a vulgar case, of which I need not trouble you with the details, gave me a glimpse of the workings of the Salvation Army.”

“A most valuable institution, no doubt,” said the Archdeacon.

“Yes,” said Edward, “but you will pardon my saying—why a Salvation Army at all? Here are more than half our churches and chapels with yawning pews, and out in the street are crowds of earnest enthusiasts following a dancing Dervish and a big drum.”

“You wouldn’t have me dancing in my cassock through Caisterholm, and the parish clerk or verger tinkling a tambourine?”

“Well, no. But, after all, if the mountain won’t come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain. And that’s just General Booth’s secret.”

“A very latitudinarian young man,” commented one vicar to another, as they jogged home together in the still autumnal evening through the fragrant hedgerows. “Whatever did St. Clair mean by taking advice from a man like him. But the man may be a good lawyer for all that, and I won’t look too closely at his Church principles if he’ll pull my good sovereigns out of those infernal Skerne blasts.”

The Archdeacon himself, before Beaumont had been a week under his roof, had conceived not only a high opinion of his guests’ acumen and legal attainments, but also a warm regard for himself personally. Their very points of difference seemed to enhance the pleasure the cleric found in the lawyer’s society and conversation. It is true they approached almost every subject from an entirely different point of view, and therein lay constant danger of friction or collision. But Edward had ever a seemly consideration for his senior in years and a ready concession of whatever deference the Archdeacon’s ecclesiastical dignity reasonably demanded. There is, perhaps, nothing so well designed as practice in the Courts to develop in a man a happy blending of due submission to authority with the respectful but unflinching assertion of one’s own opinions. The Archdeacon declared in later years that it was as great a pleasure to be routed in argument by Beaumont as to prevail, for the fellow had a sweet reasonableness about him that took away the sting of defeat, and almost persuaded the vanquished that he himself was victor. The elder man was fond of controversy if it were not pushed too far, of debate if it were conducted decently. It was an intellectual treat to meet a man with the generous enthusiasm of youth and with ideas outside the narrow range with which a country clergyman, whose only associates are clergymen like unto himself, must, almost perforce, be content. Though not so disputative as the man who repined because the very wife of his bosom was ceasing to contradict him, the Archdeacon wearied at times of speaking ex cathedra Moreover, in a society drawn almost exclusively from one’s fellows controversy lacked not only variety of interest but variety of treatment. No doubt the smooth serenity of a soundly Conservative orthodoxy was an excellent thing, but the Vicar of Caistorholm confessed to himself that Beaumont’s radical heterodoxy, if a disturbance, was one that acted as a mental tonic and wholesome fillip. Exercise is a disturbance; but it is recommended for the liver. Mr. St. Clair acknowledged with a sigh that, intellectually and spiritually, life at Caistorholm might be serene, but it was unquestionably sluggish.

“We touched on Disestablishment the other evening,” he said one day to Edward, as they walked together in the peaceful afternoon of a mellow autumn day about the Vicarage gardens; “I did not encourage you to pursue the subject, because some of our friends are very sensitive on that topic. To us clergymen, you know, the Church is as the Ark to the Levites, not to be touched by unholy hands.”

“Well,” said Edward, smiling, “I’ve no mind to bring upon myself the fate of Uzzah—at all events, I must avoid it whilst I am at the Vicarage. Percz-Uzzah is not near so pretty a name as Caistorholm.”

“But though I did not think it desirable to discuss the question when some of my friends were present who are, I fear, too apt to confound persons and principles and to think suspiciously, if not evilly, of a man who differs from them as widely as I know you do, I hope you will not conclude I shrink from discussing it. Nay, I confess, I should like to know your views on the question more at large, for then we of the Order should at least know how we appear to the outer world and learn the worst we have to expect.”

“To tell the truth, Mr. St. Clair, it is a question I have little at heart. It has always seemed to me more an affair between Church and Chapel than one that concerns the masses very largely. And, you see, if I’m but an indifferent Churchman I’m just as bad a Chapel man. Indeed, so far as I can see, a Chapel man is only an average Trinitarian, plus envy, indocility, and cant. In the abstract, of course, I certainly think the Establishment cannot be justified to-day whatever might have been said for it, at the reformation, say. As for your endowments, I think the nonconforming envy of them simply contemptible, and the claim that they ought to be applied to national education, free libraries, art galleries, etc., a mere pretence. If John Bull wants art galleries he can afford to pay for them without taking the coat off your back. No! I don’t feel like slapping you in the face, Archdeacon, just to pleasure the Rev. Josiah Boanerges, who would have no objection to be snugly endowed himself. Frankly, I don’t think the Church will fall from any blows that may be dealt from without. Its danger lies in the dry-rot that is silently but surely Consuming the inner rafters and supports.”

“Dry rot, my dear Beaumont!”

“Yes, dry-rot. If I speak at all you must let me speak frankly, and you know I do not want to wound your sensibilities. Burns, after all, was foolish to sigh for the gift to see ourselves as others see us. It might from ‘mony a faultie free us and sair mistake’; but it would so rudely and so constantly shake our serenity that life would not be worth the living. Let us change the subject, Archdeacon.”

“Well, I’ll tell you frankly enough the great danger of the Church. You know it is a common lament that your services, in the towns, I mean, attract the women, not the men?”

The Vicar bowed a silent assent.

“Now, how do you account for it, Mr. St. Clair?”

“I can only suggest spiritual indifference.”

“Nay, I cannot subscribe to that. Take my town. Let a good speaker be announced to deliver an address on political or social questions he can fill the Town Hall with men and women, mostly men, of every grade—clergy men, dissenting ministers, lawyers, doctors, manufacturers, merchants, shop-keepers; and working-men.”

“Yes, but that is to hear about worldly affairs, Beaumont, not heavenly. Your lecturers deal with to-day and here. I speak of to-morrow and there.”

“Ah! well, Archdeacon, I think you will find if a man is anxious about setting matters right to-day and here he will not be indifferent about to-morrow and there. But you must satisfy him there is a to-morrow and there.”

“But that is of course.”

“To you, yes. But to how many? I don’t judge men by their professions or their creeds. I judge them by their acts. And so judged I conclude that for most men to-day and here are very real, to-morrow and there are very visionary, very problematical; so distant, so uncertain, as to be a negligible quantity.”

“Then you would have us?”

“I would have the Church remember that we live in a questioning age, an age when the fact of an institution or an opinion being hoary with age, so far from rendering it secure from investigation rather makes it an object of suspicion. We have found our forefathers wrong in so many things, and we have improved on them so much, that we have lost our confidence in their judgment. The Church drones about things nobody questions I mean what Matthew Arnold calls ‘right conduct,’ what you call ‘righteousness’; it dogmatises, I mean asserts positively or takes for granted things which an increasing number of intelligent men are very far indeed from taking for granted. Men will no more endure being droned to about right conduct than they will submit to having it eternally dinned into their ears that twice two makes four. They cry you ‘granted.’ They go to Church for bread and you give them a stone. They seek for guidance and assurance, if guidance and assurance there may be, on matters you have made a special study, and instead of showing them how to be sure, you only tell them that you are sure.”

“What more can we do? People don’t believe, because their hearts are corrupt, and they don’t want to believe. If anyone wish to know the truth let him seek it on his knees. ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but cannot tell whither it cometh, and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit.’”

“Possibly,” said Edward, dryly. “We quote authorities in the Law Courts, Mr. St. Clair; but, you see, they are of acknowledged validity there. The suitors in our Courts are bound by the law they seek to invoke, and submit themselves to the jurisdiction when they enter their plaints. You see, the whole point is that, to-day, you have to deal with honest doubters who deny the authority of your authority, and your only answer is a petitio principis. But I see Miss St. Clair is ready for her expedition to the village, and I am to have the honour of accompanying her.”

The Archdeacon looked thoughtfully at the figures of his daughter and guest, as, side by side, apparently in gay converse, they passed down the Vicar’s Walk that led through orchard and paddock, past the hoary church and mouldering churchyard into the road that led to the straggling rows of peasants’ and small farmers’ houses, with here and there a shop, that constitute the village of Caistorholm. He could not fail to observe that Eleanor took pleasure in the lawyer’s company, that her glance had been brighter, her face happier of late. Mr. St. Clair was glad that Edward’s stay at the Vicarage should be made pleasant to him, and that his daughter should find a visit that might have developed into a visitation an agreeable break in the monotony of rural life. It was, of course, eminently satisfactory that the stranger whom he had been advised to consult and to trust in a matter of the very gravest importance should turn out to be not only a sound and reliable lawyer and a shrewd business man, but also a well-educated, well-read man, with the manners of a gentleman. Mr. St. Clair’s acquaintance with solicitors was chiefly confined to the urbane practitioners who dealt in advowsons or were learned in dilapidations, and with them he had permitted himself rather a condescending affability. From the first he had recognised that he could not patronise Beaumont, and had enjoyed the discomfiture and amazement with which Squire Wright had retired from his attempt in that direction, and which had so affected him that he had given the Vicarage a wide berth ever since. But Mr. St. Clair told himself that, after all, he knew very little about Beaumont. His old college friend, Fortescue, had told him that he had heard the best accounts of Beaumont’s successful conduct of a difficult and delicate matter, in which a mutual friend had been embroiled, and on his recommendation, and not without some natural hesitation, he had invited Edward to his home, feeling that he would rather confide to a stranger living at a distance than to a Lincoln lawyer the whole story of what he was now fully persuaded had been his very foolish, nay, reckless speculations in the Skerne shares. With Edward as a legal adviser he felt that he had more than reason to be satisfied, and he had enjoyed his conversation and the interchange of thought not a little. But he noticed with anything but satisfaction that Edward had made his conversation very acceptable to the stately Eleanor, who was not easily pleased. Not one afternoon passed but the young people found some occasion for being together—a round of parochial visits in which Edward carried the basket, and supplemented Eleanor’s tracts with covert half-crowns to rheumatic and asthmatical pensioners; a drive in Eleanor’s pony-carriage to some object of antiquarian interest, an ancient tower or a ruined church—who does not know the devices by which the tedium of the country is enlivened for the visitor from the towns?

On these excursions the Archdeacon felt he could not, even privately to his daughter, put an embargo, without giving them an importance which they might not deserve, and even suggesting to his daughter’s mind ideas that might never lodge there unless suggested. To be sure, the Archdeacon might accompany the young folk on these jaunts; but the archdeacon, like many less exalted individuals, liked to take his ease of an afternoon, and found himself on all the better terms with himself and mankind in general for forty winks in the armchair of his study, after luncheon of an afternoon, when it was a matter of faith in the household that he was meditating his next Sunday sermon, and must on no account be disturbed.

And so it came about that if Edward spent many a long hour with the father over the wearying and irritating concerns of the Iron Works, or holding forth, as was his wont, upon topics of more general interest, sometimes startling, sometimes alarming, but always interesting the Vicar, he spent also hours that seemed neither long, tedious, nor irritating with Eleanor St. Clair, when we may be sure the subjects of conversation were neither law nor theology nor commerce.

“This kind of thing, Miss St. Clair, is idyllic,” said Beaumont. “I have always had my mental picture of the Lady Bountiful of a village. She must, of course, be beautiful, with a soft, musical, tender voice, a heart quick to feel, and a soft and lily-white hand quick to help. Her path is strewn beneath her feet with the heartfelt blessings of the poor and afflicted. She moves a ministering angel among the hovels of the destitute.”

“Ah! now, Mr. Beaumont, you are laughing at me. Surely you would have me help the sick and needy.”

“It is the most priceless prerogative of the rich, and if I seem to mock I hasten to cry peccavi. But, seriously, this kind of parochial charity is but a dainty dilettantism, and you engage in it, Miss St. Clair, I beg you to confess, partly because it grieves you to see suffering without trying to relieve it and partly because it is picturesque.”

“Then I shall confess nothing of the kind, Mr. Beaumont. It is my simple duty to visit the sick and to do what little I can to ease their pains.”

“There’s Stokes the cobbler laid up with the lumbago, I am told. I went into his little shop the other day to get a trifling repair done, and the poor old fellow was nearly doubled up with pain, and, if I’m not very much mistaken, slowly dying of hunger. Shall we take Stokes the cobbler on our round?”

“Stokes does not belong to us, Mr. Beaumont. Papa would not like me to visit him. And I’m not sure that Stokes would be over civil to me.”

“He seemed a surly sort of customer, truly. I was chatting away quite comfortably with him when I mentioned casually that I was staying at the Vicarage. Then he seemed to shut himself up as I’ve seen a flower do in an east wind. Is there war between him and the Vicarage?”

“As if there could be! Papa would not condescend to notice anything such a man could say or do. All the same, it isn’t nice to be called a whited sepulchre, and I believe that is Stokes’ mildest epithet for papa.”

“Then he’s a dissenter, I suppose. He did not appear unctuous enough for that. But religion may have disagreed with him. I have observed that with some people it acts like whey in a curd.”

“They say,” spoke Eleanor, with bated breath, “he’s a Bradlaughite, an atheist. He talks about Tom Paine and the rights of man.”

“And how does he live?”

“As you know, he is a cobbler. But I don’t suppose he gets much work. It is very inconvenient. Of course, we cannot send our repairs to him, and his being here prevents another setting up in the village.”

“It’s most inconsiderate of him,” said Beaumont, gravely. “He ought to be made to see that he is inconveniencing the servants of the Vicarage. No doubt, if he were told, he would go away, and make room for a better man. Then he doesn’t get much work?”

“Very little. He seems to spend most of his time, in the summer, in the fields; and I have heard he has a curious gift of taming birds and animals. I fancy he ekes out a scanty livelihood that way.”

“Perhaps he has taken to birds and animals because he can’t get men and women to have anything to do with him. A man must love something or other.”

“What! all men?”

“Yes, I suppose so—all men. Even lawyers.”

“I know one lawyer who is very fond of something.”

“And of someone?”

“I said something, sir!”

“And that is?”

“Lecturing other people.”

“A hit, a most palpable hit, Miss St. Clair. I own my fault. But confess I don’t pretend to be a bit better than my neighbours. But about this Stokes, now. He interests me.”

“Of course.”

“Why of course?”

“Well, you see, Stokes would be all right if he would only take things as he finds them. Why can’t he come to church like other people, and be a decent member of society? Instead of that he goes on Saturday night to the public-house and talks—oh! horrid things—blasphemy and high treason, to the labourers. Papa says if his ricks are burned he shall have Stokes arrested as an accessory before the fact.”

“I don’t suppose Mr. St. Clair will entrust me with the brief for the prosecution.”

“Oh, no! If you don’t take care, sir, you’ll have enough to do to defend yourself some fine day. But I’ve done Stokes an injustice. I said he went to the public-house. He used to; but the Publican refused to serve him any more.”

“Got too much to drink, I suppose. I always knew tailors were a guzzling lot. Tailoring runs to drink, as naturally as cobbling to atheism. I don’t know why, but cobblers are all free-thinkers and tailors and lawyers’ clerks born tosspots.”

“Well, you’re out this time, Mr. Beaumont. The landlord—he’s people’s warden, you know, at the church and a most respectable man—turned Stokes out because, whenever he went of a Saturday night, he drank only one mug of small beer in a matter of three hours, and all the time discoursed of nothing but the evils of strong drink. He so frightened our undergardener, who was of the company, that he turned teetotaller, and got my maid to stitch him a piece of blue ribbon in the lapel of his Sunday coat.”

“That was carrying the war into the enemy’s camp with a vengeance. Well, he won’t be able to corrupt the farm labourers any longer of a Saturday night now he’s ejected from the ‘Blue Boar.’”

“Oh! they’ve started a club, and Joseph Arch came to open it. Papa was so upset he fled to Lincoln, and stopped a whole week at the Palace, though he does nothing but quarrel with the dear bishop.”

“And I suppose the Vicarage set the fashion in tabooing this poor son of St. Crispin?”

“Of course, papa cannot countenance atheism and arson”

“Clearly. But if the man’s ill, the man’s ill, and atheist or no atheist the man’s a man. I’m sorry I didn’t know more about him when I went to have my boot stretched. However, the other boot isn’t very comfortable, that’s one consolation.”

They walked on in silence for a time. Then, apropos of nothing, Eleanor said, very quietly: “The man must have some good about him or he wouldn’t be so fond of birds and animals. I think my boot is not very comfortable, Mr. Beaumont.”

Edward laughed gaily. “What will the Archdeacon say?”

“Oh! papa won’t mind. He’ll probably tell me I’m a goose for my pains.”

“Ah! well; I don’t know. I think the Church makes a mistake in being so discriminating in its charity.”

“You are a universal fault-finder, Mr. Beaumont. But I suppose that is what makes you a Radical. It must be a very unhappy state of mind—to be always seeing the imperfections of things.”

“Somebody must do it, Miss St. Clair. Even critics have their uses. But when you announced so unexpectedly that your shoe pinched you, I was wondering how Sister Gertrude would have dealt with old Stokes.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister. Do tell me about her.”

“Well you see, I haven’t, except in a very broad sense. Sister Gertrude is the name of a young lady I met under rather interesting circumstances. Shall I tell you about her?”

Then Edward narrated the story of the troubles of Patrick Sullivan.

“Was she very beautiful?”

“Very. It was a sort of awful beauty. You forgot the artistic delight inspired by her perfection of form, colour, and expression, in the sense that you gazed upon one who was superior to mere charm of person. There seemed something like sacrilege in thinking of her as beautiful. I suppose a devout Catholic does not let his thoughts dwell upon the physical charms of the Madonna.”

“You cease to be critical, Mr. Beaumont, sometimes I see. And she was a lady, you say?”

“Unquestionably, or I’m no judge.”

“But, after all, this lady only does ostentatiously and to the sound of the drum and the tambourine what I, what we, try to do quietly and unostentatiously. You sneer at my tracts; but as I have no gifts for sermon-making, what can I do but take a tract?”

“Oh! I don’t find fault with the tracts, Miss St. Clair, though they’re twaddly things.”

Miss St. Clair smiled.

“I fear they’re very goody-goody. But I don’t write them, you know. Why don’t you write a tract yourself, Mr. Beaumont, and show the world how it should be done?”

“Again a hit, a most palpable hit. But you see, that isn’t my line.”

“No; your line is fault-finding. What’s that Latin papa always quotes—si possis, ernenda. I forget the rest.”

“Si non, his utere mecum,” completed Edward. “Well, I won’t amend your tracts, still less use them. A Radical has greater work cut out for him. You see that hind labouring in the field yonder, Miss St. Clair? Now, I think I know the kind of life that man leads. He toils like a slave year in and year out for a wretched twelve shillings a week. He lives on fat bacon and cabbage and coarse bread. His thatched cottage is small, dark, unwholesome. There is a cesspool at his very door and a dunghill under his window. His great dissipation is a quart of beer and a big drunk at harvest time. He can scarcely read, and if he could read he has no literature but a Bible, of which only very small portions are intelligible to him for want of other knowledge, and, of course, your tracts. When he is old, and rheumatism wracks his bones, and he is past work, he and his dame must either be burdens on their children, who will be no better off than he is now, or go to the Union Workhouse. And this kind of thing has been going on for generation after generation, and all the suggestion the Church, or Sister Gertrude I suppose for that matter, has to make, takes the form of a bottle of medicine, a roll of flannel, and a tract or a sermon.”

Edward spoke warmly indignantly.

“And you?” said Miss St. Clair.

“I—nay, not I. Say We. We, Radicals I mean, would tell that man he is a fool to be content to till the land all his life for another to reap the harvest. We don’t think that it is one of the divinely ordained laws of nature that there should be a Squire Wright and a Hodge.”

“There always has been, there always will be, just as there have always been horses and riders.”

“And hammers and anvils? Well, we Radicals think otherwise. We say that it is better that all men should walk on their own legs than that one should be borne in a palanquin. Some day the people will examine the title deeds of your Squire Wrights.”

“That will be a fat day for the lawyers, Mr. Beaumont,” suggested Eleanor mischievously.

“Nay, in the ideal state there’ll be no lawyers.”

“And clearly there’ll be no critics; there’ll be nothing to criticise. Poor Mr. Beaumont. How unhappy you’ll be. Quelle triste veillesse vous vous preparez.”

“Oh, well, imperfection will last my time, Miss St. Clair. And if I cannot find perfection in this sweet Arcadia of yours, why I deserve to. . . .”

“Get Sister Gertrude to find it for you in the slums. How provoking there’s the bell, and only just time to dress for dinner.”

CHAPTER V.

The business that had taken Edward Beaumont to Caistorholm was progressing satisfactorily, and the Archdeacon and the other shareholders had every reason to congratulate themselves on having invited his assistance. It had been the usual story, a large industrial concern successfully and prosperously conducted so long as its founders had been young, energetic, and single-eyed. When they had made their fortunes and courted ease they had converted the business into a company, retaining a connection with it as salaried directors. They had put their own price on what they had to sell to the company and had not felt called upon exactly to kill themselves by working too hard as directors.

With a concern much over-capitalised and lax management, the natural result had ensued; but Beaumont had seen that with some reduction of sharemoney and better management, the situation might be saved. He had impressed his views on the general body of shareholders without any difficulty, and had cared not a rap for the black looks of the directors compulsorily retired.

All this had kept him busy enough, and every post brought him letters, copies of accounts, drafts of legal documents, and such like. One morning, as the Vicarage party were at breakfast, and the Archdeacon had opened the letter-bag and distributed its contents, Edward was smiling over a petulant letter from Storth, who wanted to know if he intended to spend the whole of the Long Vacation at Caistorholm, and if he expected his long-suffering partner to submit to being cooped up in the office when all the rest of the legal world was on the moors or drinking the waters or sniffling the salt sea air.

“Poor Sam! it’s too bad, after he’d rigged himself out for the moors. Ah, well! he must spell patience for another week anyhow,” he reflected.

“Do Radicals dance, Mr. Beaumont?” asked Eleanor. “Yes, you’re right, papa, it’s from the Countess.”

“Do Radicals dance? Some of them do, I believe. I know one who tries, et après?”

“The Countess of Yarborough asks us to dinner for the —th, and there’s to be dancing afterwards. It won’t be a ball, you know. Only the house-party down with Lord Lindsey for the shooting and a few neighbours. It will be very nice, though. Of course, we can go, papa?”

“Yes, why not? Write and accept at once, Eleanor. You’ll join us, Beaumont?”

“If——”

“Oh! there’s neither if nor but in it. Lady Yarborough will be delighted to see you, and you’ll get on well with young Lindsey, that’s her son, you know. He’s been at Heidelburgh lately, studying philosophy. Said Oxford was decadent and obstructive. I’m sure I don’t know what’s come over all the young fellows now-a-days.”

“The sportsmen aren’t content with pheasants and partridges and hares as their fathers were, they go to the Alleghanies and Central Africa for big game, and the scholars, I suppose, think they’re entitled to follow suit and try farther afield for fresh ideas,” suggested Eleanor.

“Anyhow, I don’t know what to make of young Lindsey. When I talked with him last he didn’t seem to know his own mind. But he’ll have to make it up one way or another before the next election. Richardson says he’s tired of playing warming-pan for him, and, of course, it’s out of the question that anyone but a Yarborough or his nominee should sit for this division. But Lindsey will be getting married before long, no doubt, and that will take the nonsense out of him. Say we’re bringing a friend, Eleanor.”

Norton Towers, the ancestral home of the Yarboroughs is a large and rambling structure in various styles of architecture, built originally in the Wars of the Roses, but added to and altered many times. It stands pleasantly and picturesquely on a rising stretch of knoll, Some eight miles distant from Caistorholm The noble family, whose principal seat it is, has for many generations been of paramount consideration and influence in Lincolnshire. The founder of the family is commonly supposed to have been a Venetian adventurer, one of the many merchant princes of the Adriatic’s queen, who, settling in London, became Lord Mayor under the second Richard. Then, in time, the family withdrew from commerce, acquired by prudent purchases and equally prudent marriages considerable estates in Lincolnshire, and became in time as racy of the soil as though not a trace of Italian blood intermingled with the blue blood their alliances had incorporated.

In the Civil War the heir of the house had a narrow escape of perishing on Cavendish Bog at the hand of Oliver himself, then a captain of Horse in the Parliamentary forces not yet known to fame, though marked by the observant. The Royalist soldier was borne from the field with Oliver’s bullet in his sword-arm, and that and the fever that supervened had like to have finished him, and gave him a distaste for further adventures of the kind. When the Commonwealth came the family compounded for past offences by a smart money-fine, and accepted with what grace they might the Roundhead régime. Cromwell bore no malice, perhaps remembering Cavendish Bog, and the Yarboroughs, though but sullenly acquiescent in the new order of things, and indifferent psalm-singers, kept themselves clear of the plots against the Protector’s life and rule.

When the glorious Restoration came the Lincolnshire lord was welcomed at Whitehall, perhaps because, having made few sacrifices for the Stuarts, Charles felt he owed the family nothing, and they wanted nothing from him. The Court of the second James smelt too much of incense for the stomach of the Earl, and he kept to his hunting and farming in the Fens, and had no difficulty in wearing the Orange favours when James fled the country. Since that time the Yarboroughs had been consistent Whigs, but they did not conceive that their Whiggery compelled them to quarrel with their neighbours. They had made no bones about Catholic emancipation, and, indeed, were on friendly terms with not a few of the Catholic families to be found in Lincolnshire. They had supported Jack Russell and his Reform Bill, had made a wry face over Household Suffrage, and now the Earl, who cared little for politics, but thought Lord Granville an ideal Foreign Secretary, was counted a friend of Mr. Gladstone, thinking that his dangerous political proclivities would be finally corrected by his admirable High Church principles.

But it was whispered in the county that the heir and hope of the family had returned from the Continent tainted with rank heresies of every kind. This was the Lord Lindsey, whom marriage was expected to sober.

“I don’t suppose we shall see the Earl,” said the Archdeacon, as the carriage rapidly traversed the distance between the Vicarage and the Towers. “He is a great invalid and seldom shows at the dinner table. Like the Speaker of the House he takes his homely chop when his guests are dining. I shall go to him in his room and smoke my cigar with him whilst you young folk are romping. Wright will, no doubt, be invited, and he’ll find you some partners.”

Edward had not much confidence in any help likely to be vouchsafed by the master of Thorsby Manor.

Some thirty guests gathered in the drawing room a few minutes before the clanging of the dinner-gong, and a sparkling, blue-eyed damsel of some twenty summers fell to Edward’s lot. He would have preferred to take down Miss St. Clair, but Miss Edith des Forges left him no leisure to indulge regrets.

“You’re staying at Caistorholme Vicarage, Eleanor St. Clair tells me. I stayed there three years ago, just after I left school. Eleanor and I were at school together. Mrs. St. Clair was alive then, poor dear. I flirted outrageously with the Archdeacon, and she wasn’t a bit jealous. It’s such fun flirting with a parson, don’t you know.”

“Can’t say, I’m sure. I’ll take your opinion, Miss des Forges. Are you an authority on flirting?”

“Well, pretty fair. I ought to be. Practice makes perfect. Don’t you think Eleanor simply beautiful? Don’t look at her. She is looking at us. I’m sure that stupid George Wright is boring her to death. But I suppose she’ll have to get used to it.”

“Ah! Why?”

“How long have you been at the Vicarage?”

“A fortnight.”

“And you don’t know why?”

“’Pon my word I don’t.”

“And you a lawyer! and Eleanor said you were so awfully clever. I quite quaked when the Countess sent me down with you. Are you very clever, Mr. Beaumont?”

“You must find out, Miss des Forges.”

“Do you know, I’ve never talked to a Solicitor before. I’ve wanted to meet a real live Solicitor this ever so long.”

“Question of marriage settlement, I suppose?”

“Nonsense. Anybody that takes me will have to take me just as I am without one stiver. Not much of a bargain, am I?”

“I should say cheap at any price.”

“That’s what Charlie says.”

“And who’s Charlie?”

“Ah! that’s why I wanted to meet a solicitor. Charlie’s my cousin and awfully nice. Just ask Eleanor.”

“I’ll be content with your opinion.”

“But perhaps you know him. He’s in the Temple, Paper Buildings. Isn’t it ridiculous? Paper Buildings! I’ve heard of men of straw.”

“There are a good many Charlies in Paper Buildings, Miss des Forges. I suppose your cousin is a barrister?”

“That’s just what he is—a what d’ye call it barrister, short, no, not short.”

“Briefless, perhaps?”

“How clever of you to guess it. Eleanor must be right. And he’s delightfully poor, and gives luncheon to us girls in his chambers when we go up to town, and takes us down the river. He’s awfully good; but he’s only had one brief, and then the wretched people went and settled out of Court, as Charlie calls it. I think it was a conspiracy. I’d settle ’em,” and Miss des Forgess glared vindictively across the table, to the great discomfiture of the curate of an adjoining village, who blushed distressedly.

“Quite possibly,” agreed Edward. “So your cousin’s one chance of distinction was taken from him. Never mind, he may have another brief some day.”

Miss des Forges shook her head dolefully.

“Charlie says not. He writes for the papers and magazines now and lives on air. Tell me, how do barristers get on—at first, you know. What gives them the start?”

“There are three ways never known to fail.”

“Oh! do tell one. How I wish Charlie were here!”

“Well, first, he can write a book, not a book likely to run through the fictional monthlies, you know, but a sound, solid, substantial book, say, on Estovers.”

“What’s Estovers? It sounds like something to eat. Charlie could manage that.”

“You’d better ask your cousin to tell you all about Estovers. It will help him to write the book.”

“And how long will that take?”

“Oh! not long. Say, ten or fifteen years for it to be written and get known.”

The sunshine faded from the bright face of Miss des Forges.

“As well say a lifetime,” she pouted. “And what’s another way—a short way, you understand, Mr. Beaumont?”

“Well, there’s huggery.”

“Heavens, what a name! Now, pray, Mr. Beaumont, what is huggery, It sounds like a crime of the Middle Ages.”

“Well, it has a smack of the Middle Ages. You’ve heard of ‘the rich attorney’s elderly ugly daughter’?”

Miss des Forges nodded.

“Well, that’s huggery.”

“Then that won’t do at all, sir, and you ought to know it.”

“Perhaps I do, Miss des Forges. But don’t be angry. There’s still another way.”

“Oh, yes! the third—and what is that?”

“A miracle!”

“Oh! you stupid. And Eleanor praised you ever so much.”

“Well, you haven’t told me your cousin’s name yet. There may be still another, but it isn’t recorded in the books.”

“And the heart of a certain young barrister in the Temple, sighing like hundreds of other young fellows for the chance so long a-coming, was made glad within a week from the dinner at the Temple by receipt of a ponderous parcel, bearing the Caistorholm postmark.”

“And may I post it with my own hands, Mr. Beaumont?”

“Come over to Caistorholm the day after tomorrow. The brief shall be ready then.”

And if the saucy lips of Miss des Forges were pressed just above the words, “With you, Mr. Dryasdust, Q.C.,” was ever brief better endorsed.

“I think you owe me a dance to-night, Miss des Forges.”

“A dozen, if you like. But Eleanor will want some. Oh! do just cut in and shake that stupid George Wright out of his self-centred serenity. Estovers was the word, wasn’t it? Write it me down on a slip of paper, and I’ll give you any dance you ask for in exchange for it.”

“You found a lot to talk about with Mr. Beaumont, Ethel,” said Miss St. Clair to the vivacious girl, as they awaited the gentlemen in the drawing-room. “He talks politics chiefly to me. But you wouldn’t look so radiant on politics. What was it all about?”

“Oh! huggery!” said Ethel, gaily, and Miss St. Clair wondered mightily.

Edward was standing later in the evening gazing on the pretty scene musingly. The large drawing-room was brilliantly lighted. The huge, candelabras, with their crystal pendants cunningly cut, broke and reflected the soft lights of tapers of purest wax. The mirrors, posed with art, reflected the shifting scene. There was the soft frou-frou of sweeping trains, the low hum of broken converse, the rippling music of maiden voices, and the dreamy strains of a Danubian waltz. Edward, though dancing sufficiently well, well enough, as he thought, for a man, was no votary of the graceful art; the party, happily, was a well-balanced one—there was no need for him to dance from mere complaisance. His mind carried him to a festive gathering he had recently attended in Yorkshire. The son of an acquaintance and client—a large manufacturer—had come of age and a treat was given to the millhands. After their own repast in the house the guests of the millowner had adjourned willingly enough to the vast weaving shed in which the “hands” held their revel. The bare, whitewashed walls had been hung with gay festoons and appropriate devices. The Linthwaite Brass Band, victor in historic contests, discoursed sweet music. The employees danced not ungracefully. Instead of languourous movement, swimming smoothly to a dying strain, there was the grigging romp of lusty lads and lasses. The couples in the quadrilles had no sort of notion of the challenge, the equivoque, the alluring and the feigned retreat the movements symbolise. But the music caught their feet, the unwonted excitement stirred their young blood, and their cheeks mantled and eyes glowed with the unrestrained and undisguised rapture of the fleeting hour. There was the rude and rustic humour of the looms, the lively sally, the broad retort, and the ringing laugh. Was it not as good in its way, mused Edward, as the veiled innuendo, the sneer in silky tones, the languid smile of an earl’s drawing-room—and was not that way a better way?

“Are you so soon tired of dancing—shall I find you a partner?” asked a voice at his elbow, as Edward started out of his reverie and came back from the weaving shed to the gilded saloon. He did not know the young man who had addressed him, a youth of medium height, with features none too classical, but with a smooth and lofty brow, dreamy eyes, a nascent moustache of brown down upon the upper lip. The complexion was pale to pallor, the small white hand that caressed the lips’ adorning was thin and delicate, the figure frail and almost effeminate.

“You don’t know me, Mr. Beaumont. I didn’t get the chance of an introduction before dinner. I took in Miss St. Clair—stunning creature, isn’t she?—and she told me all about you. If you aren’t dancing for a while let us slip off to my den and have a cigarette. I’m Lindsay, Lord Lindsay, you know.”

Then Beaumont knew he was speaking to the heir of the house.

“We must slip out quietly, or my mother ’ll collar us. Keep your eye on me, and hook it when we near the door. I’ll pilot you.”

The manœuver was executed.

“Take that chair; you can lose yourself in it. Try this smoke. Seltzer or soda. Mix your own liquor. Ain’t this a cozy little hole? This is my hermitage. What were you thinking of when I spoke to you? You looked miles away.”

“So I was. I was wondering, I think, whether I’d rather be a Lifeguardsman or a power-loom weaver, and contrasting that six feet two of quintessential boredom, Captain Bouverie, I think his name is, with a shuttle-thrower of my native valley.”

“Ah! yes. You’re Yorkshire, aren’t you? Any relation of Beaumont, of White Meadows? I met him once at Baden.”

“I can’t say I am and I can’t say I’m not. I’ve heard my mother say there’s some distant connection, but it is of the remotest. If we are of the same blood, it’s about run itself out by this time.”

“But you know Beaumont, of White Meadows. Plunges a lot at the tables, they say. Great friend of the Prince.”

“So I have heard. But I don’t know much about him. I’ve spoken once or twice on the same platform and probably shall again.”

“Beaumont’s a Liberal, isn’t he? Then you’re a Liberal, too. I’m glad of that. I’m to go into the House at the next Election. I suppose we’ll all have to talk extension of the suffrage to the counties?”

“That won’t be a very difficult matter in my district. I pity the poor devil of a candidate who has to address a lot of unenfranchised weavers and tell them they’re not fit to have the franchise enjoyed by their mates who work in the same shed, but happen to live the other side of an inky stream you could hop over, but that divides the county from the borough. It’s preposterous!”

“Of course it is. But how do your manufacturers like the idea?”

“Like it! Why shouldn’t they like it? If they don’t they’ll have to lump it, that’s all. It’s sure to come. If not from Gladstone then from Salisbury.”

“Do you know, Beaumont, I never saw a weaver in my life, not to talk to, that is. I should awfully like to.”

“Well, come up to Yorkshire. I’ll take you the round of the mills. But if you want to see the genuine article you must drop the Lord and come as plain Lindsay. They’ll think you’re home spun. We make lindseys our way.”

“Do you mean the hands would fawn? I shouldn’t like that.”

“No, they wouldn’t fawn. But you’d be seized on by the masters. They’d ‘my lord’ up hill and down dale. The ‘hands’ would try to equalise matters by being as unapproachable as they knew how, and that’s saying something I can tell you.”

“But I should like that.”

“I don’t think you would. But, anyway, you wouldn’t see them just as they are. To do that plain Lindsay’s the ticket.”

“Our farmers don’t take half kindly to enfranchising Hodge.”

“That’s because your farmer is only a step removed from Hodge. Intellectually, I should imagine there isn’t much difference between the farmer and the hind nor between the hind and his sheep.”

“Oh! come; we’re not so bad as that. Anyway, I tell you household suffrage for the counties is a bitter pill. Our clergy pull a sour face over it. It will take a lot of gilding to make it go down. I’m not sure I shall be returned, and I shall be the first Lindsay to be rejected since good old Noll’s days.”

“Oh! come to the West Riding and we’ll console you. We dearly love a lord.”

“Young Fitzwilliam didn’t find it so.”

“Ah! he was weighted by a banker.”

“But, seriously, do you think the people will be any better off when they get the vote?”

“That depends.”

“On how they use it? Not for revolution, I hope.”

“For reform, I hope. For revolution if they cannot get reform.”

“You don’t stick at tries.”

“No; three acres and a cow is my minimum, and that is to be only typical of inroads in other directions.”

“A leveller you?”

“No! a diffuser.”

“That’s a bitter word. I must throw that at the Archdeacon. He moans over my dangerous principles. He must rend himself over yours. How do you get on with him?”

“Oh! I change the subject when he winces.”

“See much of Wright these days?”

“Enough.”

“I suppose it’s a settled thing between the Manor and the Vicarage. She is too good for him.”

“He hasn’t got her yet.”

Lord Lindsay stole a glance out of the corner of his eyes.

“Phew! sets the wind in that corner. Well, time’s up. That’s a waltz they’re starting and I’m booked.”

When Lord Lindsay and Beaumont reentered the drawing-room Edward sought Eleanor St. Clair to claim the dance she had promised him. He was received with gay rebuke.

“This is the way you fulfil your trust, Mr. Beaumont. Papa makes his bow to the Countess and sidles off incontinent to the sanctum of the Earl. I have no doubt he is at this moment smoking a cigar and discoursing learnedly on the virtues of the Earl’s very particular and precious Madeira to which my lord, they say, is indebted for his very particular and precious gout. It’s a mercy if the wine is so very particular and precious, or I should have papa prostrate with the gout, and from all accounts that would be as bad for me as for him. Deprived of my natural protector I rely, of course, on a certain cavalier from Yorkshire, and, lo! he, too, has vanished, spirited away by Lord Lindsay to his own secret cave, there to demolish institutions, or was it only reputations?”

“As I was being spirited away I caught a vision of a radiant being threading the mazes of the Lancers on the arm of a dashing son of Mars, and looking in need neither of protection nor consolation.”

“I am a woman and therefore can dissemble, Mr. Beaumont; but see, the sets are filling.”

“Do you really want to dance every dance? See how brightly the moon shines above the trees, and the air is still and warm without. Will you not show me the view from the Terrace. It must be lovely at this hour, stretched beneath the harvest moon.”

“Papa will miss me should he tear himself away from the Earl and the Madeira.”

“He will miss me, too, and know you are in safe keeping.”

“H’m, perhaps. Well, it is hot within.”

“Adjust my wrap, so. Now, your arm, and you shall see as sweet a vista as ever eyes gazed upon—the Axholme winding through the shorn fields with the moon upon its bosom.”

In silence, side by side, they drank into their souls the solemn beauty of the darkling scene. The music of the instruments floated through the casement and fell with mellowed cadence on their ears. An owl hooted from the ivy that clung about the ancient towers; the river beneath them coiled sinuously almost at the Castle base, and the full moon with harvest beam played upon the rich treasures of the ripened grain.

“We have nothing to equal this in my part of the country. ’Tis an idyll. It breathes the spirit of peace, the gospel of content. Sure everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”

“That’s the first Christian sentiment I have ever heard you utter, sir.”

“Miss St. Clair,” said Edward very gravely, “I had a purpose in asking you to forego the dance and bear me company a while where I could say to you that of which my heart is full. And now I seek in vain for words to tell you what I would. Miss St. Clair, Eleanor, I have presumed to love you. How great is that presuming none can know so acutely as myself. But I love you. To-morrow I must return to Yorkshire and I could not go, my love untold. Perhaps I ought to have spoken first to the Archdeacon, to your father; but it is not so we woo in my class. I can offer you nothing but my love to make my suit more pleasing in your ears. Unless your own heart, fair Eleanor, should be my mediator, I must sue as one without hope. Say, Eleanor, that I do not speak too presumptuously, can I hope the love I offer you, the life I would dedicate to you are not spurned as worthless and unfit.”

“Not spurned, Mr. Beaumont—surely not spurned!” said Eleanor, in a voice so low, ’twas scarce a whisper.

“I will not win you, Eleanor, by false pretences. Though my profession is an honourable one, and my social position respectable, it does not equal yours. I number no Earls and no Countesses among my friends, and the great mansions do not receive me as a guest. But I am young, the world is all before me, and for your sweet sake I feel I could greatly dare and perhaps greatly do. Give me your glove, Eleanor, to wear in the fray and it shall not be soiled in the dust of the lists.”

“I do not fear, Mr. Beaumont, nay, let me say I do not tremble, Edward, lest you should lack courage and high endeavour. ’Tis for myself I tremble. I had looked to spend my life, if not by my father’s side, at least near him. I had schooled myself to anticipate without other yearnings the serene uneventful round of a village life. But you have touched my soul to fiercer longings, you have opened my eyes to a wider vision. I do not fear poverty, and there can be no meanness in the life that contents you. But it is all so strange, so unreal, you know me so little. You lure me to a nobler and a grander life, and I dread lest the past of my upbringing may fetter my limbs and keep my feet from those giddier heights you would tread.”

“If you can love me, Eleanor, as I love you, your soul will grow into my own. We shall have one heart, one hope, one life. Say, oh! Eleanor, can such bliss be mine!” He stole his arm round her waist, the proud head drooped upon his shoulder, and upon the lips that breathed “I love you true!” he pressed the kindling kiss.

It was only with a qualified satisfaction that Archdeacon St. Clair received Edward’s formal proposal for his daughter’s hand.

“I had other views for her, Beaumont, other views. And I have had them so long that they seem part of my life, part of the natural order of things. Everything was going just as I wished till—till you came. Eleanor would make an ideal chatelaine, and I had hoped to see her established almost at my Vicarage gates.”

“At Thoresby Manor in effect?”

“Well, yes. I’ve no doubt the Squire took the thing as settled.”

“It doesn’t do, Archdeacon, to take a woman’s hand for granted. I haven’t much experience of the sex, but I fancy a lady does not care to be regarded as to be had for the asking. A woman likes to be wooed before she is won.”

“Well, it seems you have both wooed and won. There’s one comfort, I shan’t have to explain all about those confounded Skerne Iron Works in which Eleanor’s fortune is invested. You’ll have to take it in shares instead of cash.”

“I want neither the shares nor the cash. I want Eleanor.”

“I don’t see it’s much use coming to me now. Eleanor’s her own mistress. Well, Beaumont, you know I like you. Of course, I think your opinions are horrid, but you’ll wear out of them, just as young men of poetical fancies wear out of long hair and Byron collars. But, frankly, and though it’s a nasty thing to say to a fellow in my own house, I aspired higher for my only daughter than a provincial attorney.”

Edward winced and flushed.

“A provincial attorney may rise to the Woolsack, Archdeacon St. Clair. He is not more remote from it than a curate from a mitre.”

“Now, you’re huffed, and I don’t wish you to be. You may thank your stars you haven’t Eleanor’s mother to deal with instead of me. You’d have heard a great deal about her grandfather, the Earl. I know I did.”

“Well, he’s dead and buried now, Archdeacon.”

“All the same, I am ambitious for my child. I should not like to think of her settling down to the somewhat vulgar mediocrity of your manufacturing middle-classes. And, what’s more, Beaumont, Eleanor won’t like it. Depend on it. She will not like your bejewelled dames sprung from the loom, with good hearts, maybe, and excellent principles, but lax notions about the letter H. She may not think so now. No doubt she’ll think that for life and eternity you will be all in all. But it won’t do. She’ll miss the kind of society she has been used to, and I don’t think she’s the sort of girl to find her compensation in the nursery and household idolatry. You must go into Parliament, Beaumont. With your ability you can count on a Junior Lordship, at least. That is, if you shred some of your impracticabilities and vote the party ticket, as I think they phrase it in America. And, of course, you’ll do that.”

“I have thought of Parliament, sir, but as a remote possibility. Something to crown my days, not to begin them on. But I should not run well in official harness.”

“Oh, we won’t insist on that. After all, an M.P.’s an M.P., if he’s but a Radical member. I don’t like that Labouchere, though he’s an amusing fellow, and of good family, too. Well, go into Parliament, and then come to me for my blessing.”

“And meanwhile, sir?”

“Meanwhile? meanwhile? Why, if Eleanor St. Clair has said she will have you, have you she will, and I don’t and won’t withhold my consent from your engagement. But I ask you not to press for an early marriage. Win your spurs, Edward, and then we’ll set the wedding bells ringing. You’re both young, and waiting will try you and do you good. Now, admit I’m reasonable.”

“I don’t say you’re not. So hey! for Westminster and my bride.”

“What did papa say to you, Edward?” asked Eleanor when he sought her to tell her the issue of the dreaded interview. “Wasn’t he awfully cross?”

“Not a bit of it. I can bring a ring for the prettiest hand in the world the next time I come down. But I’m to get into Parliament before I bring the plain gold loop.”

Eleanor’s eyes sparkled.

“Did papa really say that?”

Edward nodded.

“Oh! won’t that be glorious! And I can go up to town for the season. Shall we be so very poor, Edward? Shall we have to live in a garret when we go to London, and shall I have to sit in the Ladies’ Gallery in a print frock whilst you make your maiden speech in fustian.”

“Not so bad as that, Eleanor mine. But I’m not in yet. Can you wait; will you wait?”

“Wait, you know I will wait, sir. Besides, we shan’t have to wait long. You’re sure to be elected as soon as you try. I wish there was an election to-morrow. I’ll canvas for you, Edward!”

“And bribe the electors as the Duchess bribed for Fox?”

“Are Yorkshiremen very fond of kisses, sir?”

“What should you say?”

“Well, yes. Pretty fair. There, that will do. Oh! I am so happy. Edward Beaumont, M.P. You’ll be Sir Edward in no time and a Peer before your first twinge of the gout.”

“They don’t make Peers of men whose greatest worldly wealth is a beautiful wife. At least, they don’t now-a-days.”

“Of course, I’m joking, Edward. Isn’t papa thoughtful? I don’t suppose you’d have thought of it yourself.”

“I don’t suppose I should,” conceded Edward. “I thought only of you.”

CHAPTER VI.

Dulce est desipere in loco—a Latin tag that assures us we may on occasions pleasantly unbend. Edward Beaumont, as we have seen, was dreaming love’s young dream, than which we are all convinced there is nothing sweeter in this brief life of ours, and seeing visions of a glorious future rounded by the woolsack, and I know not what other suggestions of a lively imagination. Sam Storth, the partner whom he was fool enough to at the same time trust implicitly and regard with a sort of good-humoured contempt, was essaying the gentle art, desipere in loco, after a fashion of his own, in a word, combining business with pleasure. The Long Vacation, beloved of lawyers of ample means, bemoaned by those members of the junior bar to whom briefs—briefs lightly “marked” at that—are as angels’ visits, few and far between, was now dragging its weary course—and Mr. Storth had time enough and to spare on his hands. He would have liked to don that much-prized shooting-jacket and those knickerbockers that so fittingly displayed a calf whose proportions Sam surveyed with a proper pride, and to which he rightly conceived the costume of the courts failed to do adequate justice. But here was he doomed to the treadmill, whilst his partner dangled at the petticoats of an Archdeacon’s daughter, and had the confounded impudence to stretch his legs under an earl’s mahogany.

“There’s Beaumont,” the irate junior partner thus unburthened himself, “doing the la-di-da in baronial halls, whilst I’m expected to moil and toil trying to find work for a set of idle clerks in the deadest season of the legal year. How Beaumont, with the principles he professes can cheek to make himself so very much at home, as I’m sure from his letters he has done, in gremio ecclesiae, in the very bosom of the Church, or, what is more scandalous still, of the Church’s daughter, passes my comprehension. But I suppose Beaumont’s not such a fool as a fellow’d take him to be by his talk. These Radicals are all alike. They rail against aristocrats, but give me a Radical for kow-towing to a duke; they gibe at the Church as by law established, but trust ’em to be uncommon deferential to a bishop; they declaim against pensions and annuities, but wouldn’t they just like a soft job themselves. Oh, no, I don’t think. There’s Beaumont, whose grandfather, I verily believe, used to wear clogs and a blue smock, and take his twopenny-ha’penny pieces to market on a donkey’s back, quaffing the vintages of Burgundy in the baronial halls aforesaid, whilst I, forsooth, whose father was a——”

“Was a what?” queried the fair damsel to whom Master Sam had opened the floodgates of his eloquence.

“Well, he wasn’t a damned poverty-knocker anyway,” said Charles hurriedly; “whilst I, as I was saying, must content myself with a tankard of bitter in a——”

“In a what, sir?” asked the lady, tartly.

“In a place that I much refer to baronial halls,” quoth Sam gallantly.

The place so honoured was the snug of the Royal Albert in Huddersfield, and the lady to whom Mr. Storth was confiding his grievances was Miss Amelia Wrigley, the very comely daughter of the landlord of that old-established hostelry, a lady not only well-dowered by Nature with a good figure, a pleasing face, and a sprightly wit, but reputed to be likely in the years to come to be well-dowered by the worthy but gouty sire, whose ales and liquors Mr. Storth so vastly appreciated.

Now, Miss Amelia Wrigley was not only of a good figure, a pleasing face, and a sprightly wit, and with those promising prospects that are a mighty agreeable adjunct to personal charms; she was also fully aware of her own value. She knew to the decimal of an inch how far it was prudent to permit the thirsty youths who frequented the Royal Albert Hotel to go in their amorous advances. Of course, she must not be too frigid, and there were occasions when it was politic to be diplomatically hard of hearing. The ingenious Hebe who ministers to the pleasures of manufacturers, flushed by the frequent “friendly glasses” inseparable from the conduct of business on market-day, must affect not to hear many an innuendo that crapulous youth seems to think he may safely utter in the presence of a barmaid, though he would soundly trounce the fellow who should utter the like in the hearing of his sister in the domestic drawing-room. Poor Hebe’s face may glow with outraged modesty, her eyes may flash her indignation and resentment, but business requires that she should smile and smirk and say smooth things. Miss Amelia Wrigley was declared by many a young buck of Huddersfield to be “too stand-offish” for his taste, which required that a girl should be able “to give a joke and take a joke, don’t you know”; though the kind of joke required by this predilection to be given and taken was not defined with that precision beloved of the mathematician. But it may be put down to Mr. Sam Storth’s credit that this stand-offishness of the fair Amelia was very far from diminishing that lady’s attractiveness in his eyes.

“I like a larky girl as well as any man,” he confided to his partner, “and when I’m in for fun I don’t want to have to do with a condemned iceberg; but fun’s one thing and matrimony’s another and don’t you forget it. And when I place a lady at the head of my mahogany, I don’t want to think that every doddering idiot in Huddersfield that can sport a flash ring and chain has blown a cloud of cigarette smoke in her face and drawled out ‘Another special, Millie, my angel, and a smile with it.’ You don’t ‘Millie’ Amelia Wrigley, I can tell you.”

From which profound observation it may be inferred that in the conversation of which we have heard but a part, and of which, by your leave, good reader, we will take the liberty to hear more, Mr. Sam Storth could not boast of that self-assurance and complacency that usually marked his intercourse with the ladies he honoured with his acquaintance. In some mysterious way the talk had drifted, as talk between a young man and maid will drift, to the perilous subject of liking, of love, of the choice of a lover and so forth.

“I used to think I wasn’t a marrying man, Miss Amelia—I may call you that mayn’t I?—Miss Wrigley’s so formal, so cold, between friends, don’t you think?—not a marrying man by a long chalk. Seen so much billing and cooing in my time, and then a chain that can’t very well be broken with a cat at one end of it and a dog at the other. I always draw the line at that particular service in the Prayer Book that so appropriately begins with “dearly beloved” and ends with “amazement! But”—with a sigh that was intended to be sentimental, and a glance that was unmistakeably amorous—“but a man never knows his fate. How true it is that man proposes but God disposes.”

“Then man shouldn’t propose,” suggested the lady.

“Oh, do be serious, Miss Amelia, or may say I Amelia?”

“Certainly you may not say Amelia, Storth, at least not to me. Why should you?”

“Because, because oh! hang it Amelia, I mean Miss Amelia, you make it confounded difficult for a fellow. Jove! Isn’t it hot?”—and Mr. Storth mopped his troubled and moist brow with a vast bandana. “I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll have another pint of bitter, with a top on.”

Miss Wrigley rose, and, moving with stately ease to the pumps, drew a large tankard of the foaming beverage.

“I never knew such a man as you for beer, Mr. Storth.”

“Safer than whisky, my dear. I mean Miss Amelia; but I was saying——”

“Yes; you were saying.”

“Well, lately, ever since I came to know you in fact, I’ve been thinking of settling down. I’m not a sentimental young fool, as you know. This isn’t calf love, in fact, I never had any such tommyrot to bother me as calf-love. It’s the genuine article, warranted 18 carat and entered A1 at Lloyd’s. I’ve met my fate at last. A lady, young, and yet not too young; I do hate your simpering schoolgirl-misses, just out of short frocks, and long what-do-you-call-’ems, with the crochet frills on; tall, a good figure, handsome, of good intelligence and education and manners—by Jove, the manners of a duchess.”

“Oh! so you’ve met such a lady at last, have you, Mr. Storth, and deigned to approve of her figure, face, mind, and manners, and all.”

“Why, you know I have, Amelia. Ain’t I telling you so?”

“Meaning me, I suppose?” queried the lady, with much composure.

“Why, of course I mean you. You don’t think I’m such a confounded ass as to sit here half the afternoon talking about another girl. I may be ten or twenty different kinds of fool, but I’m not such a fool as all that comes to. Of course I mean you.”

“I’m sure I’m vastly obliged to you,” commented the lady. “You’ve assured me, somewhat obliquely, to be sure, that I’ve a fine figure, a passable face, an intelligent mind, and the manners of a duchess, I think you were so flattering as to observe; and you’ve also assured me, also somewhat obliquely, but ’twill pass, that I’m your fate. You’ve said nothing, by the way, about my heart, Mr. Storth, nor, now I come to think of it, unless very, very obliquely, about your own.”

“Oh! that’s of course,” declared Sam, with considerable vigour.

“Exactly, that’s, as you say, of course. So I’ve a good figure, a fair face, an intelligent mind, the manners of a duchess. I never met a duchess, but I presume the comparison is meant as complimentary; all these, and, to boot, a heart that’s, as you say, of course. Now, pray, Mr. Storth, what do you offer in exchange for all this?”

“What do I offer? I? Why, surely you can’t misunderstand me, you cannot fail to know that all this time I’ve been offering MYSELF!”

“I see ‘myself,’ in large capitals, I suppose.” Sam Storth looked, as he doubtless felt, somewhat nonplussed by this reception of what he assured himself was an uncommonly handsome offer.

“Yourself!” continued the object of his well-regulated affections; “h’m, yourself. That’s so comprehensive as to be a trifling vague. You were good enough to enter into detailed particulars, quite a bill of quantities, or particular invoice of what should be included in the self, the other self besides yourself, on which you would deign to lavish the treasures of your heart. Cannot you be a little more precise as to what is included in YOURSELF? What’s to be the quid pro quo for my good figure, my fair face, my excellent understanding and my manners of a duchess? Is it to be par example your good figure?”

Now, it has been said that Mr. Storth, however excellent a lawyer, was no Adonis.

He winced and sate silent.

“Your fair face?”

Again Mr. Storth winced and found no words.

“Your excellent understanding? Your manners? I suppose they should be ducal to match mine?”

“Oh, hang it all, Miss Wrigley! I think you’re piling it on a bit too thick. I don’t set up for a beauty, though I’ve had my successes,” Sam added, in parenthesis.

“So I understand. In the coulisses of the music-hall.”

“And I don’t set up for a saint. But that’s all over now. But you’ve beauty and goodness enough for the pair of us, and if I’m neither an Adonis nor a saint I’m not generally looked upon as a fool. I’m a gentleman by profession, I’ve a good business, and I’m making enough to keep a wife, and if that isn’t good enough, why, I can’t help it, and there’s an end on’t.”

“Ah! now you’re talking sense. You’re making, you say, a good income. But as what? As the junior partner of Mr. Edward Beaumont; the man who does the leavings of his work, takes the cases he doesn’t think important enough to attend to himself, and does the drudgery he thinks beneath his high and mightiness.”

“Oh, damn Edward Beaumont!” broke in Storth, hotly.

“With all the pleasure in life,” pursued the lady serenely, “though perhaps it isn’t quite in harmony with ducal manners to say so in the presence of a lady. But that’s the position you offer me—the wife of a junior partner, whose senior is, I understand, the guest of an Archdeacon, and is, you imagine, basking in the smiles of the Archdeacon’s daughter. I suppose I should be expected to take up the role of a junior partner’s wife, to receive an occasional invitation to dinner when no one else in particular was invited, to be on visiting terms with the managing clerk and his lady, and to be humbly thankful when my partner’s wife acknowledged me in New Street. No thank you, Mr. Storth, it isn’t good enough.”

“Is that your final word?” asked Storth, savagely.

“No, it isn’t, and you needn’t glare at me like that. I’m not in the witness box, and, if I were, I shouldn’t be afraid of you. It isn’t my final word. If you want me you must win me.”

“How?” interjected Sam, eagerly.

“Only show me how.”

“Cease to be a junior partner, and if, in doing so, you humble your Mr. Edward Beaumont to the dust, I shall be none the less pleased on that account. Make a position that is your own. I know you’ve brains. Perhaps not of the highest order, but still good enough for the work you have to do. Use them to lift you up from the shadow by which you are now obscured, the shadow of another man’s personality. And then come to me. And, meanwhile, don’t forget what I said about your precious Mr. Edward Beaumont.”

“Then it’s a promise, Amelia?” asked Storth eagerly, his face lit up with the joy of triumph.”

“It’s what I think you lawyers would call a conditional promise. You keep your part of the bargain, Sam, and I’ll keep mine. There, that’ll do. I’m not fond of those demonstrations, and I don’t like the smell of beer. You’ll have to take to claret—some day.”

“And that day isn’t far off, you bet, Amelia. I’m not too fond of Mr. Edward Beaumont, as you call him, myself; and I’ll be no more sorry than yourself to see my lord taught a lesson he badly needs. Well what is it, Ainley?”—this to one of the clerks of his firm who was heard inquiring if Mr. Storth was about.

“Mr. Schofield would like to see you, sir.”

“Pat as the heft to the blade,” exclaimed Storth. “I’ll tell you some day what I mean,” he added, as he hastily drained his pewter, wiped his lips and nodded his adieus to Miss Wrigley.

Mr. William Schofield, the client whom Mr. Storth found nervously awaiting him, was a man of some sixty years of age, of middle stature, with hard, one might say, harsh features, his face clean shaven save for a ragged, grizzled fringe of hair that ran down the sides of the cheeks and under the chin, leaving unadorned the close lips, and exposed the few yellow front teeth advancing years had left; eyes bright, keen and greedy. Mr. Schofield had been, as he would have told you with pride, a hard worker all his life. He had known the hardships in his youth of the unreformed, uncoerced Factory System. As a boy, not yet in his teens, he had been a “billy piecener,” walking miles to the mill in all sorts of weather, in winter time long before sunrise, he had worked his fourteen and fifteen hours a day for a beggarly wage of a few shillings weekly, subsisting for the most part on water porridge, which he often had to eat cold. What education he had he had picked up in the Sunday School attached to the Golcar Baptist Chapel. There he had learned to read, to write, and to “sum,” so that by the aid of a ready-reckoner he could make out an invoice.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his early disadvantages he had prospered. He had by the time he was forty years old become a small lindsey manufacturer. He worked hard six days a week, and he could scarce be said to rest on the seventh, for he was a deacon of the chapel in whose Sunday school he had learned the rudiments. He had worked hard and he had lived hard, denying himself almost necessary food and fuel and clothing, “clamming,” so it was said by the envious, himself and his wife, that he might put more and more of his earnings into his business. He had no pleasures, unless the hearing of the non-elect vigorously damned every Sunday by a Predestinarian preacher be a pleasure, and excepting always that: great and all-sufficing joy of adding shilling by shilling to his store. He had no children, and when he reflected that unless he left his money to the chapel it should in the natural course go to a spendthrift nephew he often consoled himself by the thought that the nephew could not have more pleasure in dissipating his patrimony than the uncle had in hoarding it. He cared neither for literature nor arts. He never read anything but the Bible, the Baptist Magazine, and the Leeds Mercury. He called himself a Liberal, but his Liberalism was not based so much on a desire for the betterment of the condition of the many as upon resentment of the privileges of the few. And Edward Beaumont was his solicitor, as Edward Beaumont’s father before him had been.

“Howd’ye do, Mr. Schofield? Fine day, isn’t it? Glad to see you looking so fit, ’pon my word you look younger every time you give us a call.” It was one of Mr. Sam Storth’s most cherished maxims that politeness—to the people to whom it is worth while to be polite—costs nothing.

“Well, I’m nobbut so-so, Mr. Storth, nobbut so-so, a plaguy lot o’ rheumatiz these days, but aw reckon aw mun expect to feel th’ years creepin ower me, tho aw’m nobbut a lad yet in a manner o’ speakin’, that is, wheer some come; but it wer’ Mr. Beaumont aw wer’ wantin’ to see. Aw reckon yo’n know nowt abaat that bit o’ brass o’ mine, if yo can call a matter o’ three thousand paand a bit o’ brass at Edward’s father ligged aat at interest for me. I’d better wait and see hissen.”

“But Mr. Beaumont’s away, down in Lincolnshire, and I can’t quite say when he’ll be back. Perhaps you can tell me what it is you want to know and I may be able to give you the information you require. Let me see, you’re the mortgagee of Midgley’s mill, aren’t you?”

“Aye, that’s me. Yo’ see, it’s abaat ten yer sin’ aw, put th’ brass aat. It were i’ Edward’s father’s time an’ he made th’ writins for me. It wer’ a seet o’ eggs to put i’ one basket—three thaasand paand, awmost th’ savin’s o’ my lifetime—but Midgley were doin’ well then an’ th’ rate o’ interest, five per cent., were temptin’. But aw’d never ony bother abaat th’ interest till just abaat th’ time th’ owd man, tho’ he woren’t so owd to be sure, Edward’s father aw mean, took an’, died, and Edward stepped into his shoin. That were afore yo’ came to th’ office, so happen yo’ won’t know th’ ins an’ th’ outs on it. Then owd Midgley went dahn th’ slot, banked tha’ knows. Awst nivver forget that market-day, when th’ news came to th’ market. Aw’ were eitin’ a fourpenny plate o’ meat pie at Morton’s, when somebody axed me if aw’d heerd owd Tommy Midgley had done a bank. It welly choked me, an’ aw’d to struggle hard to finish th’ pie, but aw couldn’t fashion to put it i’ mi pocket-hanker. Aw come up straight to see Mr. Edward, an’ he made nowt but fun o’ me. He axed me if aw’d forgotten th’ mortgage. As aw’m a miserable sinner it had clean slipped my mind. He tried to sell th’ mill under th’ mortgage, but th’ highest bid wouldn’t have paid me off. Trade were very bad just then, an’ folk failin’ reet an’ left. Midgley’s mill were just a white elephant. But Mr. Edward came out like a gentleman an’ he said as how his father had advised th’ loan he’d take th’ responsibility on his showders till things mended. An’ aw’ve had my cheque reg’lar ivery half-year ever sin for th’ interest less th’ income-tax.”