BOOK VII THE SUITOR (continued 2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10

“One—AND. Two—AND. Three—AND.”

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

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

“Oswald!”

“Yes, mother.”

“Count, dear!”

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

“Mother?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Are you listening?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Did you hear that?”

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

“One—AND. Two—AND. Three—AND.”

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

“One—AND. Two—AND. Three—AND.”