Front matter (continued 3)

“Ah! I see,” said Storth; “this is all new to me. You see this was, as you say, before I came into the office, and it appears to have been a private arrangement between you and Mr. Beaumont. A merely verbal arrangement, I understand. You’ve only Mr. Beaumont’s word.”

“That’s all. It’s good enough, isn’t it?”

“Oh, quite so. But we’re all mortal, you know, and I like black and white myself in business. Who’s running the mill now?”

“Aw couldn’t reetly say for sure. But aw yer it’s let off, or part on it is, shoose ha’, i’ room an’ power. Aw nivver bothered my yed abaat it, as long as th’ interest cam’ to hand. But it’s a week o’er due, an’ aw’ve been expectin’ it by ivery post, so aw thowt aw’d better call in an’ see abaat it. Yo’ won’t charge me owt for that, will yo’?” he asked, as a sudden fear seized him.

“No, no, by no means—mortgagor’s costs. Make your mind easy. I’ve no doubt it will be all right when Mr. Beaumont returns. Still…,” and Mr. Storth fingered the seal on his watch-chain, and puckered his brow and pursed his lips and slowly shook his head.

“Still, what?” asked Mr. Schofield, sharply. “There’s nowt wrong, is there?”

“Wrong? No, no, of course not, at least…. well, well. No writing, you say, only Mr. Beaumont’s word; and, of course, Mr. Beaumont’s the soul of honour. You know what the poet says: “So are we all, all honourable men.” Still, three thousand pounds is a tidy bit.”

“Yo’d ’ave thowt so if yo’d had to addle it an’ nip an’ scrat for it same as I had.”

“A very tidy bit. You have the deeds, of course?”

“They’re at the bank.”

“You’ve overdrawn on them, I suppose.”

“Then you suppose wrang, young man, aw dunnot lend money at five per cent. to borrow brass fra’ the bank at six. That’s noan th’ way we mak’ money i’ Golcar. Th’ writin’s are nobbut theer for safety. Aw can fot ’em aat ony day aw like. What are yo’ axin’ for, if aw may mak’ so bowd?”

“I’m not only asking, Mr. Schofield, I’m thinking. You read the local papers, of course?”

“Aw see th’ Weekly Examiner ivery week. Me an’ a neighbour join at it. What for?”

“Well, of course, you’ve read any time this last few weeks that there’s great unrest in the industrial world. There was the strike at Martin’s, of Lindley, not so long ago; there’s just been trouble at Taylor and Littlewood’s, at Newsome, and I know for a fact that the textile workers have formed a very strong and formidable union that embraces not only Huddersfield, but the valleys of the Colne and the Holme. In fact, Mr. Beaumont was fool enough to draw up the rules of the union and make no charge.”

“That’s more nor he’d do for me, aw rekon. What sud he do that for?”

“Oh, you know, he’s all for the rights of labour.”

“Rights o’ fiddlesticks. What’s a man want more nor plenty o’ wark an’ overtime? But what’s all this to do wi’ my brass?”

“Not much, perhaps. Only, you see, I don’t think, from what I saw of that exceedingly amiable gentleman, Albert Clough, the weavers’ secretary, when he came to consult Beaumont about the draft of the new rules—a cut-throat lace, if I ever saw one—that this new union’s going to be idle very long.”

“Well, what’s that to me?”

“Nothing—perhaps; perhaps a great deal; perhaps a matter of that tidy little bit of a three thousand pounds of yours.”

Mr. Schofield’s face sicklied over with the pale cast of a mortal fear. His hands became cold and clammy, his heart sank within him.

“Good God! how can that be? Isn’t there th’ writin’s?”

“Oh, don’t alarm yourself unnecessarily, Mr. Schofield. It may be all right. The late Mr. Beaumont was a very cautious man, I’ve always understood. Still, as you say, there wasn’t a very spirited bidding when the mill was put up before, and if there should be a general strike, or what comes to much the same thing in the long run, a general lockout, mill property will be a drug on the market.”

“Still, aw’ve Mr. Beaumont’s word.”

Mr. Storth shrugged his shoulders.

“Exactly. Well, Mr. Beaumont’s away. Lord only knows when he’ll be back. It’s the Long Vacation, you know. Meanwhile, tho’ it’s very irregular, I’ll let you have my own cheque, on my private account, for the interest. Doubtless Beaumont will see me all right. All the same, I’m glad my little bit isn’t out on mill property and I’ll take precious good care it never is. Of course, it was all right to have your money out in a good round sum when you were up to your eyes in business, and hadn’t time to look after things. But if I were a man of your years, with a fair amount of leisure and settled in my native village, do you know the kind of investment I should fancy?”

“Let’s be knowing, sir, if yo’ don’t mind.”

“I’d lend a hundred here and a hundred there on good cottage property—property that I could walk past every day of my life. I should have the satisfaction of knowing I’d helped some hard-working man to become the owner of his own dwelling.”

“Wi’ me on th’ top of it.”

“Exactly, with you on the top of it, as a sort of ballast; and if you like to devote your retired leisure to serving your native village on the Local Board, or on the Board of Guardians, why you could serve your own interests at the same time by keeping the rates down . . . .”

“Them poor rates is a scandal,” interposed Mr. Schofield with conviction.

“Keeping the rates down and consequently the value of property up; and with three thousand pounds out in small sums take it you’ve thirty voters at least you can rely on any time you like to put up for office.”

“Aw winnot say but aw had thowt o’ th’ Local Board, an’ happen’ th’ Guardians. But nob’dy’s axed me to stand.”

Mr. Storth smiled indulgently.

“Oh, that’s easily managed when the time comes. Let me see, what’s the formula? ‘Yielding to the urgent solicitations of a large and influential body of my fellow townsmen I have consented to allow myself to be nominated as a candidate for your suffrages at the forthcoming election. If elected, etc.’ But we’re jumping a little before we get to the stile, eh? You haven’t got these thirty nice snug mortgages yet, have you?”

“No; but aw sooin can have. Just yo’ call in that brass i’ double quick time.”

“No need to be precipitate. I’ll speak to Mr. Beaumont about it when he returns. All the same, there’s no need to let the grass grow under your feet. If you’ll make yourself comfortable with a newspaper in the waiting-room for half-an-hour, I’ll draw up the formal notice of withdrawal of the money—we shall have sufficient particulars in the Deed Book, I’ve no doubt, and you can sign it, leaving the date open; and if Mr. Beaumont concurs in my view, the notice can go without troubling you again.”

But a few days after the consultation, at which we have been privileged to assist, Edward Beaumont returned to Yorkshire and the duties there awaiting him.

“Morning, Sam,” he exclaimed, as he grasped his partner’s chubby hand. “I’m a bit overdue, I fear. The fact is, I didn’t come straight on from Lincolnshire. I had to take a run up to town.”

“Did you go to see Russell about those Iron Works, those blasted Blasting Works, as I’ve been tempted to call them. It’ll end in Chancery, I suppose.”

“Not if I can help it; and I didn’t go to town to see Russell.” Now, Mr. Russell, of Bedford Row, was the London agent of the firm of Beaumont, Son, and Storth. “You’ll never guess whom I went to see, and why. The fact is, I put in a good bit of time at the Reform Club.”

“Well, I don’t doubt they do you very well at the Reform Club. Never been beyond its august portals myself, but on general principles I should argue a cordon bleu for a chef and a cellar second only to an Emperor’s. Your true reformer who recommends vegetarianism and total abstinence, high thinking and low feeding to the general, takes uncommon good care to have the best of everything for himself.”

“Well, I only sampled a cigar and a whiskey and soda. Leatham took me to interview the Junior Whip.”

Now Mr. Leatham was the Liberal member for Huddersfield.

“And what the deuce did you want with the Liberal Whip, if I may make so free?”

“Why, what the deuce, to borrow your phrase, do people want with Liberal Whips?”

“Can’t say. No use for ’em myself, and I should have thought you hadn’t. But I can make a shrewd guess what the Junior Liberal Whip wanted with Mr. Edward Beaumont, and that’s a subscription to the party fund. Well, go ahead with your tale.”

“Well, it seems I was just the sort of man the party’s looking for. There’s to be a vacancy soon in one of the West Staffordshire Divisions—Staveley Hill’s the sitting member, a blue of the blues, you know—and the party our party, want a man well up on the Land Question to fight the seat. Now, I do rather fancy myself on the Land Question.”

“I don’t think you know a turnip from a mangel wurzel, if that’s what you call being well up on the Land Question.”

“Don’t be a fool, Sam. You know that’s nothing to do with the question. And the long and short of it is I’ve promised to step into the breach, and uncommon glad of the chance, too. Why, man, it’s an honour to be permitted to carry the banner of Land Reform right up to the entrenchments of feudalism.”

“Oh, you can keep that sort of talk for the free and independent. Have you counted the cost? There hasn’t been a Liberal member for a county constituency in the whole length and breadth of Staffordshire since the days of Simon de Montfort, I imagine. The Southern Division’s an awfully scattered one and almost purely agricultural.”

“There’s the mining district right in the heart of it,” broke in Beaumont.

“True; and the miners haven’t a vote. They’ll crowd round your meetings, and carry you shoulder high, shout themselves harse, and wring the hands off you in their grimy fists, and sing ‘See the conquering hero comes’ till you feel you can’t fail to head the poll. And when the polling day comes, where are they? No more use than a row of skittles. And while they’re roaring, your quiet comfortable farmer draws up in his gig from his quiet comfortable farm, has a quiet and comfortable glass at his favourite hostelry, and then quietly and comfortably pills you in the polling-booth. Do you think the farmer is such an insensate ass as to fall out with the vicar and the squire and his relations, just to oblige Mr. Edward Beaumont, charm he never so wisely?”

“Well, commend me to you for a Job’s comforter, Sam. It will be a hard fight, I know, but, as the Whip put it, it will give me a chance to show the stuff I’m made of, to win my spurs; and what can a man want more? Anyway, I’ve passed my word, and I’m off to Wolverhampton in next to no time to meet the election agent and arrange for a series of meetings all over the Division. And I want you to cut off for your holidays and come back as fit as a fiddle, for I expect during the next few months you’ll have to do more than your share of the office work.”

“Well, ‘who will to Cupar, maun to Cupar.’ Whom God wants to ruin, He first turns mad; and if ever a man was qualifying for a lunatic asylum, that man’s yourself, Beaumont. Don’t say I haven’t warned you. You’ll think of what I say someday or my name’s not Sam Storth. You’ll spend a lot of money.”…

“I don’t care if it costs every penny I have in the world.”

“You needn’t care. It will cost every penny you have in the world, and more to boot, unless you’ve stumbled across a gold mine in the fens.”

“Better than a gold mine, my boy. The grandest, divinest creature——”

“Exactly. I guessed there was a woman at the bottom of it. But for electioneering purposes give me the gold mine. Well, just run through these papers with me and then I’m off. My name’s Walker, and my address the Highlands for the next six weeks.”

At the door Storth turned, as if on an afterthought.

“Oh, by-the-bye, Beaumont, I had a man here the other day, a William Schofield, of Golcar. He’d got some maggot in his head about a mortgage, and was in mortal terror about some overdue interest. He told me the amount and I gave him my cheque for it. I suppose it was all right?”

“Quite right. If you’ll wait a moment I’ll write you a cheque for the money. It’s a private account, you know. I’d forgotten the interest was due. How quickly half-years slip away when you’ve money to pay at the end of them. I think I’ve had more bother about that loan of Schofield’s than all the rest of the business put together.”

“Ah! I didn’t quite get the hang of the matter from the old gentleman. But I sized him up to be just the sort to talk enough about his interest, if he didn’t get it, to shake the credit of the Bank of England, so I just, as I say, calmed him down with a piece of stamped paper with my name in the corner.”

“Well, I’d better tell you all about it. It seems he lent three thousand pounds to Midgley, of Almondbury, on the security of Plover Mill, and some adjacent cottages, in the mill-yard, I expect. That was in my father’s time; and the strange thing about it is I’ve never been able to find any valuer’s certificate as to the value of the property at the time of the loan, though from what I know of my father’s way of doing business I’m as certain there was one as I am that the sun’s in the heavens. To make matters worse, soon after my father’s death, poor old Midgley went smash and the mill has never been wholly occupied since, and the rents from the cottages hardly pay a clerk’s wages for collecting. However, I told Schofield I’d pay the interest myself, and so I must, I fear, for the sake of the dear old dad’s memory. It’s a bit of a pull though.”

“But what about the principal? Three thousand pounds isn’t exactly a flea-bite, and it would about kill Schofield to lose it.”

“I suppose I’ll have to take it on my own shoulders. I’ve always put off taking over the property, subject to the mortgage, though Midgley’s trustee is willing enough to transfer the equity to me. I hoped to get a good tenant, but things seem to go from bad to worse out Almondbury way. Still, the thing’s got to be done. They can’t go on in this slip-shod way. Just attend to the matter, Sam, when you come back. Put it on a business footing. I’ll take over the whole thing, lock, stock, and barrel, with Schofield’s mortgage on the top of it.”

“All right; I’ll see to it between now and next interest-day No hurry. I think you’re rather a fool though.”

“Well, you see, it wasn’t your father, Sam. If only that confounded valuer’s certificate would turn up; but that’s past praying for, I fear, and I don’t know who the valuer was and, what’s more, when I tried to find out, some time ago, by inquiring among the auctioneers and estate agents, nary a one of them had any recollection of making a valuation.”

“All right, Beaumont, I’ll put things to ship-shape. Well, I shan’t see you again before I start, so ta-ta. Hope biz. will brighten up before I come back. It’s been as dull as ditch-water this month back.”

Mr. Storth returned to his own room and began to set to rights, as he styled it, the heterogeneous mass of papers that accumulate about a busy lawyer’s desk and pigeon-holes and drawers. He was routing out the contents of a deep recess, lettered XYZ, a receptacle apparently for odds and ends of documents that could find no other home, reading the endorsements, tearing up some, transferring others to their appropriate resting-place, when he chanced upon a document bearing no endorsement—an omission not a little irritating to the methodic mind.

“If I knew the clerk who’s responsible for this I’d give him a piece of my mind,” muttered Mr. Storth, vindictively, as he opened the folded paper and set about ascertaining its nature, with a view to duly marking its date and character upon its back. He read a few lines and then whistled softly.

“Well, I’m jiggered! The missing certificate! ‘Can recommend an advance of £3,000 (three thousand) to £3,500 (three thousand five hundred pounds).’ Now, what shall I do with this precious bit of paper? What a load the finding of this will take off Beaumont’s mind! I’ve a good mind to pop it in the fire. I know a young lady who would say that’s what I ought to do. Shall I? No; hanged if I play it as low as that, not even to pleasure Miss Amelia Wrigley.”

Mr. Storth was so absorbed in his own reflections that he did not hear a gentle tap at his room door, did not hear the door open, did not hear the deprecating cough by which the clerk who entered sought to attract his attention, and only when the clerk stood by his side, and had cast a quick glance at the document that engrossed his thoughts did he turn swiftly round in his chair.

“That you, Barnes. What the deuce do you mean stealing into my room like a confounded ghost? What do you want any way?” And Mr. Storth huddled up the papers he had taken from the pigeon-hole XYZ, the long lost, anxiously-searched certificate among them and thrust them into that receptacle.

And though, later, Mr. Storth searched high and low for the document, he found it not. It had again vanished.

And so had Mr. Barnes.

CHAPTER VII.

If any man prides himself on being the master and controller of his own destiny, if he plumes himself on his own achievements, saying in his heart: “My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth,” or this title, or this what you will, let him chasten his self-esteem by reviewing his own career, and observing how, not once nor twice but many times, it hath been over-ruled, shaped, fashioned, deflected, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill, by happenings in which he has had neither part nor parcel, in which it seemed little likely he would and could have no concern, yet which for him and all his future were as big with fate as if they had been specially designed by Providence for no other purpose than to humble or exalt him, to make or to mar him. Thus, whilst at this period we may safely conceive of Edward Beaumont as reflecting with some complacency on the enjoyment of a lucrative practice, anticipating the delights of a keen contest for a seat in Parliament, with visions belike of at least a junior lordship, and sweet imaginings of bridal veils and orange wreaths; it is none the less true that the doings of some half-dozen not over cultured millhands, whose very names were unknown to him, were fated to leave on his life a mark eternity itself would perchance not suffice to efface.

It is a wild night, and the wild and blustering month of March, 1883, and the New Street of Huddersfield is swept by a gale that comes tearing, roaring, wuthering down the Come Valley right from Standedge top; a wind laden with pelting rain that dashes into your face, blinds your eyes, and makes as though to rend the very garments from your back, whirl them sky high, and sport with them among the scurrying, glowering clouds. It is a night on which, to quote the quaint equivoque, it is good to have no home to go to, to be instead snugly seated in your own ingle-nook, by a roaring fire, with slippered feet on a thick, list rug, a pipe in your mouth, a book in your hand, the dog at your feet blinking his honest eyes at you, the cat purring peacefully its hymn of bliss, and the placens uxor, the sonsie wife, as she rocks in her chair opposite you, breathes a sigh of profound thankfulness that the day’s work is well-nigh done, that the bairns, God bless them, are snugly tucked in bed, and for ten peaceful hours will cease from troubling, and the weary mother may be at rest. It is a night on which the mind, reposeful after a day’s toil well done, and a day’s wage well won, would fain enjoy a peace undisturbed by thoughts of the morrow’s harrassings.

But in Huddersfield and in all the wildly beautiful district around, nor for master nor man, was there any hope that night of that ideal, beatific peace. The strike, the great Weavers’ Strike, as it came to be known, was well under weigh, and both masters and men had settled down with the grim resolve of the northern character to see which side could starve the other into submission. For, after all, with all the talk and all the writing about good trade and bad trade, about high profits and losses, about scales and rates of wages, after all the conferences and deputations and talk of arbitration and Boards of Conciliation, to a trial of brute strength, of sheer endurance, of staying power, not to a determination of which side was right and which was wrong, must the contest surely come.

It was a very pretty quarrel, as quarrels go, a quarrel to make the cynic hug himself in glee, a quarrel to make angels weep. The masters had agreed upon a new scale of wages to be adopted and enforced in every mill in the district, a scale that would determine not only the plus and minus of the employers’ balance-sheets, but that perhaps negligible affair, the plus or minus of thousands of humble homes for miles around. The masters declared, ore rotundo, with swelling voices and in good round phrase that the new scale of wages was not a reduction, but a readjustment; the weavers swore by all their gods that any readjustment the scale would effect would be a transference of so many weekly shillings from the earnings of each craftsman to the pockets of his master.

A question, surely, this, to be settled in three minutes by a penny ready reckoner, where and when Reason has sway. But in Huddersfield and in the villages converging therein Reason had unfurled her glittering wings and had fled affrighted from the scene of strife, to return only when Passion, and Hatred, and Ignorance, and all evil imaginings and utterings had wrought their fill of ill.

A pretty quarrel, in very sooth, a quarrel that should have shown the veriest idiot of a workingman of how little worth are political professions, nay, indeed, of how little worth are religious protestations when that sorest of sore points, the pocket, is touched. The weavers of Huddersfield and of the valleys hard by had, for years that stretched back almost beyond count, flocked in their thousands to shout at the hustings in the Square, or, in later days, to shout in their noble Town Hall for banker or manufacturer or merchant who came to them with glib, smooth speech, asseverating with tear-laden eyes that all they asked, to make them happy, was to spend and be spent in the workers’ cause. And now the lists are ranged for a grim conflict between Labour and Capital, and where are ye now oh, friends of the people? Where now is the Liberal merchant, where now the Radical manufacturer, where now your reforming councillors and aldermen who have risen to their paltry place and gimcrack power on the popular vote, where now the editors of facile pen who have been so fluent in their vows of fidelity to the people’s cause? All, all alike—Whig and Tory, Conservative, Liberal, and Radical stand in solid phalanx, confronting an abandoned, impassioned mob, conscious only of its wrongs and its betrayal. The men know the masters’ scale means robbery, but how shall they, unlettered, unskilled, with hands that can ply a shuttle but unused to pen, with brains to think and know and feel, with tongues little used to ordered speech, how shall they plead their cause?

Two men are seated this stormy March night in a retired room of the Albion public-house on the Buxton Road. The room is small, ill-ventilated, stuffy, its air laden with tobacco reek and the fumes of stale ale. They are Albert Clough, the Weavers’ Secretary, and Allen Rae, two men as different in character and temperament as the poles are wide asunder, but united in a common belief in the worker’s right to a fairer and a sweeter heritage.

Both were weavers, and both, therefore, were well aware of the effect likely to be produced by the masters’ proposed scale upon the earnings of themselves and their fellow-workmen. But there was little other resemblance between the two men. Rae was a man of no small natural ability, his forehead denoted intellectuality, his firm, close-set lips determination and self-control. Anyone accustomed to judge character by external indications would have no difficulty in pronouncing Rae to be of an essentially practical turn of mind; of no great ideals or enthusiasms; a safe guide rather than an impassioned leader. Clough, on the other hand, was as readily assessed, or, as his acquaintances would have phrased it, “sized up,” as a man of impulses, apt to allow his judgment to be warped by his passions and his prejudices. And of passions and prejudices he had his full share. He had read much, and the literature to which he was partial consisted, for the most part, of those books that exposed the iniquities of those in high places, men born and nurtured in the lap of luxury. He, at all events, never questioned the divine dictum as to the possibility of a rich man entering the kingdom of heaven. His whole attitude to the capitalist class, as embodied for him in the Masters’ Union, was determined by a consuming sense of the rank injustice of things, the gross iniquity that he and his fellows should be cursed rather than born into the world, foredoomed to moil and toil for a pittance to lead a hard life of endless work, with long hours and paltry pay, to live a dun, colourless existence, a life of carking care and ceaseless struggle, with the prospect at its close, of the Workhouse, unless he should be so happy as to drop at his loom; while other men, many of whom, he was very sure, were neither so clever, nor so well instructed as himself, were by the accident of birth or from positions their own hands and brains had not won, sheltered from the storms of life, had never known and would never know the pangs of hunger nor the hideous monotony of a life of mechanical toil in another’s service. There was not much talk of Socialism in those days; Socialism was vaguely supposed to be a milder form of Nihilism, having something to do with dynamite and secret societies. Had there been any Socialists in Huddersfield, Clough would have been in their midst; but his Socialism would have been based not so much upon a divine compassion for others as upon a fierce pity for himself.

“Have you read that leading article o’ Joe Woodhead in to-neet’s Rag?” it was thus impolitely he referred to the “Huddersfield Daily Examiner.”

Rae nodded.

“An’ this is th’ paper th’ working-men ha’ been fooils enough to call th’ friend o’ freedom. By gow, Allen, it ma’es me think what fooils we ’n bin.”

“I don’t quite see what else we could expect,” said Rae, quietly. “Yo’ musn’t forget that behind the editorial ‘we’ there is always a very human personality. Th’ editor o’ th’ ‘Examiner’s’ only human, and it’s only natural he’ll look at the present crisis in th’ trade of Huddersfield from a very different standpoint to you an’ me. Yo’ see, he started in life as a manufacturer hissen, an’ only drifted into journalism. He’s one of the middle-class hissen. He were born into it, he wedded into it, an’ aw should think all his friends are of it. Look how thick he is wi’ ‘Midget’ o’ Marsden, ’at they say’s done so much to make th’ ‘Examiner’ go in the Colne Valley. Yo’ can’t say but what both Mr. Woodhead an’ Mr. Robinson—that’s ‘Midget,’ you know—are good Liberals. They’re sound on questions of Church an’ State. But this strike isn’t a question of Church an’ State; it’s a question o’£ s. d.”

“It’s more nor that, Allen. It’s a question o’ th’ right o’ combination; th’ right o’ th’ men to have a say in fixin’ th’ rate o’ wages they’re willin’ to work for.”

“Well, it comes to £ s. d. in the end. The masters want to put their finished goods on the market at as little cost to themselves as they possibly can; the men want to get as much for producing the finished article as they possibly can. The only question is, can they starve us into accepting their price for our labour.”

“There’s one man they’ll never starve into swallowing this new scale. There’s another man off to America first.”

“That’s all very well for you, Albert, and may be for me, too. In fact, when this fight’s over, end choose which way it may, it’s more nor likely that’s th’ only course open for either on us. I don’t fancy there’ll be a loom for either you or me long in this town or hereabouts. We’re marked men, however others may fare. But we can’t all clear out to th’ States, an’ none o’ us can stand clammin’ long. We haven’t really felt th’ pinch yet. We’ve only had a month of it, and it’s just been a holiday for all o’ us. An’ th’ anxiety’s been on th’ masters’ side up to now, having to turn away orders because they couldn’t accept ’em running th’ risk o’ losing good customers it’s cost em happen years o’ fishing an’ a mint o’ money to cooper. That’ll hit us in the long run, but it hits them first. And, meantime, we’ve been all right. The strike pay’s been there to th’ minnit, an’ it’s just been a novel an’ delightful sensation to lie i’ bed as long as you like, to stroll about th’ streets, or sit by th’ fireside, or hang about th’ pubs, as too many of us do, an’ then to draw our strike pay without th’ trouble of addling it. But this can’t go on for ever. Th’ question is, how long will it last, Albert, how long will it last?”

“Well, as far as I’m concerned it’ll last as long as the Union has a meg to its back.”

“That won’t be long, as things are shaping. Yo’ see, if we’d only a third of the men out and two-third’s working for th’ ‘out’s’ to draw on we should be up another street. But th’ masters….”

“Curse ’em!” ejaculated Clough.

“Th’ masters soon saw that, an’ now yo’ may say were’re all out, an’ we’re like that German chap’s monkey you’ll have read on, sat afore th’ fire hilariously boiling its own tail for breakfast.”

“You’re nobbut a Job’s comforter, Allen. Don’t yo’ believe in th’ triumph o’ right over might, o’ principle over pelf?”

“I believe in facts, Albert, an’ facts stubborn things. Of course, there’s no hurry yet. As I said, th’ pinch hasn’t come yet. Wait till th’ co-op.’s an’ th’ small grocers ha’ put their foot down, an’ won’t let as much as a pound o’ oatmeal go out o’ th’ shop till it’s paid for; wait till th’ landlord begins to fetch th’ sticks for th’ rent; wait till the distress warrants are out for the borough rate an’ th’ poor rate; wait till th’ pop-shops are full an’ the houses are welly empty; wait till th’ strike fund’s don an’ th’ children are cryin’ for bread—what then Albert, what then?”

“There’s wealth enough all round for th’ taking, wealth we’n more right to nor them ’at’s gotten it.”

“That means the treadmill. No thank you, lad.”

“Oh! what’s th’ use o’ lookin’ forrard so far? Th’ masters ’ll weaken before th’ worst comes to th’ worst. I’m all for a policy o’ bluff; th’ weaker we get th’ bigger we mun talk.”

“That’s all right. But we must look forward to a time when it’ll do us good to have th’ public on our side, an’ th’ only way to get them is to show th’ people we’re right an’ th’ masters wrong. I don’t think myself that th’ people o’ England are going to see our Union stamped out if we’ve reason on our side—an’ I’m as sure o’ that as that’s a pint o’ ale you’ve got in front o’ you.”

“But it isn’t,” said Albert, “it wor, but awve supped it long sin. But how are we to get th’ public on our side? It’s easy talking. You see for yoursen th’ ‘Examiner’s’ none likely to take our side, an’ you may be certain sure th’ ‘Chronicle’ and th’ ‘Weekly News’ ’ll be worse. If we hold meetings there’ll be nobbut weavers theer, and that’s preachin’ to the converted w’ a vengeance. There’s only th’ pen left when th’ sword an’ th’ tongue are teed. An’ if it comes to writin’ there’s none o’ us fit to howd a candle to th’ masters, to say wowt o’ th’ allies they may have i’ th’ Press.”

“I’ve been wondering,” said Rae, slowly, “if Mr. Edward Beaumont….”

“The very man,” cried Clough, rising so excitedly that he upset his pewter; “th’ very man, or I’m sore mista’en. By gow, aw nivver thowt o’ him. If we can nobbut mak’ him see th’ same way as we see.”

“If,”, assented Rae. “But there’s no harm i’ trying.”

And thus it came about that long letters signed “Edward Beaumont” began to appear in one of the local papers, bearing upon the one topic that engrossed the thoughts and speech of nearly every man and woman in Huddersfield, and in the valleys converging on that town, be those men and women of what class, of what degree they might. For the Weavers’ Strike, as it was called, though strike it was not, if by a strike is meant a refusal to work for the wages current at its commencement, had assumed proportions so portentous that there was in all that great and populous district scarce a household that was not seriously affected by it. The combatants drawn up in conflict, of course; but not they alone. And yet they alone, and the children of their loins, were numbered by their thousands. But upon the textile industry of that great area depended dozens of auxiliary trades, and every trade, wholesale and retail, was hit and hit hard. All gloomed under this heavy pall except, at first, the publican, and he, for a few glad weeks, felt that the normal condition of every industry should be one of strike or lock-out; felt it so intensely that in the exuberance of his disinterested sympathy he placed upon his beer-stained tables hot luncheons of fried tripe with onions, and savoury dishes of liver and bacon. And as the men consumed these delicacies and quaffed their measures of “Timmy,” by which fond name the brew of a local firm was widely and appreciatively known, of what should they read, and of what should they talk but the great Strike, and, of course, the letters of Edward Beaumont. It is to be feared that these contributions to the dialectics of the great contest were more relished by the workers than by their employers. The letters took it for granted in the outset that the masters were sincere in their protestations that nothing was further from their thoughts, in insisting on the acceptance of the new scale, than the reduction of current wages. The writer declined to believe, with the men, that the masters’ insistence on this point was but a Machiavellian device for a considerable lowering of rates. The masters were, of course, honourable men, all honourable men, and they must know how the scale of their own devising would work out. But if the men were so obtuse that they could not see that a raising rather than a lowering at all events and certainly no lowering, would result; why not put the whole question to the arbitrament of one or two competent men conversant with the intricacies of the textile trade, men able to unravel the somewhat tangled and bewildering skein of the new scale—and let them say, aye or nay, would it be, as the weavers so passionately persisted, a grievous weekly diminution, not of their earnings, not of their work and output, but of the guerdon of their toil. Never in the whole history of industrial conflicts, the writer exclaimed, had there before been known a case of employers being driven to lock-out their men to dragoon them into accepting higher wages, or of men striking in resentment of the benefits their benevolent despots were bent upon thrusting into their unwilling hands.

And when the blue-smocked ones read these words they gaffawed over their cups; but the masters scowled and damned the writer as a meddling busy-body. The president of the Employers’ Association—the employers naturally, did not have a union, merely an Association, such virtue is there in a name, despite the poet’s dictum—Who chanced to be, not only a large manufacturer, but also a prominent Liberal, worshipful master of Beaumont’s Masonic Lodge, and a very desirable client to boot, called upon that gentleman at his office, and proceeded to give him a piece of his mind in language whose plainness left nothing to be desired.

“Look here, brother Beaumont, I should have thought by this time you’d learned which side your bread’s buttered on, and who spreads the butter. You know I’m a Liberal, as good a Liberal as you are yourself, if it comes to that; you know when there’s a fight to be fought my cheque’s always been ready, and not a little cheque at that; and you’re vastly mistaken if you think you’ve got a monopoly of zeal for the working-class. But what the deuce, man alive, do you want poking your finger into this pie for? Why, in the name of common sense, can’t you leave us and our men to fight this battle out between us?”

“Do you think it’s a fair fight, brother Tomlinson?”

“Fair. Why not?”

“Well, I’ll tell you why not, if my opinion’s worth anything. On your side you’ve got all the money, all the staying power, and all, or nearly all, the educated skill to put your case plausibly before the public. Now, what have these poor devils of weavers got? A few pounds of reserve in the Co-op. and the Savings Bank, a few sticks of furniture, and hands for which they can find no work to do, and so unused to wielding the pen to state their own claim that, with the best case in the world, if they had it, you’d have no difficulty in making it appear the worst. They’ve been to me, I admit it, everyone by this time knows they have. I’ve tried in every way I could to get at the merits of the dispute, and, to tell you frankly, I don’t believe, for a single minute, this is a question of wages at all!”

“Oh, indeed, and what is it?”

“I believe, in my heart of hearts, it’s neither more nor less than a deliberate attempt to smash and pulverise the Weavers’ Union. That, neither more nor less; and I think it’s a criminal shame that men like yourself, who call themselves Liberals and the friends of Labour, should be engaged in what is at bottom simply a conspiracy against Labour’s most precious and hard-won right—the right of combination.”

“Oh, stow that talk! it’s good enough for electioneering and the Town Hall platform. This is business, solid business, and business hasn’t room for bunkum. How would you like Albert Clough coming swaggering and hectoring into your office, and telling you you didn’t pay your clerks a proper wage?”

“I shouldn’t like anybody coming swaggering and hectoring into my office. I shouldn’t like Albert Clough and, perhaps you won’t mind my saying, I shouldn’t like Albert Cough’s employer.”

Mr. Tomlinson waived away the suggestion impatiently and continued:—

“Not merely saying you didn’t pay enough wage, demanding, when you told him you paid as much as you could see your way to pay, demanding in a truculent voice to see your ledgers and overhaul your pass-book, and wanting to know why you kept a carriage if you couldn’t afford better wages. D—n the man, he’ll be wanting to know what I have for dinner next, and what my wife gives for her bonnets and her gloves.”

Edward smiled. He knew Albert Clough and Albert’s ways. But he was not the man to make admissions that might be useful to his adversary and of no use to himself.

“Why, Tomlinson,” he said, “if it comes to that I’ve over a thousand men coming every day of the week into my office, not exactly hectoring and blustering, but in a manner that is more effective, though quieter, than any hectoring and blustering, and these thousand men and more dictate to me every hour of my life, not what I shall pay my clerks, but, what is more comprehensive still, what I shall sell my goods for, in other words, what I shall charge for every act of my business life; I can’t give a piece of advice, I can’t open my mouth in the court, I can’t write a business letter, I can’t take a business journey, I can’t prepare a will, an agreement, or a deed, but these impertinent thousand odd men, meaning thereby my lords and gentlemen of the British Parliament, tell me exactly what I may charge and what I may not. And yet, you see, I contrive to live and look pleasant.”

“Oh! that’s special pleading, and you know it. There’s no parallel in the two cases.”

“Pardon me, the cases are exactly parallel. The State intervenes between me and my client because it knows it would be a sad day for the client if he were left to the tender mercies of the lawyer, or, as you would put it, to the law of supply and demand on which you employers claim to rest the rate of wages. Now the workman has nothing to help him against you but this very right of combination and the clumsy, often futile, boomerang-like device of a strike. A poor weapon, but better than none at all. And yet he is to be deprived even of that.”

“But you’re ruining us, man; you’re driving the trade out of the district and God only knows when and whether it will ever come back again.”

“Pardon me, Tomlinson. It is not I that am doing all this. It is rather you and your fellow employers, who have not only caused the present crisis, but are needlessly prolonging it. Sooner or later I suppose you’ll get your own way. I’ve no doubt that sooner or later the men—not the best of them, for they will have been snapped up by outside firms—will be brought to their knees. The victory will be yours—but what a victory! Do you think things will be any pleasanter in your mills when the men have been starved into submission, and go back to their work beaten, sullen, and resentful, feeling every day they live that they have been robbed and their masters are the thieves, for that’s what it comes to in plain English. If it isn’t so, why in the name of elemental justice and common sense don’t you agree to arbitrate the whole matter? The men are willing, always have been willing. I’ll go bail that if you’ll agree to that every mill shall be running in a week, aye, and less. It is you and your Association that stand in the way and not the men. If you are being done to death it is felo de se, suicide, pure and simple; if the town is being ruined, you and your colleagues are doing that deed most damnable.”

“By heavens! Beaumont, I’ll hear no more of this. I came to you as a friend and as a brother mason to bring you to reason in a friendly and brotherly way, and you as good as tell me I’m a robber and a murderer. Well, well, if I’m to be ruined, I’ll be ruined; but I’ll take precious good care there’s somebody tumbles before I tumble, and I shouldn’t be surprised if his name’s Edward Beaumont. I’m not chairman of a Banking Company for nothing. People who play at bowls must expect rubbers. Send me my account, if you’ve got one against me, and you can send all my papers to Ewart and Co. You’ll get your cheque, and I fancy it’ll be a long time before you see the colour of my money again.”

“Good morning, Mr. Tomlinson. There’s the door. You remember what I said about hectoring and bullying?”

For long after the irate manufacturer had bounced out of his office Beaumont sat ruminating in the chair he drew to the fire. In vain he had tried to concentrate his thoughts upon the documents upon his desk. His own concerns crowded out the concerns of others. He had been made painfully sensible of late that things were not going well with him. Mr. Tomlinson was not the only client who had demanded his account and the transference of his papers. His best and oldest clients were deserting him. His staff of clerks was a large and expensive one, and he had little or no work now for them to do, and yet he shrank from discharging so much as an office-boy. Why should they and their families suffer? At the club, too, men looked black at him; at his Lodge his brethren treated him coldly. He was uneasy, too, about Schofield’s mortgage. Edward was resolved, that at any cost to himself, no cloud should rest upon his father’s name. The expenses of his electioneering promised to be heavy. Money seemed to flow like water from his bank into Staffordshire, and his account was overdrawn to an unusual and disquieting extent. The courteous manager and he were on the best of terms, but Edward knew a manager, even a bank manager, is but a servant of the directors—and the directors were manufacturers or merchants to a man, and the chairman of the directors was none other than the gentleman who had just left him in such high dudgeon and breathing threats that could have but one meaning.

And top of all this the morning’s post had brought him a letter from Storth.

“DEAR BEAUMONT,—I have been thinking things over a lot since I started for my holidays, and I’ve come to the conclusion to try to stand on my own bottom, like any other tub. I know by the terms of our agreement you are entitled to six months’ notice of dissolution, but I’ve no doubt you’ll waive that, for it would be pleasant for neither you nor me for me to continue in the office, as it were, with one foot in it and the other out. What say you? My plans for the future are very vague. Hope things are going on smoothly at your end. Wretched weather here.

Yours,

S. S.”

“Pretty cool,” reflected Edward, as he re-perused this missive. “Anyway, I’m not going to beg him to stop on to please me. He can cut the painter now if he likes, and I’ll write and say so. It’s a nuisance that I must be in Stafford to-morrow night, and I wish more than I can say I’d never gone into that electioneering campaign. However, I’m in it and it can’t be helped. In for a penny, in for a pound. I feel very much like having put out my leg further than I can stride, and it’s time for the proverbial silver lining to the cloud.”

CHAPTER VIII.

There stands, or some years ago there stood, in a noble park some five miles to the south of the ancient town of Stafford, a large and imposing edifice, built of a dull red brick, grown russet-hued with age, a house, one judged, reared in the days when Anne was queen. The outer door, stout almost as the portal of a jail, opened into a spacious hall, cheered by the fire of a commodious grate, its walls adorned, or one had perhaps better say furnished, by gloomy portraits of departed worthies and their beloved spouses. Dining-room and breakfast or morning-room opened right and left into the hall, whilst a noble staircase of oak, dark with age, with broad, shallow steps, worn by the feet of many generations, led to the upper storeys. In a room, on the second floor, snug, cosy, but somewhat severely furnished, sat in the early gloom of a wintry afternoon two maidens, both passing fair and good to look upon, and yet of a fairness how unlike—the one dark, tall, queenly of port and mien, and the other of slenderer form, of a gentler aspect, of a softer gaze, the one born to sway imperious, the other to win by the soft persuasion of tender look and soft appeal. The house is the home of Mrs. Jane Fairfax, relict of a former burgess and mayor of the town, whose trade—the townsfolk proudly boast—is trodden under foot by all the world—and it is the home also of her niece, ward, and heiress, Gertrude Fairfax.

Gertrude Fairfax and her old schoolfellow, Eleanor St. Clair, the proud and imperious beauty who, as a girl, had ruled her classmates and sorely tried the patience of her teachers, and to whom the gentler maiden had yielded a ready and adoring submission when both were in short frocks and wore their hair in a pig-tail, were in the intimate converse of afternoon tea.

“My dearest Eleanor,” the younger girl is saying, as she hands cake and tea to her friend reclined in the deep, soft-cushioned basket chair, “I cannot tell you how delighted I am to see you after all these years. Why, you had almost ceased to write, and, lo! when I could not have dreamed of such a pleasure, with just one day’s warning, you drop, as it were, out of the clouds. And how beautiful you are, Eleanor. Oh! how beautiful. But you always were. Don’t you remember how we used to call you Lady Macbeth, and vow you would wed at least an earl. You were born to move resplendent in imperial courts, waited upon by adoring slaves, laying their coronets at your feet.”

Eleanor laughed complacently.

“Well, if I was so born, I’m not going to fulfil my destiny. I don’t know that courts will know much of me, unless they are some horrid, low, fusty, musty law courts. Heigho! I shudder at the thought of them. No! destiny’s out of it this time for me. But you, Gertrude, you, if you like, are fulfilling your destiny. Didn’t we call you Saint Cecilia, and the Puritan maiden, and Miss Prim, and all that? And there you sit, I declare, dressed in a plain serge, with a plain linen collar and cuffs, your hair confined as tight and brushed as smooth as its inherent rebelliousness will permit, without a ribbon or a ring, and just a cheap jet brooch at a neck you hide as though you were ashamed of it. You might be a nun, or what is it you remind me of? I have it. You only want a poke bonnet and a tambourine and you’re the picture of a Salvation Army lass; but sure the prettiest and the sweetest Salvation Army lass that ever travestied religion.”

“Well, I am a Salvation Army lass, if it comes to that; but I don’t know, Eleanor, that I travesty religion. I try to live it, not to parody it.”

“You, a Salvation Army lass! Angels and ministers of grace defend us! You, Gertrude, that simply roll in money, you that live in this grand old house, you with a maid of your own a butler like a bishop, a footman with calves that are simply thrown away in Staffordshire, you with a carriage and a lovely pair, and a coachman as gorgeous as the Lord Mayor’s, you a Salvation Army lass! As the Scotch parson said: ‘Good Lord! it’s juist rideeculous!’”

“My dear Eleanor, you forget. The house is not mine, the maid, the groom, the coachman, and the carriage and the pair—these are not mine. They are my dear aunt’s. Mine they never may be. Should they be destined some day to be mine, may that day be far, far distant.”

“Amen, with all my heart. Your aunt’s a dear. But to all intents and purposes they’re yours, or will be some day, and you know it. I wish I were as certain of heaven. And, heigho! don’t I just wish that some of that filthy dross you Salvationists affect to despise were mine. Money’s just thrown away on you. It’s a ridiculous waste of the good things of life to lavish them on a girl I verily believe would just as soon have a steel as a diamond brooch at her breast, and a slip of velvet round her neck as a rope of pearls.”

“Sooner,” said Gertrude. “I think it’s simply sinful to spend precious money on pearls and diamonds when so many of my sisters perish for lack of very bread. I do not judge others, Eleanor, God forbid that I should. It may not be sinful for others, but it would for me, seeing as I see and thinking and feeling as I think and feel. And, indeed, it is no sacrifice for me to be without fine apparel and costly jewels. I take neither pride nor pleasure in them. A bit of coloured glass is to me as beautiful as the rarest gem, and a rose or a violet more beautiful than either. I often think people value jewels not for what they see in them, but from a curious sense that their costliness denies them to others. I don’t think it is an enviable frame of mind. But you haven’t told me, dear, why you wished particularly to be in Staffordshire just now. You hinted in your letter there was a reason. Is it a secret?”

“It is, and it isn’t. Oh! Gertrude, I am the happiest and the most miserable of girls. I’ve given my heart and promised my hand to nearly the last man in the world I ought to have loved, and papa simply won’t hear a word of our being engaged, and as for being married, it may come off when I’m ready for one of those old-age pensions those horrid Radicals dangle before the silly people’s eyes. But, I forgot, I’m a Radical myself now, or I suppose I ought to be.”

“You a Radical, Gertrude! Yes, when I’m a Tory. But why must you?”

“Why, because Edward’s a Radical. Isn’t that reason enough? But I forget. You’re but a schoolgirl yet. You know nothing of such things. And there’s that goose of a Squire Wright—never leaves me alone, follows me like my shadow, and the more I snub him the more he seems to like it. He grows sleek on cruelty and positively beams under despiteful usage.”

“And Edward is, I presume, the fortunate suitor. Edward what? Who is he? Where did you meet him? You’ve never mentioned him in your letters.”

“Edward Beaumont. See, this is his portrait,” and Eleanor drew a locket from her bosom and handed it to her friend. “Isn’t he handsome? Now don’t say yes if you don’t think so; but I’ll just shake you if you don’t.” Gertrude Fairfax gazed long upon the face encircled in its golden frame, and a close observer would have seen a deeper colour suffuse her cheeks and brow only to leave them paler than before. She clasped the locket nervously and returned it to her companion.

“It is a good face,” she said quietly. “I have seen it before. I know Mr. Beaumont slightly, and, Eleanor, I think you should be a very happy girl.”

Then she told of that adventure in Huddersfield which has been already chronicled in these veracious pages.

“And you love him, Eleanor?” she concluded, “and he loves you, and soon the glad marriage-bells will ring and you will live happy ever after.”

“I’m not so sure of all that, Gertrude. There’s the Archdeacon to reckon with, and though he’s the best of fathers, he can put his foot down when he likes, and it’s a heavy one. Then, yes, I suppose it’s true enough, and I may as well say it, there’s Eleanor St. Clair to reckon with. You see, Edward’s not rich, a successful attorney at the best. That is what he is now, and if I marry now I marry what he is now, not what he may be. And I really don’t think I could marry a poor man of no position worth talking of. Why, I might as well marry a curate.”

“But you love him, Eleanor?”

“Oh! that’s well enough in novels. But I’ve been told on high authority that when poverty comes in at the door, love flies out at the window. Fancy me, Eleanor St. Clair, living in a cheap villa, with a horrid garden patch in front and a yard for drying clothes at the back; a slip-shod servant-maid with a sniffing nose, doing my own laundry work, cooking my own meals and my lord’s, cold mutton and rice pudding most days. I don’t think I could bear it for the best man living, and that’s flat!”

“Perhaps it won’t be so bad as all that, Eleanor. Does Mr. Beaumont know how you look at things?”

“Pretty well, I fancy, and he has more sense than to expect anything else. Don’t you know he’s trying for Parliament? Why, bless me, I forget to tell you. He’s to be in Stafford to-night, speaking in the Town Hall, I’ve never heard him make a speech, so I trumped up an invitation from my old school friend and here I am. You’ll go with me to the Hall to-night, won’t you, dear? He mustn’t see me nor know I’m in Stafford, but I do so want to see and hear him.”

That was a memorable meeting in the Stafford Town Hall. It was to be, so far as possible, a county meeting. From all parts of the Southern Division men teemed into Stafford—farmers, greatly daring, who braved the wrath of their landlords, shop-keepers, agricultural labourers, and the miners from Cannock Chase. An ex-Cabinet Minister was to be on the platform, Joseph Arch, the peasant’s pride, was to speak, and the new Radical candidate was to address the electors and non-electors. And Edward Beaumont had resolved that that night he would deliver his soul, let the result be what it might. He would speak not to win this election, for that he was convinced no Radical could do and be honest, but so speak that either he or some better man should hereafter win elections by an emancipated electorate. He would not water down his creed to conciliate the half-hearted or to disarm the prejudiced. The people should know his soul, his whole soul and nothing short of it. He knew his speech would shock, would wound, would alienate; but he had learned his political creed amid the free, outspoken, fearless, and enlightened citizens of the North; and that creed, or none at all, from him the more dull and decorous Midlands should have. The chairman, a pursy, podgy alderman of the town, gasped with horror, the ex-Cabinet Minister grew frigid with haughty resentment, the black-clothed citizens looked into each other’s eyes in blank dismay, but the ruddy peasants and the grimy miners roared themselves hoarse as he warmed to his work and spoke the convictions of his mind.

“You have heard,” he said, “from the right hon. gentleman who has just resumed his seat that a much-needed, long-delayed measure of electoral reform cannot much longer be denied. You met that declaration with much cheering, and rightly so. But I wish you to ask yourselves what use are you prepared to make of the vote when you get it? Are you so content with your present lot that you look forward to ending your lives as most of you have begun and so far spent them? You miners, you stalwart sons of the soil, has the future no fairer promise for you than the lot you and your fathers have known. To what measures are our legislators to put their hands when Liberal, perchance a Radical, House sits to carry into law the people’s behests? I tell you your votes will be of no value unless you are resolved to use them as the crowbars and the jemmies with which to force the safes of privilege and plunder, use them not to steal what is not your own, but to regain that of which the people have been despoiled, to win back for yourselves your own, but that which has been so long enjoyed by others you have almost forgotten your imprescriptible rights. Is it a law of Nature that one should spend his toil and another enjoy its fruits? Is it an immutable decree of heaven that there should be for ever and for aye the inordinately rich and the abjectly poor? Is it marked down in holy Writ that Dives should always be clad in purple and fine linen and fare sumptuously every day, whilst Lazarus lies at his gates and the dogs lick his sores? Is it to be endured for ever that the miner should toil in the bowels of the earth—shut out from God’s sunshine and daring all the perils of a sudden and awful death, whilst the mine-owner rolls lordly in his carriage and cossets himself on partridge and champagne? Is it to be endured that so long as this earth shall last the owners of the soil may live in pampered luxury upon the earnings of the harassed farmer and the sweating and sweated hind? No, by heavens, gentlemen, if I am to be your candidate I shall stand for measures that will humble the pride of those in high places, measures that will strip the coronetted peers of the power they now possess to thwart the people’s will, measures that will humble the bishop’s bench and strip the haughty hierarchy of its ungodly privileges, measures that will give back to the people the wealth the people earn by their sinews and their brain. A time shall come when England shall be Merry England once more, aye, if we have to make a holocaust of the title-deeds by which its broad acres have been tied in parchment bonds; a time when honest toil shall be honestly rewarded; a time when he who toils not shall see himself and be seen as the parasite he is; a time when no man shall wield political power merely because he chances to be ‘the tenth transmitter of a foolish face’; a time when no man and no woman shall be poor who is willing and able to work; a time when the Workhouse shall no longer be the only asylum for decent poverty, a time when the wealth-winners shall be the wealth-enjoyers. Woe in that day to the man, aye, though he boast the blood of the Plantagenets, who owes his pride and station, his pomp and luxury, to the rentals of common land stolen from the peasant; woe in that day to the capitalist who grinds the faces of the poor; woe in that day to all who sit at the feast they have not spread and quaff the goblet they have not filled. But glad, glad that day for all who give unstinting of brain or muscle and by honest toil add their measure to the common wealth and win thereby the right to share to the full in the generous bounty of Nature’s ungrudging hand. I do not come to you with mincing gait and honeyed words. No kid-glove politician I. You know my mind. Say, shall I be your spokesman at the people’s House?”

And that vast audience, almost to a man, sprang to feet, and thundered back an “Aye” that shook the very walls. But the chairman paled in his puffy cheeks and the ex-minister’s brow was dark. And even as the cheers rolled and rolled again a messenger handed to Beaumont as, flushed and exultant, he gazed upon the sea of faces, a message flashed across the wires by his confidential clerk:—

“Petition in Bankruptcy against you by Bank and Schofield.”

“See, Eleanor,” whispered Gertrude Fairfax, who, seated in the balcony beside her friend, had drunk in with enraptured ears the fervent periods of the speaker. “See, he has had bad news. He pales, I can see it even here. He is ghastly white. Oh! I am sure he has had some terrible blow. And at such a moment! Cannot you go to him and comfort him?”

But Eleanor made no sign.

CHAPTER IX.

Three years have passed; years to which in later life Edward Beaumont looked back with loathing and with wonder, wonder that in so short a time he should have not merely fallen from that fair place he had filled in the eye of what was to him the world, but worse, infinitely worse, have fallen from his purer, better, nobler self; years in which, merged, well-nigh submerged, in London’s restless, ruthless sea, he had struggled to keep body and soul together by the use of his pen. When first he had come to town he could, doubtless, have obtained employment as a managing clerk. There are hundreds of men of his profession who are glad to earn the bread of dependence in that capacity; but a false pride forbade him to serve as clerk, who had so recently kinged it in his own office. So he had turned to that refuge of the educated out-of-work—literature—to find, as thousands have found before, that literature is, perhaps, the hardest of all professions. And yet it seems so easy a thing to start in life as a writer; all you need is a J pen, a few sheets of foolscap, and, yes, there’s the rub, something to write about that people want to read about; and, given all that, he’s a lucky man that does not find someone else has forestalled him and has written on the same theme infinitely better than he can write himself. Beaumont, in those days, often recalled the three ways in which, according to the traditions of the Bar, a young barrister may rise rapidly: by writing a book on some legal subject, by huggery—id est—by marrying an attorney’s daughter, or by a miracle. For the man who must needs write daily for his daily crust it is not easy to write a book, certainly not easy to find an appreciative publisher; as for huggery, or marrying an editor’s daughter editor’s daughters look far beyond the out-at elbows penny-a-liner; and as for miracles, well, he had never believed in them. Indeed, in these days he had ceased to believe in anything or anybody, even in himself. It was the worst of his misfortunes that he had lost, as it were, at one fell swoop, everything, even the desire to succeed. If he could earn enough to keep life within him, though why he should care even to do that he would have been hard put to it to say, that would suffice. He who loses fortune loses much, who loses friends loses more, but who loses courage loses all. And Beaumont’s heart was dead within him.

It was a dark, dreary night of March. The rain beat fitfully against the window of a bedroom in a small by-street off the Holloway Road. The room is Edward’s sleeping room, his eating-room, and his workshop. A tiny fire burns dully in a tiny grate and emits rather less heat than the gas that blares with a sickly flame above Beaumont’s head. It is close upon ten of the night, and Edward has thrown down his pen, collected the sheets of “copy” that he hopes to turn into money if editors prove kind on the morrow, and is now, pipe in mouth and book in hand, trying to find a comfortable place in the rickety, horse-hair armchair, called by his landlady in some fit of uncanny humour, an easy chair, and trying, too, to so focus his book as to catch the rays from his solitary gas-jet. A very different Edward this from the easy, debonair youth whom men had envied and maidens smiled upon. His clothes are well cut, but woefully white at the seams, his linen is frayed, his boots down at heel, the watch he glances at is manifestly a Waterbury, its chain of steel; and before he lights his pipe he is compelled to cut a pipeful of unmistakeable Limerick. Upon the small table are a jug of water, a tumbler, and a bottle labelled “Pride of the Glen.” Edward holds it to the light and measures its contents with his eye.

“Still three-parts full. Behold the rewards of abstinence. Had I not been frugal last night I must have been frugal to-night; but, heaven be thanked, there are two or three hours’ quiet soaking in three-quarters of a 3s. 6d. bottle of the ‘Pride of the Glen,’ and by that is drunk this dingy hole will be a palace and Edward Beaumont its prince; my tea of bread and margarine, with a bloater, will look in the retrospect a Guildhall banquet; this very angular, grid-iron like chair will be as cosy as a divan; the cheap prints that adorn my walls will show as the works of Watteau and Greuze; my rags will fall away, and I shall be clad in purple and fine linen; my whiskey will be imperial Tokay; my twist Havanas; and, in fine, it will be Edward Beaumont and not the bottle that will be three-parts full. It is true that tomorrow my mouth will be parched and I shall crave for a hair of the dog that bit me, and have to crave unless the landlord of the ‘Jolly Dogs’ is in confiding mood; my gorge will rise at the streaky, sickly slice of bacon and the ghastly ‘shop-’un’ and the leathery bread that will be served for breakfast; it is also true my eye will be bleared, if not blood-shot, my head will ache fit to split, and my hand tremble till I can scarce lift to my lips the cup of wash-up water my landlady calls tea. All these things I verily believe. It is doubtless also true that I am shortening my life, true as gospel, oh! most sapient Sir Wilfrid Lawson. But is it not written that man shall take no thought for the morrow and that sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. Here, benign deity at 3s. 6d. the bottle! here, thou offerest three hours’ oblivion, and they’re well purchased by tomorrow’s reckoning.”

And he poured from the bottle a generous measure of the elixir mortis, puffed his pipe to a vigorous glow, and with a sigh of something like content, set himself to the reading of his well-thumbed “Omar Khayyam.”

“Good old Omar,” the reader mutters, as he drains his goblet, and replenishes it from bottle and jug, “good old Omar, thine is the only true philosophy. Carpe diem, pluck the passing hour, let us eat and drink for to-morrow we may die, and who cares?

“Now, talk of Impertinence, who the deuce is this coming up my stairs at this hour of the night, and such a night? It can’t be the printer’s devil, besides, the step’s a man’s at that. If his thirst’s as big as himself, God help the bottle or what’s left of it. Oh! come in, whoever you are, and be hanged to you!” and in response to this not very pressing invitation the door opens, and in the doorway stands, peering into the room, dazzled in the transition from the gloomy staircase, a tall, erect figure, closely draped in a heavy Inverness cape, sodden with the rain.

“It is Mr. Beaumont, is it not?” asks a manly, pleasant voice. “Why, of course it is, now I can see you. How are you, Beaumont?” and a white but strong firm hand is outstretched and grasps the hand that not too gladly meets it.

“Denis Caird, by all that’s holy!”

“Of course, it’s Denis Caird, and glad to see you, Beaumont. Been hunting for you everywhere this month or two back. Was up in the West Riding lecturing, inquired about my old pupil we all prophesied such great things from, expected to find you in the Mayor’s parlour at least, till such times as you could follow Chamberlain’s lead heard you’d gone under, been seen in London, made up my mind to find you by hook or crook, and here I am and there you are. I say, what’s this, and this?” And the speaker, who had thrown off his cape, took up the little volume of verse, glanced at the title, and shook his head at the tall bottle. “‘Omar Khayyam’ and a whiskey bottle; bad food for mind, worse food for the body, my friend; the apostle of self-indulgence, and the worst, or nearly the worst, way to gratify it. This won’t do, Beaumont; this won’t do, my lad.”

Edward moved uneasily in his chair.

“Dulce est” he began.

“Dulce est be hanged,” quoth his visitor.

“I’m a clergyman or I’d say something stronger than that. What’s a young fellow like you want cooped up in a garret reading that rubbish, beautiful rubbish, if you like, but still rubbish, and making matters ten thousand times worse by drinking liquid damnation at three-and-six a bottle; up here, I say, in a garret, mooning over a lot of verses and soaking yourself with poison, when all around you there’s work to be done, man’s work, God’s work, and none too many to do it. What’s wrong with you, Beaumont, what’s wrong, say?”

“Everything’s wrong. You know, of course, how I came a mucker up yonder. Well, I’ve cared for nothing since, but just to get a crust of bread, and as much of that stuff as the money’ll run to.”

“Wasn’t there a girl in the case. Hadn’t you her to live for if nothing and nobody else?”

“Oh! yes, there was a girl, if it comes to that. But when the smash came she very promptly declined to permit me to ‘live for her,’ as you put it. See, look here, you can read my letters of dismissal, if you care to. Short and sweet, like a donkey’s gallop, I call ’em.”

And Beaumont took from a drawer and threw upon the table two letters:

“The Vicarage,

Caistorholm,

Lincs.

February, 188

“DEAR MR. BEAUMONT,—

I am exceedingly distressed to learn of your misfortune. You will do me the justice to remember that I gave only a reluctant and conditional assent to my daughter’s engagement to you. Of course that must now be absolutely and finally broken. I trust the dear girl may be given strength to bear this fearful trial, and I hope that your future may be brighter than present prospects indicate.

Yours faithfully,

HUGH ST. CLAIR.”

“The Vicarage,

Caistorholm.

“DEAR EDWARD,—

Papa insists that I endorse his words. What else can I do? I am so sorry, but there seems no other way. And, after all, I’m sure I should not have made you the wife you ought to have. With best wishes,

ELEANOR ST. CLAIR.”

“Humph!” said the Rev. Denis Caird.

“There’s nothing lacking on the score of lucidity anyway. Anything else?”

“Merely this,” said Edward, bitterly, as he handed a newspaper to his visitor.

“A marriage has been arranged, and will shortly be solemnised, between Mr. George Wright, of Thoresby Manor, Lincs, and Eleanor, only child of the Very Reverend Archdeacon St. Clair, of Caistorholm Vicarage, Lincs.”

“Ah, well!” said Mr. Denis; “there’s an end of that chapter anyway.”

“With your permission we’ll drop these precious letters carefully into that not very cheerful fire of yours. It’s simply mawkish sentimentality keeping them by you to gloom over. I don’t know the lady, but it seems to me she knew what she was talking about when she said she wasn’t quite the kind of wife you want. A fair-weather sort of mate isn’t quite the sort of mate for a shipwrecked mariner. And so, because you’ve got two nasty slaps in the face from that fickle jade, Dame Fortune, you coop yourself up in this dingy hole, read Omar Khayyam and that rot, and drink yourself into a fool’s paradise or a sot’s oblivion, by way of mending matters. I thought you were made of better stuff, Beaumont, and that’s a fact. Why, man alive, if you’ve no more backbone in you than that comes to Eleanor St. Clair’s well rid of you, or any other decent woman for that matter.”

“Oh, yes, I’m down, jump on me,” said Beaumont, savagely.

“It’s time somebody did jump on you to some purpose. I’ve no patience with you, man. Why, it’s just such nasty knocks as those that test a man. Life’s a fight for the best of us, a stand-up fight, shoulders squared, knees braced, fists clenched, lips tight-pressed, and eyes intent and steadfast. A fight not with your fellow-man, to see which can down the other, that’s a poor business, but with the world, the flesh, and the devil. What sort of a fighter do you call the man who, on the first knockout, lies grovelling in the saw-dust, bleating for mercy? he’s not the man you put your money on. No, it’s the little game one who never knows when he’s beaten, that takes his gruel kindly, and is up on his feet after a breathing space, bruised and stricken, if you like, but eager for another round, and another, and still another, so long as he’s a leg to stand on. Now, you’ve had your breathing space. Look on me, if you like, as the man who brushes the saw-dust off your clothes, sponges your brow, gives you a knee, and bucks you up generally for another set-to. I want to see you in the ring again. Are you willing, or is it to be whiskey and Omar Khayyam, till the inevitable end, a leap over Westminster Bridge into the Thames, or the Workhouse? I could almost quote Scripture to you: ‘See, I have set before thee this day life and good, death and evil. Therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.’”

For a long time there was silence between the men. Edward leaned with his elbows upon his knees, gazing into the dull embers of the fire, the minister watching him anxiously. Then Beaumont rose and stretched out his hand.

“I choose life,” he said. “Show me the way.”

“There is only one way, Beaumont. There never has been, never will be, anyway but one. It is the Via Crucis—the way of the Cross. It is a way that was before Gethsemane, though men knew it not as they may know it now, if they but will. And you may put your foot on that way to-night, this very moment. What are you going to do with that whiskey bottle? You can’t carry that sort of luggage on the Via Crucis?”

“There’s the sink,” said Edward.

“Precisely, there’s the sink, and here goes for the sink and the sewer and the rats. And those letters?”

“There’s the fire.”

“Exactly. Let the dead past bury its dead, or as burial is not convenient for letters, here’s for cremation. And Omar Khayyam?”

“In with him.”

“Now we breathe a purer air. Now put on your hat and coat and come with me to a place I wot of where you can get the juiciest steak in all London town, with fried onions and roast potatoes and a cup of very decent coffee, piping hot. And then we’ll talk of things, and I may be able to put you in the way of doing a bit of useful work and earning a modest shilling or two by doing it. And that’s something to be thankful for in this vale of tears, I can tell you.”

CHAPTER X.

THE LAST.

Denis Caird was as good as his word, and better. He stuck to Beaumont like a leech. In those hours of depression that always come to him who has abandoned alcoholic stimulant—those hours in which every fibre of the being seems to clamour for the wonted drug, the good clergyman was to Beaumont a man and a brother, cheering him, rallying him, exhorting him, appealing to all the better forces of his nature, and aiding him in the bitter fight, till, after anxious months, both could feel the victory was won.

And Beaumont got work, work to his heart’s desire, work for his pen and work for what gift of speech he had.

“Go into the slums, go to the bottommost pit in this London hell,” said Mr. Caird. “Go and see for yourself what the teaching of your Omar Khayyam makes of men and women. See human beings turned into beasts and devils by yielding to the beast and devil latent within every man and every woman. You believe in evolution, you say. Well, what has made men and women only a little lower than the angels? Why, nought but myriads of years of beating down Satan under their feet, beating down the animal basis on which the moral and the spiritual superstructure is reared. Go, learn your lesson, and then, and not till then, with pen and tongue preach your lesson. I’m a Socialist, you know I am. But ere ever the masses enter into their kingdom of economic justice, ere ever they win the full heritage of their toil, I pray and labour that they may be worthy of that kingdom and of that heritage, that they may learn the right use of wealth; else will all their gains be but added curses.”

And Beaumont went into the slums, and their teaching sank deep into his soul. And in his goings he met time after time that sweet and winsome maiden whom he had first seen, years ago, in circumstances how different, in his office in Huddersfield—Gertrude Fairfax, Sister Gertrude. He saw her move, a ministering angel, among the foul purlieus, the noxious dens, speaking to Women from whose touch Respectability plucked its skirts, saw her indeed touch pitch without being defiled, a serene and wholesome presence before which sin slunk abashed away, and e’en the drunkard forbore to curse.

And seeing her thus almost daily, old memories died away, the carking bitterness left his heart, and it was filled again with the image of a woman whom to love was a liberal education and a holy cult in one.

The last scene of this story shall not open under the fogs nor ’mid the slums of hideous London. Come with me, gentle reader, to that goodly mansion by Stafford town, where dwell Mistress Jane Fairfax and her niece Gertrude. It is the month of leafy June, the skies are blue o’erhead, the air sweet and soft and warm, and the garden of Cromwell House is rich in verdure and in bloom, and redolent of the choicest perfumes distilled by that cunningest of all alchemists—Dame Nature. There is a bower there with rustic seat, a bower all garlanded with roses sweetly breathing, with clematis and wild convolvulus, and a purling brook alive with darting troutlet babbles by. And there are seated side by side the heroine of this story and Edward Beaumont.

“I have something to give you, Mr. Beaumont, that I think belongs to you. Let me first tell you how it came to my hands. You had a clerk, had you not, called Barnes?”

“I had.”

“Well, he came to a sad end, poor fellow. Drifted to London, took to evil courses, and died in great straits. I was by his bed when the end drew near. He remembered my being at your office, when you defended Pat Sullivan. He had tried to find you. He confessed he had abstracted this paper from your office, thinking he might make money by it, if a reward were offered for its recovery. I promised if ever I met you to restore it to you, and the man seemed easier for the promise.”

Beaumont wondering opened the document she handed to him.

“By Jove!” he cried, “the missing valuer’s certificate for Midgley’s mortgage. Why, I’ve searched high and low for this. What would I not have given for this precious bit of paper that night in Stafford Town Hall when I got that awful telegram. You were there, you tell me. If I’d only had this then! But it’s better as it is, much better. Don’t you think God schemes for us better than we can scheme for ourselves? A man need have long visions to scan the ways of God.”

“I don’t think, I know. But why do you ask that question just now?”

“Why, you see, Gertrude, if I may call you so, if I had had this paper I should probably have made a fight and struggled on in the law. And if I had, it seems to stand to reason I shouldn’t have been here!”

“No; you’d have been happily married by this to Eleanor St. Clair!”

“Who is much more happily married to George Wright, and I am free to say what say I must before I leave for London and my work. Can’t you guess what it is I would say, Gertrude? I’m not much of a man to offer to any woman, but such as I am I love you, Gertrude. I’m poor, you are rich or will be; I’m tainted, you are pure, unsullied. But, there, I think you know me as I am. Say, Gertrude, is there in your heart any tiny seedling of love for me that time and the warmth of my love may woo to life and growth?”

Edward had risen and now stood before the girl to whom he pleaded, who drooped her eyes before the ardour of his gaze, her bosom fluttering ’neath her modest dress like a prisoned bird that beats its bars, the rich colour suffusing the pale brow and cheeks.

“I think I have loved you, Edward, since that day in the Police Court. Oh! it nearly broke my heart when I heard how sadly you had fallen from what I dreamed you might be, and shall from what, God willing, you may be yet.”

“And you will help, Gertrude?”

“Aye, that I will.” And she rose and placed her hands in his and spake to him as Ruth the Maobitish damsel, spake to Naomi, and as Edward drew her to his breast and kissed the lips that met his he murmured: “The Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.”

And this is the end of my story, and yet but the real beginning of the lives that were joined before God’s altar by the Rev. Denis Caird. The wedding presents were neither costly nor numerous, but they included one from Eleanor St Clair, now Lady Wright, for that ambitious matron never rested till she saw her spouse a member for the Louth division, and, once in Parliament, that gentleman wisely refrained from speech, “never thought of thinking for himself at all, but always voted at his party’s call” ; and in due time the Premier of the day, yielding, it was said, to the blandishments of that brilliant leader of society, Mrs. George Wright, rewarded him with a baronetcy.

And what of Miss Amelia Wrigley and her amorous Sam? Alas! that lady never realised her modest ambitions. Mr. Storth prospered, as indeed he deserved to prosper, in the profession of his choice; but much beer, added to a plethoric habit and a choleric temperament, induced an apoplectic seizure from which he never rallied, and Miss Wrigley still lives in maiden meditation, if not fancy free, still to be wooed and won.

THE END.