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 HISTORY OP DAVID GRIEVE 
 
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THE HISTORY 
 
 OF 
 
 DAVID GBIEVE 
 
 BY 
 
 MRS. HUMPHRY WARD 
 
 ▲X7TH0R OF ' ROBERT ELSMERE, ' ETC. 
 
 Neto York 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
 
 1908 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
Copyright, 1891, 
 By the MACMILLA.N COMPANY. 
 
 Special edition, April, July, 1905; March, 1906: 
 October, 1908. 
 
 Nortoooti ^xtsi 
 
 J. S. Ciwhlng & Co. — Berwick & Smith C». 
 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
 
TO 
 
 THE DEAR MEMORY 
 
 OP 
 
 MY MOTHER 
 
 
 273368 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 BOOK I 
 Childhood 
 
 PAGE 
 1 
 
 Youth . 
 
 BOOK 11 
 
 ..... 123 
 
 BOOK III 
 Storm and Stress • • • * ^"^^ 
 
 Mattjritt 
 
 BOOK IV 
 
 441 
 
PREFACE 
 
 London : May 2, 1892. 
 
 Dear Mr. Smith, 
 
 A few days ago there came into my head the idea 
 of writing you — my friend and publisher — an 'open letter' 
 which might serve, if you thought well, as a little preface to 
 the sixth and popular edition of ' The History of David Grieve;' 
 and I was turning the notion over in my mind when I fell upon 
 a passage in M. Kenan's last volume of ' Souvenirs,' which he 
 has called ' Feuilles Detachees.' He is describing his relations 
 with the 'Journal des Debats' and with M. Silvestre de 
 Sacy, the editor of that well-known newspaper when the young 
 ex-seminarist and future author of the 'Vie de Jesus' first 
 joined its staff. 'I owe to M. de Sacy,' says M. Renan, ' some 
 of the moral rules that I have always followed. I owe to him 
 in particular the habit of never replying to newspaper attacks 
 even when they contain the greatest enormities. When I sub- 
 mitted to him different cases of possible exceptions, his answer 
 was invariable : ^^ Jamais, jamais, jamais !" I believe that on 
 this point, as on so many others, I have conscientiously followed 
 the counsels of my old master. Du haut du del M. de Sacy sera 
 content de moi.^ 
 
 ' Jamais ! ' 
 
 It is true tiiat, a little further on, M. Renan, with his usual 
 hatred of the absolute, begins to qualify and ponder a little — 
 falls wondering, after all, whether ' nowadays M. de Sacy would 
 not change his mind.' But all the same, that ' Jamais ! ' of M. 
 de Sacy lingered in my ear, and stood in the way of my own 
 small project. ' No, no ! ' I have said to myself ; ' M. Renan's 
 old friend was a thousand times right. If I let myself put 
 down the things now fermenting in me, I shall be answering 
 my reviewers ; and what can be more futile? — what even, if I 
 may say so without arrogance, more superfluous ? For, as our 
 
viii THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE 
 
 English criticism is constituted at the present moment, does it 
 not jDerpetually answer itself ? It has no recognised leaders ; 
 and when it attacks, it falls at a moment's notice into violence. 
 Now the snare of violence is contradiction ; and if contradiction 
 is not the note just now of large tracts of English reviewing, 
 what is ? Let it alone, and finish M. Ilenan's entertaining 
 volume.' 
 
 But no. Even that ^ Jamais!^ is not strong enough, and I 
 take up my pen determined somehow both to write my letter 
 and to profit by the wisdom of M. de Sacy. After all, does it 
 not depend upon what is meant by ' answering ' ? 
 
 In the first place, however, that word ' contradiction ' haunts 
 me, and before I turn to one or two very general matters, on 
 which I have asked you to give me this opportunity of saying a 
 public word or two, let me draAv your attention for a moment— 
 a passing tremulous moment — tO those three Quarterlies which 
 in this month of grace have been bombarding ' David Grieve.' 
 (Ah ! I feel that when you come to tliis you will be nervous. 
 You will say to yourself, ' This will never do — Mrs. Ward can- 
 not, after all, refrain.' No, no ! you will see it will all come 
 right.) So let us look ! — on our way to other things. As for 
 me, it is like the bogies of my childhood — the more I look, the 
 less I shake. There is, first of all, the writer in the ' Quarterly,' 
 who is now, as always, what yo\x might expect to find him. 
 This time he is equally displeased with all the recent birtlis of 
 time. The situation in literature, as he describes it, is sombre 
 indeed. Nevertheless, his style is trijoping, and his humour con- 
 fident ; one perceives that after all, perhaps, at bottom, like the 
 reader, he remembers that the ' Quarterly' has walled over 
 many generations, that ' howsoe'er the world goes ill ' the 
 thrushes still sing in it, and cheerfulness is best. Still, though 
 he is cheerful, he is severely confident, and when he tells me in 
 the same breath, first, that ' sixteen centuries ago' the religious 
 puzzles with which people, and especially David Grieves, trouble 
 their heads in the present day were all satisfactorily settled, 
 and next, that 'David Grieve' is 'tiresome as a novel and in- 
 CiTectual as a sermon,' I am for the moment so carried away by 
 the Olympian sureness of the tone that I find both statements 
 equally true, and am naturally depressed by the last. But 
 there is balm — not only in Gilead, but where one least looks for 
 it. Public report tells me that if the ' Quarterly ' has used 
 wliips, the 'Edinbui-gh' has used scorpions, and I go on to my 
 second reviewer in fear and trembling. And in the 'Edin- 
 
PREFACE IX 
 
 burgh' I do indeed discover an extremely hostile gentleman 
 writing in an agitation whicli betrays him into a very quagmire 
 of repetitions, and finally leads him, through a breathless series 
 of the most trenchant adjectives known to the language, up to 
 the composition of, surely, two of the most incompetent pages 
 ever penned in defence of the Christian religion ! But at the 
 same time I stumble on a little sentence dropped out by the 
 way, which arrests me by its odd incongruity with its surround- 
 ings. ' David Grieve,' of course, 'is a failure,' but all the same 
 the writer who so labels it contrives to admit that he has found 
 it 'a powerful story, at times of absorbing interest.' How be- 
 wildering ! But how soothing ! For clearly the * Edinburgh ' 
 and the ' Quarterly ' cannot both be right. A book cannot be at 
 one and the same time 'tiresome as a novel and ineffectual as 
 a sermon,' and 'a powerful story — of absorbing interest.' The 
 two statements cancel out like those mysterious sums of one's 
 childhood, which I still remember as though they were some 
 pleasant conjuring trick— amusing and impenetrable. 
 
 And when I bring in my third critic— him of the 'Church 
 Quarterly'— the cancelling process becomes brisk indeed. My 
 new reviewer holds up poor ' David,' if I remember right, as one 
 of several shocking examples showing the decline of ' theology 
 and morality ' in fiction. But his ways are gentler than those 
 of Ids colleagues, and I notice with some inward glow that he 
 has let my tale-spinning beguile him a good deal. The 'Edin- 
 burgh ' only rails the moi-e because against its v/ill it has been 
 interested ; but the ' Church Quarterly,' in the midst of its hard 
 sayings, will still confess that it has lauglied over Lucy's social 
 pangs, and been touched by Lucy's dying. The book shows ' a 
 total absence of humour,' says the 'Edinburgh' fiercely (the 
 italics are mine, they merely represent the general energy of the 
 context); but here is the 'Church Quarterly' talking of 'a 
 refined and delicate sense of humour,' of 'mingled Immour and 
 pathos,' of 
 
 But no ! this is absurd. I must not count my compliments. 
 I must remember that they too, for the moment, ' cancel out.' 
 
 Once more. The ' Quarterly ' is clear that ' David ' is ' dis- 
 tinctly and surprisingly inferior ' to its predecessor ' in all the 
 arts and devices necessary to produce a literary composition.' 
 But the 'Edinburgh' puts it in this way : the 'workmanship, 
 ' critical ability,' and ' gift of literary expression ' are the same ; 
 the defects are about equal; but 'the later novel has greater 
 interest, more passion, more power, and more pathos.' As for 
 
X THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE 
 
 the * Church Quarterly,' it says roundly that ' David Grieve ' is 
 a great improvement, so that on the whole this little sum leaves 
 me in good spirits. 
 
 Finally the ' Quarterly,' as I have before remarked, is so 
 contemptuously certain that Athanasius and Nicsea ('sixteen 
 centuries' back bring us up somewhere, I think, just behind 
 Nicsea 1) left nothing for German or any other theologians to 
 do, and that all those 'puzzled commonplaces' which poor 
 David stole from Germany or Oxford were really comfortably 
 disposed of at that early date — it is so certain of these things, it 
 tells us, that to this side of the matter it will have— or rather it 
 endeavours to have— nothing at all to say. Its dignity revolts. 
 And perhaps it remembers how much it had to say of this kind 
 in the case of ' Kobert Elsmere,' and will not repeat, even to 
 a world that forgets. But the ' Edinburgh ' neither feigns nor 
 feels a composure of the sort. It stands and wrings its hands, 
 lamenting that ' such an attack as Mrs. Ward's might well put 
 the defenders of Christianity on the alert.' And meanwhile 
 the biographer of 'David Grieve,' standing between the two 
 voices — the voice of ill-assured contempt and the voice of angry 
 alarm— does not know whether to laugh or cry ! She can only 
 find one thing to say— one little, foolish, personal thing. Did 
 neither of these gentlemen ever possess a college friend with 
 whom he talked and to whom he wrote on those matters of 
 'whence' and 'whither' which have a trick of engaging our 
 attention at some period of life ? No doubt, no one — or very 
 few— ought to feel an interest in them. But still can he re- 
 member any such futile moments or no? If he can, were they 
 not a part of life— for the time, at least, an important part of 
 life — just so much and no more ? And if they were, can he not 
 allow a ' David Grieve,' who had no college friends, his thoughts 
 and his journal, unorthodox and irritating though it be — as 
 at least a part of life — so much and no more ? Why scold his 
 biographer because she tries to fill in the picture as each man's 
 memory fills in his own? Is it her fault if every rich human 
 life contains these things? The real point is, Do men and 
 women trouble their hearts and heads about these matters, — 
 do they affect action and conduct? If so, the novelist claims 
 them as he claims all else tliat belongs to life — under the con- 
 ditions of his art hien entendu — and the critic who will not play 
 the game, so to speak, who stands and breaks into personalities 
 al)Out the painter when he should be judging the picture as a 
 picture 
 
PREFACE a 
 
 Here, indeed, I have fallen headlong into the snare ! I am 
 'answering' on my own account — there can be no possible 
 doubt of that— and I see your admonitory look. Well, let us 
 come to the point. Let me have done trifling with j\I. de Sacy's 
 ' Jamais ! ' and take up those more serious matters for which in 
 truth I am disquieting you with this letter. And first let me 
 return a moment, but in another spirit, to my three latest critics, 
 lest I should inadvertently misrepresent them as they, to my 
 thinking, have sometimes misrepresented ' David Grieve.' It is 
 quite true that some of their most formidable dicta ' cancel out' 
 with astonishing neatness, and to the stimulus of that sense of 
 humour in which the ' Edinburgh ' finds David's biographer so 
 deficient. But it is also true that in certain canons and 
 methods of criticism they are very closely agreed ; and because 
 it is so, and because the articles are long, simultaneous, and 
 conspicuous, it may be well to take them as representative of 
 much else— I will not say in the mind of the public— but at any 
 rate in the mind of a portion of the press. All three dislike 
 and resent what they call the intrusion of Hheology ' into a 
 novel, and tlie two older Quarterlies are especially intolerant 
 of ' the novel with a purpose,' of any writing within the domain 
 of art which, as the ' Quarterly ' puts it, aims at ' reforming the 
 world.' Great stress is also laid— particularly in the 'Edin- 
 burgh '—on that method of reviewing which consists in putting 
 together all that one may know, or imagine one knows, about 
 the personal history of a writer, and framing one's literary 
 judgment to suit. 
 
 Now these points — what is meant by a ' novel with a pur- 
 pose,' or by 'dragging theology into fiction,' and the legitimacy 
 of the 'personal' method of reviewing— are worth discussion, 
 and I am not ungrateful to the Quarterlies for having turned 
 my attention to them once more. Let me take the last first, as 
 being the most diverting ; for I have a certain love, as I fear 
 my books betray, for a ' serious ending.' The ' personal ' method 
 consists apparently in examining wliether to your knowledge 
 the author of a given book has ever been personally placed in 
 the precise situations he describes, and judging his work accord- 
 ingly. It leads to deductions of this kind—' ^Mr. A.'s pictures 
 of convict life cannot possibly be well done, since Mr. A.— we 
 know it for certain— has never been a convict. As for Mr. B.'s 
 descriptions of immorality and divorce— absurd !— we happen 
 to know that a better husband and father than Mr. B. does not 
 exist. And what does Miss C mean by talking to us about 
 
xii THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE 
 
 peasants ? ]Miss C lives — we have looked it up — in D 
 
 Street, Kentish Town. Now what, we should like to ask, have 
 
 English, or still more Scotch peasants to do with D Street, 
 
 Kentish Town ? As for ^Ir. F., we know all about his relations, 
 and are not to be taken in ; none of them ever attempted what 
 Mr. F. has attempted ; the inference is obvious.' 
 
 The danger of this method is that it is difficult to be informed 
 enough, and that your literary judgments are ajDt to be kept 
 waiting while you are quarrelling with ' Men of the Time ' for 
 not supplying you with detail enough to make them. The 
 attractions of the ' personal ' method of criticism are no doubt 
 great. Sainte - Beuve ha^ a rapturous passage in which he 
 declares that he never understood Chateaubriand till he knew 
 all about Chateaubriand's sisters. Still, by that time Chateau- 
 briand was dead — which in this connection is something. In- 
 formation of the personal sort is apt to accumulate after a 
 writer's decease; and criticism, as the 'Edinburgh' conceives 
 it, is thereby made easier. During a writer's lifetime I con- 
 stantly notice that while the critic^ are spending time and 
 temper over these matters, the public is reading the book, — 
 which is after all more important. 
 
 As for the one literary assumption underlying these vagaries, 
 — that a writer must deal with nothing but his or her personal 
 exjDerience, — it is of course a very respectable assumption. All 
 that one lias to say is that literature and the public have upset 
 it times without number. It is tolerably obvious that Sir 
 Walter Scott could not have personally observed the society 
 of George II. 's day, or have lived familiarly in the society of 
 Louis XI. ; which does not prevent the ' Heart of Midlothian ' 
 or 'Quentin Durward' from being great novels. Another 
 truism, you say. Very well. At any rate the successes of the 
 historical novel prove that the imaginative treatment of life 
 depends upon personal experience as one of its great factors, 
 but by no means the only one. Personal experience, at least, 
 of the narrow and technical sort. Every novel that ever 
 touched a reader depends, of course, ultimately upon personal 
 experience— that is to say, upon what the writer is, and can 
 put into the framework with which experience or imagination, 
 or research if you like, supplies him. But that is another 
 question. 
 
 To return, however, to what are really the 'hanging matters,' 
 with the Quarterlies, and with other people besides. 
 
 'The novel,' says a writer in the 'New Review,' 'will not 
 
PREFACE xiil 
 
 bear ' what the writer of ' David Grieve ' puts into it ; will not 
 bear, that is to say, the introduction of matter drawn from 
 the religious and philosophical field. Naturally the proposition 
 interests me. But'it rouses in me a little amused wonder that 
 a critic with so wide a knowledge of literature as Mr. Traill 
 should imagine that the matter can be settled quite so easily. 
 For as one looks back over the history of the novel nothing 
 seems to be so clear as that it has ' borne ' everything of what- 
 ever kind that a writer who could make himself heard was 
 minded to put into it. In the days of Cervantes the novel, 
 fish-like, swallowed other novels whole, and the adventures of 
 the immortal knight came to a standstill while the fortunes 
 and career of 'El Curioso Impertinente ' unrolled. In the 
 days of ' Julie,' the cadre supplied by the loves of Saint-Preux 
 and Madame de Wolmar admitted of the introduction of a vast 
 amount of material which would make the critic of to-day rise 
 in his wrath — discussions of the opera, of the qualities of 
 women of the world, of the existence of God, of the proper 
 management of children and estates, and much else. The dis- 
 cussions happened to be interesting then, and they are in- 
 teresting historically now. Rousseau wrote as the spirit moved 
 him, choosing out of the variegated spectacle of life what 
 attracted him, and the instant response of his generation — in 
 spite of the sarcasms of Voltaire — showed that he was right. 
 ' Wilhelm Meister ' wanders, digresses, and preaches as Goethe 
 pleases, but the man who wrote of life and thought in it had 
 lived and thought ; and, formless as it is, the book has entered 
 into the training of Europe. Chateaubriand, George Sand, and 
 Victor Hugo have bent the novel to all the purposes of pro- 
 paganda in turn. Theology, politics, social problems and 
 reforms, they have laid hands on them all, and have but stirred 
 the more vibrations thereby in the life of their time. And 
 which of them, from ' Don Quixote ' downwards, will you save 
 from this opprobrious category of ' novels with a purpose ' 1 — 
 which of them has not tried in its own way and with its own 
 vehemence to * reform the world,' whether it be by throwing an 
 effete literature out of window, or by holding up the picture of 
 married virtue and religious faith beside that of illicit love and 
 empty doubt, or by showing forth the wrongs and difficulties of 
 women, or by the passionate attempt to make the world realise 
 the pressure of the pyramid of our civilised society on the poor 
 and the weak at its base ? 
 
 It is no doubt true, and the fact is one of great psychological 
 
XIV THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE 
 
 interest, that in Engiand the novel has been specially objective, 
 positive, concrete. Our novels since Fielding descend rather 
 from. 'Gil Bias 'and that Spanish picaresque literature, the 
 refuge of a people intellectually starved, which became so 
 popular and found so many imitators in a seventeenth- or 
 eighteenth-century England, than they descend from ' Euphues' 
 or 'The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia.' We have always 
 taken more delight in the mere spectacle of life than our 
 neighbours ; ' ideas ' have on the whole, and for good reasons, 
 been more distasteful to us than to France or Oerraany ; and 
 in the novel of our century we have the splendid result of both 
 tendencies, positive and negative. Still there have been con- 
 siderable exceptions. If one looks back over the fiction of the 
 last fifty years, one comes again and again upon books that 
 have broken bounds so to speak, and that have owed both 
 their motive-power and their success to this desire, which the 
 * Quarterly ' finds so terrible and so abominable, of ' reforming 
 the world,' or, as I should put it, to the expression of 'a criti- 
 cism of life,' wliich may advance, wliether in the hearts of the 
 many or the few, thoughts and causes dear to the writers. 
 ' Think with me ! ' * See with me ! ' ' Let me persuade you ! ' 
 they seem to say, and again and again the world, or rather the 
 world which belonged to the book, has let itself be persuaded, 
 gladly. 
 
 Let us, indeed, exchange the idea of ' purpose ' for the idea 
 'criticism of life,' and see how the matter stands. 'Poetry,' 
 said Mr. Matthew Arnold, 'is a criticism of life under the 
 conditions of poetic truth and poetic beauty.' For this dictum 
 he has been roughly handled by the school which, in its zeal for 
 certain elements and aspects of art, and under the influence of 
 a narrow conception of criticism, would, if it could, divorce art 
 from criticism and claim for it a divine and irresponsible 
 isolation. But, in my belief at any rate, the task is impossible. 
 Criticism lurks, and will always lurk, in the very holiest and 
 secretest places of art. For the artist there is always the choice 
 between this and that, between good and better, between the 
 congruous and the discordant, between one sequence and 
 another. Every act of literary conception is half creative, half 
 critical, and could not be creative without being critical. 
 
 Alter two words, then, in Mr. Arnold's definition of poetry, 
 and watch how it applies to the novel. 'A criticism of It/e 
 under the conditions of imaginative trtith and imaginative 
 heaiUy.^ It is easy to see that the definition so drawn sweeps into 
 
PREFACE XV 
 
 its net all the remembered novel-writing of the century. For 
 even Miss Austen — that most detached and impersonal of all 
 the great story-tellers — has her ' criticism of life ' and makes it 
 felt. Witii what glee and malice does she hold up to us the 
 absurdities of aristocratic pride in Darcy and in Lady Catherine 
 de Burgh, and how large she writes the lesson of Emma's 
 patronising and meddlesome conceit ! As for Scott, Thackeray, 
 Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, compare the 'criticism of life' in- 
 volved in the work of any one of them with that involved in 
 the work of any conspicuous French novelist, of George Sand, 
 or Theophile Gautier, or Octave Feuillet, and the contrasts of 
 nationality will make you realise at once that each of these 
 writers, however objective and positive he may seem, has all 
 the while an ethical and social ideal which he is trying to make 
 prevail. Each delights, as every artist should and does delight, 
 in the mere play of the imaginative gift ; but through each 
 and all throbs the wish 'to reform the world' in his or her 
 measure. The question is, can you have lasting imaginative 
 work without it 1 
 
 Well, but — you will perhaps say to me with impatience — this 
 is all trite and familiar enough. What you call ' criticism of 
 life' other people call 'individuality,' and very few dream of 
 denying that the novel or the poem should have individuality 
 — should embody a 'criticism of life' up to this point. The 
 question is : How far is the criticism to be carried ? 
 
 Ah ! that is indeed the question, the whole question. All 
 that one can say is there have always been two answers — the 
 answer of those who wish to make of art a protection against 
 life, and the answer of those who attempt to use it as the torch 
 for exploring life. Do not attempt to carry your criticism, say 
 the first, beyond the point of common experience, above all of 
 common agreement. The world is rich enough within these 
 limits ; it will give you amply within them the wherewithal to 
 laugh or cry, or wonder ; for heaven's sake be content ! and 
 join with us in making of fiction and poetry an ark of refuge, a 
 many-coloured shrine for the common perennial passions and 
 emotions and delights of mankind, reared amid the clash of 
 irreconcilable interests, and that surrounding darkness of the 
 Unknown which neither philosophy nor religion, say what you 
 will, can clear away. 
 
 A beguiling answer !— and what magicians it has called into 
 its service ! It was the creed of Scott and Miss Austen ; in 
 words at least of George Eliot ; it is implied in the golden art 
 
XVI THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE 
 
 of Mr. Stevenson. We have all felt the charm and the per- 
 suasiveness of it ; and in certain moods of life there is not a 
 single man or woman that has not wished it, consciously or 
 unconsciously, to prevail. 
 
 But there is another answer, — and it is equally legitimate. 
 'Nay, let us have no lines, no exclusions!' it says. 'Life 
 divided into sections is life shorn of some of its fulness. There 
 are no hard and fast limits in reality ; the great speculative 
 motives everywhere play and melt into the great practical 
 motives ; each different life implies a different and a various 
 thought-stuff; and there is nothing in art to forbid your deal- 
 ing — if you can ! — with the thought-stuff of the philosopher as 
 freely as with the thought-stuff of the peasant or the maiden. 
 Still less is there any artistic reason why in picturing the indi- 
 vidual human existence you should feel yourself bound to cut 
 away from it anything that really is there. Either way, let 
 there be no parti ]>ris. If we, in our zeal to include ideas among 
 the material of imaginative presentation, make the mistake of 
 supposing that ideas are the whole of life, our work will come 
 to nothing ; and if you, in your zeal to escape the ideas which 
 torture and divide, or those which present special difficulties 
 to the artist, tend to empty your work of ideas beyond a certain 
 point, it also will come to nothing. Each form of life- reading 
 has its dangers. Success in ours is rarer ; permanence less 
 likely ; the dangers more obvious than in yours. But the 
 attempt is inevitable, and if we fail, we fail ! ' 
 
 The voices of Rousseau, of George Sand, of Goethe, are in 
 this last answer. And as for me, shrinking under the onslaught 
 of the Quarterlies, may I still be proud to count myself — how- 
 ever feeble, however weak — among that company? I am so 
 made that I cannot picture a human being's development 
 without wanting to know the whole, his religion as well as his 
 business, his thoughts as well as his actions. I cannot try to 
 reflect my time without taking account of forces which are at 
 least as real and living as any other forces, and have at least 
 as much to do with the drama of human existence about me. 
 ' The two great forming agencies of the world's history have 
 been the religious and the economic,' says Professor Marshall. 
 Every one will agree that in his own way the novelist may 
 handle the ' economic' By and by we shall all agree that in 
 his own way he may handle the 'religious.' For every artist 
 of whatever type there is one inexorable law. Your ' criticism 
 of life' must be fashioned under the conditions of imaginative 
 
PREFACE xvii 
 
 truth and imaginative beauty. If you, being a novelist, make 
 a dull story, not all the religious argument in the world will or 
 should save you. For your business is to make a novel, not a 
 pamphlet, a reflection of human life, and not merely a record of 
 intellectual conception. But under these conditions every- 
 thing is open— try what you will— and the response of your 
 fellows, and that only, will decide your success. 
 
 Ah ! that response — how dear it is to us ! Now as I am 
 about to launch this second book into that wider public beyond 
 the circulating libraries to which the ultimate appeal lies, as I 
 launched ' Robert Elsmere ' four years ago, my mind passes back 
 over these years — over their hopes and emotions and surprises, 
 their delights and their toils. I think of the many thousand 
 persons to whom in that space of time I have become known ; 
 of whom in the pauses of work I inevitably think, with 
 alternate yearning and dread. I remember that wave of 
 sympathy which lifted ' Kobert Elsmere ' ; I feel it still swelling 
 about me, waiting, I trust, for this new book, to carry it also 
 into prosperous seas. I should be ungrateful indeed were I 
 to show much soreness under criticism, however hostile, how- 
 ever, as I think, unjust. For the world to whicli they were 
 addressed has sent out kind and welcoming hands to these 
 books of mine ; I have in my ears the sound of words that may 
 well stir and quicken and encourage ; and in my heart the 
 longing to keep the sympathy gained, and the ambition to 
 deserve it more and more. 
 
 Yours always sincerely, 
 
 Mary A. Ward. 
 
BOOK I 
 CmLDHOOD 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 ' Tak your hat, Louie ! Yo're alius leavln summat behind yer.' 
 
 ' David, yo go for 't,' said the child addressed to a boy by her 
 side, nodding her head insolently towards the speaker, a tall 
 and bony woman, who stood on the steps the children had just 
 descended, holding out a battered hat. 
 
 ' Yo're a careless thing, Louie,' said the boy, but he went back 
 and took the hat. 
 
 ' Mak her tie it,' said the woman, showing an antiquated pair of 
 strings. 'If she loses it she needna coom cryin for anudder. 
 She'd lose her yead if it wor loose.' 
 
 Then she turned and went back into the house. It was a 
 smallish house of grey stone, three windows above, two and a door 
 below. Dashes of white on the stone gave, as it were, eyebrows 
 to the windows, and over the door there was a meagre trellised 
 porch, up which grew some now leafless roses and honeysuckles. 
 To the left of the door a scanty bit of garden was squeezed in 
 between the hill, against which the house was set edgeways, and 
 the rest of the flat space, occupied by the uneven farmyard, the 
 cart-shed and stable, the cow-houses and duck-pond. This garden 
 contained two shabby apple trees, as yet hardly touched by the 
 spring; some currant and gooseberry bushes, already fairly green; 
 and a clump or two of scattered daffodils and wallflowers. The 
 hedge round it was broken through in various places, and it had 
 a casual neglected air. 
 
 The children went their way through the yard. In front of 
 them a flock of some forty sheep and lambs pushed along, guarded 
 by two black short-haired collies. The boy, brandishing a long 
 stick, opened a gate deplorably in want of mending, and the sheep 
 crowded through, keenly looked after by the dogs, who waited 
 meanwhile on their flanks with heads up, ears cocked, and that 
 air of self -restrained energy which often makes a sheep-dog more 
 human than his master. The field beyond led to a little larch plan- 
 tation, where a few primroses showed among the tufts of long, rich 
 grass, and the drifts of last year's leaves. Here the flock scat- 
 tered a little, but David and the dogs were after them in a twink- 
 hng, and the plantation gate was soon closed on the last bleating 
 mother. Then there was nothing more for the boy to do than to 
 go up to the top of the green rising ground on which the farm 
 stood and see if the gate leading to the moor was safely shut. 
 
4 ' THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i. 
 
 .',F6rit/!)i9 -sheep liip Jhad beeii driving were not meant for the open 
 moorlatid. ' Their feeding grounds lay in the stone-walled fields 
 round the homestead, and had they strayed on to the mountain 
 beyond, which was reserved for a hardier Scotch breed, David 
 would have been answerable. So he strode, whistling, up the hill 
 to have a look at that top gate, while Louie sauntered down to 
 the stream which ran round the lower pastures to wait for him. 
 
 The top gate was fast, but David climbed the wall and stood 
 there a while, hands in his pockets, legs apart, whistling and 
 looking. 
 
 ' They can't see t' Downfall from Stockport to-day,' he was 
 saying to himself; ' it's coomin ower like mad.' 
 
 Some distance away in front of him, beyond the undulating 
 heather ground at his feet, rose a magnificent curving front of 
 moor, the steep sides of it crowned with black edges and cliffs of 
 grit, the outline of the south-western end sweeping finely up on 
 the right to a purple peak, the king of all the moorland round. 
 No such colour as clothed that bronzed and reddish wall of rock, 
 heather, and bilberry is known to Westmoreland, hardly to Scot- 
 land; it seems to be the peculiar property of that lonely and 
 inaccessible district which marks the mountainous centre of mid- 
 England — the district of Kinder Scout and the High Peak. Before 
 the boy's ranging eye spread the whole western rampart of the 
 Peak— to the right, the highest point, of Kinder Low, to the left, 
 ' edge ' behind ' edge,' till the central rocky mass sank and faded 
 towards the north into milder forms of green and undulating 
 hills. In the very centre of the great curve a white and surging 
 mass of water cleft the mountain from top to bottom, falling 
 straight over the edge, here some two thousand feet above the 
 sea, and roaring downward along an almost precipitous bed into 
 the stream — the Kinder — which swept round the hill on which 
 the boy was standing, and through the valley behind him. In 
 ordinary times the 'Downfall,' as the natives call it, only makes 
 itself visible on the mountain-side as a black ravine of tossed and 
 tumbled rocks. But there had been a late snowfall on the high 
 plateau beyond, followed by heavy rain, and the swollen stream 
 was to-day worthy of its grand setting of cliff and moor. On 
 such occasions it becomes a landmark for all the country round, 
 for the cotton-spinning centres of New Mills and Stockport, as 
 well as for the grey and scattered farms which climb the long 
 backs of moorland lying between the Peak and the Cheshire 
 border. 
 
 To-day, also, after the snow and rains of early April, the air 
 was clear again. The sun was shining; a cold, dry wind was 
 blowing; there were sounds of spring in the air, and signs of it 
 on the thorns and larches. Far away on the boundary wall of 
 the farmland a cuckoo was sitting, his long tail swinging behind 
 him, his monotonous note filling the valley; and overhead a 
 couple of peewits chased each other in the pale, windy blue. 
 
 The keen air, the sun after the rain, sent life and exhilaration 
 
CHAT. I. CHILDHOOD 5 
 
 through the boy's young limbs. He leapt from the wall, and raced 
 back down the field, his dogs streaming behind him, the sheep, 
 with their newly dropped lambs, shrinking timidly to either side 
 as he passed. He made for a corner in the wall, vaulted it on to 
 the moor, crossed a rough dam built in the stream for sheep- 
 washing purposes, jumped in and out of the two grey-walled 
 sheep-pens beyond, and then made leisurely for a spot in the 
 brook — not the Downfall stream, but the Red Brook, one of its 
 westerly affluents — where he had left a miniature water-wheel 
 at work the day before. Before him and around him spread 
 the brown bosom of Kinder Scout; the cultivated land was left 
 behind; here on all sides, as far as the eye could see, was the 
 wild home of heather and plashing water, of grouse and peewit, 
 of cloud and breeze. 
 
 The little wheel, shaped from a block of firwood, was turning 
 merrily under a jet of water carefully conducted to it from a 
 neighbouring fall. David went down on hands and knees to 
 examine it. He made some little alteration in the primitive 
 machinery of it, his fingers touching it lightly and neatly, and 
 then, delighted with the success of it, he called Louie to come 
 and look. 
 
 Louie was sitting a few yards further up the stream, crooning 
 to herself as she swung to and fro, and snatching every now and 
 then at some tufts of primroses growing near her, which she 
 wrenched away with a hasty, wasteful hand, careless, apparently, 
 whether they reached her lap or merely strewed the turf about 
 her with their torn blossoms. When David called her she gath- 
 ered up the flowers anyhow in her apron, and dawdled towards 
 him, leaving a trail of them behind her. As she reached him, 
 however, she was struck by a book sticking out of his pocket, and, 
 stooping over him, with a sudden hawk-like gesture, as he 
 sprawled head downwards, she tried to get hold of it. 
 
 But he felt her movement. ' Let goo ! ' he said imperiously, 
 and, throwing himself round, while one foot slipped into th^ 
 water, he caught her hand, with its thin predatory fingers, and 
 pulled the book away. 
 
 ' Yo just leave my books alone, Louie. Yo do 'em a mischeef 
 whaniver yo can — an I'll not have it. ' 
 
 He turned his handsome, regular face, crimsoned by his posi- 
 tion and splashed by the vrater, towards her with an indignant 
 air. She laughed, and sat herself down again on the grass, 
 looking a very imp of provocation. 
 
 •They're stupid,' she said, shortly. 'Theymak yo a stupid 
 gonner ony ways.' 
 
 ' Oh ! do they ? ' he retorted, angrily. ' Bit I'll be even wi yo. 
 I'U tell yo noa moor stories out of 'em, not if yo ast iver so.' 
 
 The girl's mouth curled contemptuously, and she began to 
 gather her primroses into a bunch with an air of the utmost se- 
 renity. • She was a thin, agile, lightly made creature, apparently 
 about eleven. Her piercing black eyes, when they lifted, seemed 
 
6 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 to overweight the face, whereof the other features were at present 
 small and pinched. The mouth had a trick of remaining slightly- 
 open, showing a line of small pearly teeth; the chin was a little 
 sharp and shrewish. As for the hair, it promised to be splendid; 
 at present it was an unkempt, tangled mass, which Hannah 
 Grieve, the children's aunt, for her own credit's sake at chapel, or 
 in the public street, made occasional violent attempts to reduce to 
 order — to very little purpose, so strong and stubborn was the curl 
 of it. The whole figure was out of keeping with the English 
 moorside, with the sheep, and the primroses. 
 
 But so indeed was that of the boy, whose dark colouring was 
 more vivacious and pronounced than his sister's, because the red 
 of his cheek and lip was deeper, while his features, though larger 
 than hers, were more finely regular, and his eyes had the same 
 piercing blackness, the same all-examining keenness, as hers. 
 The yellowish tones of his worn fustian suit and a red Tam-o'- 
 Shanter cap completed the general effect of brilliancy and, as it 
 were, foreignness. 
 
 Having finished his inspection of his water-mill, he scrambled 
 across to the other side of the stream so as to be well out of his 
 sister's way, and, taking out the volume which was stretching his 
 pocket, he began to read it. It was a brown calf -bound book, 
 much worn, and on its title-page it bore the title of ' The Wars of 
 Jerusalem,' of Flavins Josephus, translated by S. Calmet, and a 
 date somewhere in the middle of the eighteenth century. To 
 this antique fare the boy settled himself down. The two collies 
 lay couched beside him; a stone-chat perched on one or other of 
 the great blocks which lay scattered over the heath gave out his 
 clinking note; while every now and then the loud peevish cluck 
 of the grouse came from the distant sides of the Scout. 
 
 Titus was now making his final assault on the Temple. The 
 Zealots were gathered in the innermost court, frantically beseech- 
 ing Heaven for a sign; the walls, the outer approaches of the 
 Sanctuary were choked with the dying and the dead. David sat 
 absorbed, elbows on knees, his face framed in his hands. Sud- 
 denly the descent of something cold and clammy on his bent neck 
 roused him with a most unpleasant shock. 
 
 Quick as lightning he faced round, snatching at his assailant; 
 but Louie was oif , scudding among the bilberry hillocks with peals 
 of laughter, while the slimy moss she had just gathered from the 
 edges of the brook sent cold creeping streams into the recesses of 
 David's neck and shoulders. He shook himself free of the mess 
 as best he could, and rushed after her. For a long time he chased 
 her in vain, then her foot tripped, and he came up with her just 
 as she rolled into the heather, gathered up like a hedgehog against 
 attack, her old hat held down over her ears and face. David fell 
 upon her and chastised her; but his fisticuffs probably looked 
 more formidable than they felt, for Louie laughed provokingly all 
 the time, and when he stopped out of breath she said exultantly, 
 as she sprang up, holding her skirts round her ready for another 
 
CHAP. I CHILDHOOD 7 
 
 flight, ' It's greened aw yur neck and yur collar — luvely ! Doan't 
 yo be nassty for nothink next time ! ' 
 
 And off she ran. 
 
 ' If yo meddle wi me ony moor,' he shouted after her fiercely, 
 ' yo see what I'll do ! ' 
 
 But in reality the male was helpless, as usual. He went rue- 
 fully down to the brook, and loosening his shirt and coat tried to 
 clean his neck and hair. Then, extremely sticky and uncomfort- 
 able, he went back to his seat and his book, his wrathful eyes 
 taking careful note meanwhile of Louie's whereabouts. And 
 thenceforward he read, as it were, on guard, looking up every 
 other minute. 
 
 Louie established herself some way up the further slope, in a 
 steep stony nook, under two black boulders, which protected her 
 rear in case of reprisals from David. Time passed away. David, 
 on the other side of the brook, revelling in the joys of battle, and 
 all the more alive to them perhaps because of the watch kept on 
 Louie by one section of his brain, was conscious of no length in 
 the minutes. But Louie's mood gradually became one of extreme 
 flatness. All her resources were for the moment at an end. She 
 could think of no fresh torment for David; besides, she knew 
 that she was observed. She had destroyed all the scanty store of 
 primroses along the brook; gathered rushes, begun to plait them, 
 and thrown them away; she had found a grouse's nest among the 
 dead fern, and, contrary to the most solemn injunctions of uncle 
 and keeper, enforced by the direst threats, had purloined and 
 broken an egg; and still dinner-time delayed. Perhaps, too, the 
 cold blighting wind, which soon made her look blue and pinched, 
 tamed her insensibly. At any rate, she got up after about an 
 hour, and coolly walked across to David. 
 
 He looked up at her with a quick frown. But she sat down, 
 and, clasping her hands round her knees, while the primroses she 
 had stuck in her hat dangled over her defiant eyes, she looked at 
 him with a grinning composure. 
 
 ' Yo can read out if yo want to,' she remarked. 
 
 ' Yo doan't deserve nowt, an I shan't,' said David, shortly. 
 
 ' Then I'll tell Aunt Hannah about how yo let t' lambs stray 
 lasst evenin, and about yor readin at neet.' 
 
 ' Yo may tell her aw t' tallydiddles yo can think on,' was the 
 unpromising reply. 
 
 Louie threw all the scorn possible into her forced smile, and 
 then, dropping full-length into the heather, she began to sing at 
 the top of a shrill, unpleasing voice, mainly, of course, for the sake 
 of harrying anyone in her neighbourhood who might wish to read. 
 
 ' Stop that squealin! ' David commanded, peremptorily. Where- 
 upon Louie sang louder than before. 
 
 David looked round in a fury, but his fury was, apparently, 
 instantly damped by the inward conviction, born of long expe- 
 rience, that he could do nothing to help himself. He sprang up, 
 and thrust his book into his pocket. 
 
8 THE HISTORY OF DAYTD GRIEVE book i 
 
 Nobory nil mak owt o' yo till yo get a bastin twice a day, wi 
 an odd lick extra for Sundays,' he remarked to her with grim em- 
 phasis when he had reached what seemed to him a safe distance. 
 Then he turned and strode up the face of the hill, the dogs at his 
 heels. Louie turned on her elbow, and threw such small stones 
 as she could discover among the heather after him, but they fell 
 harmlessly about him, and did not answer their purpose of pro- 
 voking him to turn round again. 
 
 She observed that he was going up to the old smithy on the 
 side of Kinder Low, and in a few minutes she got up and saun- 
 tered lazily after him. 
 
 ' T' owd smithy ' had been the enchanted ground of David's 
 childhood. It was a ruined building standing deep in heather, 
 half-way up the mountain-side, and ringed by scattered blocks 
 and tabular slabs of grit. Here in times far remote — beyond the 
 memory of even the oldest inhabitant — the millstones of the dis- 
 trict, which gave their name to the ' millstone grit ' formation of 
 the Peak, were fashioned. High up on the dark moorside stood 
 what remained of the primitive workshop. The fire-marked 
 stones of the hearth were plainly visible; deep in the heather near 
 lay the broken jambs of the window; a stone doorway with its 
 lintel was still standing; and on the slope beneath it, hardly to be 
 distinguished now from the great primaeval blocks out of which 
 they had sprung and to which they were fast returning, reposed 
 two or three huge millstones. Perhaps they bordered some 
 ancient track, climbed by the millers of the past when they came 
 to this remote spot to give their orders; but, if so, the track had 
 long since sunk out of sight in the heather, and no visible link 
 remained to connect the history of this high and lonely place with 
 that of those teeming valleys hidden to west and north among the 
 moors, the dwellers wherein must once have known it well. 
 From the old threshold the eye commanded a wilderness of moors, 
 rising wave-like one after another, from the green swell just 
 below whereon stood Reuben Grieve's farm, to the far-distant 
 Alderley Edge. In the hollows between, dim tall chimneys veiled 
 in mist and smoke showed the places of the cotton to\\Tis — of Hay- 
 field, New Mills, Staleybridge, Stockport; while in the far north- 
 west, any gazer to whom the country-side spoke familiarly might, 
 in any ordinary clearness of weather, look for and find the eternal 
 smoke-cloud of Manchester. 
 
 So the deserted smithy stood as it were spectator for ever of 
 that younger, busier England which wanted it no more. Human 
 life notwithstanding had left on it some very recent traces. On 
 the lintel of the ruined door two names were scratched deep into 
 the whitish under-grain of the black weather-beaten grit. The 
 upper one ran: ' David Suveret Grieve, Sept. 15, 1863;' the lower, 
 'Louise Stephanie Grieve, Sept. 15, 1863.' They were written 
 in bold round-hand, and could be read at a considerable dis- 
 tance. During the nine months they had been there, many 
 a rustic passer-by had been stopped by them, especially by the 
 
CHAP. II CHILDHOOD 9 
 
 oddity of the name Suveret, which tormented the Derbyshire 
 mouth. 
 
 In a corner of the walls stood something more puzzling still — a 
 large iron pan, filled to the brim with water, and firmly bedded on 
 a foundation of earth and stones. So still in general was the shin- 
 ing sheltered round, that the branches of the mountain ash which 
 leant against the crumbling wall, the tufts of hard fern growing 
 among the stones, the clouds which sailed overhead, were all 
 delicately mirrored in it. That pan was David Grieve's dearest 
 possession, and those reflections, so magical, and so ahve, had 
 contrived for him many a half -hour of almost breathless pleasure. 
 He had carried it off from the refuse-yard of a foundry in the 
 valley, where he had a friend in one of the apprentices. The farm 
 donkey and himself had dragged it thither on a certain never-to- 
 be-forgotten day, when Uncle Reuben had been on the other side 
 of the mountain at a shepherds' meeting in the Woodlands, while 
 Aunt Hannah was safely up to her elbows in the washtub. Boy's 
 back and donkey's back had nearly broken under the task, but 
 there the pan stood at last, the delight of David's heart. In a 
 crevice of the wall beside it, hidden jealously from the passer-by, 
 lay the other half of that perpetual entertainment it provided— a 
 store of tiny boats fashioned by David, and another friend, the 
 lame minister of the ' Christian Brethren ' congregation at Clough 
 End, the small factory town just below Kinder, who was a sea- 
 captain's son, and with a knife and a bit of deal could fashion you 
 any craft you pleased. These boats David only brought out on 
 rare occasions, very seldom admitting Louie to the show. But 
 when he pleased they became fleets, and sailed for new continents. 
 Here were the ships of Captain Cook, there the ships of Columbus. 
 On one side of the pan lay the Spanish m.ain, on the other the 
 islands of the South Seas. A certain tattered copy of the ' Royal 
 Magazine,' with pictures, which lay in Uncle Reuben's cupboard 
 at home, provided all that for David was to be known of these 
 names and places. But fancy played pilot and led the way; she 
 conjured up storms and islands and adventures; and as he hung 
 over his pan high on the Derbyshire moor, the boy, like Sidney of 
 old, ' sailed the seas where there "was never sand '—the vast and 
 viewless oceans of romance. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 Once safe in the smithy, David recovered his temper. If Louie 
 followed him, which was probable, he would know better how to 
 deal with her here, with a wall at his back and a definite area to 
 defend, than he did in the treacherous openness of the heath. 
 However, just as he was settling himself down, with a sigh of 
 relief, between the pan and the wall, he caught sight of something 
 through one of the gaps of the old ruin which made him fling 
 down his book and run to the doorway. There, putting his 
 fingers to his mouth, he blew a shrill whistle along the side of 
 
10 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 the Scout. A bent figure on a distant path sto^Dped at the sound. 
 It was an old man, with a plaid hanging from his shoulders. 
 He raised the stick he held, and shook it in recognition of Da- 
 vid's signal. Then resuming his bowed walk, he came slowly on, 
 followed by an old hound, whose gait seemed as feeble as his 
 master's. 
 
 David leant against the doorway waiting. Louie, meanwhile, 
 was lounging in the heather just below him, having very soon 
 caught him up. 
 
 ' What d' yo want 'im for ? ' she asked contemptuously, as the 
 new-comer approached: 'he'd owt to be in th' sylum. Aunt 
 Hannah says he's gone that silly, he owt to be took up. ' 
 
 'Well, he woan't be, then,' retorted David. 'Theer's nobory 
 about as ull lay a finger on 'im. He doan't do her no harm, nor yo 
 noather. Women f oak and gells alius want to be wooryin soomthin. ' 
 
 'Aunt Hannah says he lost his wits wi fuddlin,' repeated 
 Louie shrilly, striking straighter still for what she knew to be 
 one of David's tenderest points — his friendship for 'owd 'Lias 
 Dawson, ' the queer dreamer, who, fifteen years before, had been 
 the schoolmaster of Frimley Moor End, and in local esteem ' t' 
 cliverest mon abeawt t' Peak. ' 
 
 David with difficulty controlled a hot inclination to fall upon 
 his sister once more. Instead, however, he affected not to hear 
 her, and shouted a loud ' Good mornin ' to the old man, who was 
 toiling up the knoll on which the smithy stood. 
 
 'Lias responded feebly, panting hard the while. He sank 
 down on a stone outside the smithy, and for a while had neither 
 breath nor voice. Then he began to look about him ; his heaving 
 chest subsided, and there was a rekindling of the strange blue 
 eyes. He wore a high white stock and neckcloth; his plaid hung 
 round his emaciated shoulders with a certain antique dignity; his 
 rusty wideawake covered hair still abundant and even curly, but 
 snow-white; the face, with its white eyebrows, was long,' thin, 
 and full of an ascetic delicacy. 
 
 ' Wal, Davy, my lad,' the old man said at last, with a sort of 
 pompous mildness; ' I winna blame yo for 't, but yo interrupted 
 me sadly wi yur whistlin. I ha been occupied this day wi busi- 
 ness o' grdat importance. His Majesty King Charles' has been 
 wi me since seven o'clock this "mornin. And for th' fust time I 
 ha been gettin reet to th' bottom o' things wi him. I ha been 
 probin him, Davy — probin him. He couldno riddle through wi 
 lees; I kept him to 't, as yo mun keep a horse to a jump — straight 
 an tight. I had it aw out about Strafford, an t' Five Members, 
 an thoose dirty dealins wi th' Irish devils ! Yo should ha yerd 
 it, Davy — yo should, I'll uphowd yo ! ' 
 
 And placing his stick between his knees, the old man leant his 
 hands upon it, with a meditative and judicial air. The boy stood 
 looking down at him, a broad smile lighting up the dark and vivid 
 face. Old 'Lias supplied him with a perpetual ' spectacle ' which 
 never palled. 
 
CHAP. II . CHILDHOOD 11 
 
 ' Coe him back, 'Lias, he's soomwheer about. Yo need nobbut 
 coe him, an he'll coom.' 
 
 'Lias looked fatuously pleased. He lifted his head and affected 
 to scan the path along which he had just travelled. 
 
 ' Aye, I daur say he's not far. — Yor Majesty ! ' 
 
 And 'Lias laid his head on one side and listened. In a few 
 seconds a cunning smile stole over his lips. 
 
 ' Wal, Davy, yo're in luck. He's noan so onwillin,* we'st ha him 
 here in a twinklin. Yo may coe him mony things, but yo conno 
 coe him proud. Noa, as I've fund him, Charles Stuart has no 
 soart o' pride about him. Aye, theer yo are ! Sir, your Majesty's 
 obleeged an humble servant ! ' 
 
 And, raising his hand to his hat, the old man took it off and 
 swept it round with a courtly deliberation. Then Replacing it, he 
 sat with his face raised, as though to one standing near, his whole 
 attitude full of a careful and pompous dignity. 
 
 'Now then, yor Majesty,' said 'Lias grimly, ' I'st ha to put 
 that question to yo, yance moor, yo wor noan so well pleased wi 
 this mornin. But yo shouldno be soa tender, mon ! Th' truth 
 can do yo noa harm, wheer yo are, an I'm nobbut askin for infor- 
 maslmn\s sake. Soa out wi it; I'st not use it agen yo. That 
 — wee — bit — o' — damned— paper, — man, what sent poor Strafford 
 to his eend — yo mind it ? — aye, ^at yo do ! Well, now ' — and the old 
 man's tone grew gently seductive — ^explain yursel. We'n had 
 their tale,' and he pointed away to some imaginary accusers. 
 ' But yo mun trust an Englishman's sense o' fair play. Say your 
 say. We 'st gie yo a varra patient hearin,' 
 
 And wath chin thrown up, and his half -blurred eyes blinking 
 under their white lashes, 'Lias waited with a bland imperativeness 
 for the answer. 
 
 ' Eh ? ' said 'Lias at last, frowning and hollowing his hand to 
 his ear. 
 
 He listened another few seconds, then he dropped his hand 
 sharply. 
 
 ' WTiat's 'at yo're sayin ? ' he asked hastily; ' 'at yo couldno 
 help it, not whativer — that i' truth yo had nothin to do wi 't, no 
 moor than mysel— that yo wor forcit to it — willy-nilly— by them 
 devils o' Parliament foak— by Mr. Pym and his loike, wi whom, if 
 God-amighty ha' not reckoned since, theer 's no moor justice i' 
 His Kingdom than yo found i' yours ? ' 
 
 The words came out with a rush, tumbling over one another till 
 they suddenly broke off in a loud key of indignant scorn. Then 
 'Lias fell silent a moment, and slowly shook his head over the 
 inveterate shuffling of the House of Stuart. 
 
 ' 'Twinna do, man — 'twinna do,' he said at last, with an air of 
 fine reproof. ' He wor your friend, wor that poor sinner Strafford 
 —your awn familiar friend, as t' Psalm says. I'm not takin up a 
 brief for him, t' Lord knows ! He wor but meetin his deserts, to 
 my thinkin, when his yed went loupin. But yo put a black mark 
 agen yore name when yo signed that bit paper for your awn skin's 
 
13 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 sake. Naw, naw, man, yo should ha lost your awn yed a bit 
 sooner fust. Eh, it wor base — it wor cooardly ! ' 
 
 'Lias's voice dropped, and he fell muttering to himself indis- 
 tinctly. David, bending over him, could not make out whether 
 it was Charles or his interlocutor speaking, and began to be afraid 
 that the old man's performance was over before it had well begun. 
 But on the contrary, 'Lias emerged with fresh energy from the 
 gulf of inarticulate argument in which his poor wits seemed to 
 have lost themselves awhile. 
 
 'But I'm no blamin yo awthegither,' he cried, raising himself, 
 with a protesting wave of the hand. ' Theer's naw mak o' mis- 
 chief i' this world, but t' women are at t' bottom o't. Whar's 
 that proud foo of a wife o' yourn ? Send her here, man; send her 
 here ! 'Lias Dawson ull mak her hear reason ! Now, Davy ! ' 
 
 And the old man drew the lad to him with one hand, while he 
 raised a finger softly with the other. 
 
 ' Just study her, Davy, my lad,' he said in an undertone, which 
 swelled louder as his excitement grew, ' theer she stan's, by t' side 
 o' t' King. She's a gay good-lookin female, that I'll confess to, 
 but study her; look at her curls, Davy, an her paint, an her 
 nakedness. For shame, madam ! Goo hide that neck o' yourn, 
 goo hide it, I say ! An her faldaddles, an her jewles, an her 
 ribbons. Is that a woman — a French hizzy like that — to get a 
 King out o' trooble, wha's awready lost aw t' wits he wor bom 
 wi?' 
 
 And with sparkling eyes and outstretched arm 'Lias pointed 
 sternly into vacancy. Thrilled with involuntary awe the boy and 
 girl looked round them. For, in spite of herself, Louie had'^come 
 closer, little by little, and was now sitting cross-legged in front of 
 'Lias. Then Louie's shrill voice broke in — 
 
 ' Tell us what she's got on ! ' And the girl leant eagerly for- 
 ward, her magnificent eyes kindling into interest. 
 
 ' What she's got on, my lassie ? Eh, but I'm feart your yead, 
 too, is fu' o' gauds ! — Wal, it's but nateral to females. She's aw 
 in white satin, my lassie, — an in her brown hair theer's pearls, an 
 a blue ribbon just howdin down t' little luve-locks on her forehead 
 — an on her saft neck theer's pearls again — not soa white, by a 
 thoosand mile, as her white skin — an t' lace fa's ower her proud 
 shoothers, an down her luvely arms — an she looks at me wi her 
 angry eyes — Eh, but she's a queen ! ' cried 'Lias, in a sudden 
 outburst of admiration. ' She hath been a persecutor o' th' 
 saints — a varra Jeezebel — the Lord hath put her to shame — but 
 she's moor sperrit — moor o' t' blood o' kingship i' her little finger, 
 nor Charles theer in aw his body ! ' 
 
 And by a strange and crazy reversal of feeling, the old man 
 sat in a kind of ecstasy, enamoured of his own creation, looking 
 into thin air. As for Louie, during the description of the Queen's 
 dress she had drunk in every word with a greedy attention, 
 her changing eyes fixed on the speaker's face. When he stopped, 
 however, she drew a long breath. 
 
CHAP. II CHILDHOOD IS 
 
 * It's aw lees ! ' she said scornfuUy. 
 
 * ITowd your tongue, Louie ! ' cried David, angrily. 
 
 But 'Lias took no notice. He was talking again very fast, 
 but incoherently. Hampden, Pym, Fairfax, Falkland— the great 
 names clattered past every now and then, like horsemen, through 
 a maze of words, but with no perceptible order or purpose. The 
 phrases concerning them came to nothing ; and though there 
 were apparently many voices speaking, nothing intelligible could 
 be made out. 
 
 When next the mists cleared a little from the old visionary's 
 brain, David gathered that Cromwell was close by, defending 
 himself with difficulty, apparently, like Charles, against 'Lias's 
 assaults. In his youth and middle age— until, in fact, an event 
 of some pathos and mystery had broken his life across, and cut 
 him ofle from his prof ession— 'Lias had been a zealous teacher and 
 a voracious reader ; and through the dreams of fifteen years the 
 didactic faculty had persisted and grown amazingly. He played 
 schoolmaster now to all the heroes of history. Whether it were 
 Elizabeth wrangling with Mary Stuart, or Cromwell marshalling 
 his Irongides, or Buckingham falling under the assassin's dagger 
 at 'Lias's feet, or Napoleon walking restlessly up and down the 
 deck of the ' Bellerophon,' 'Lias rated them every one. He was 
 lord of a shadow world, wherein he walked with kings and 
 queens, warriors and poets, putting them one and all superbly to 
 rights. Yet so subtle were the old man's wits, and so bright 
 his fancy, even in derangement, that he preserved through it 
 all a considerable measure of dramatic fitness. He gave his pup- 
 pets a certain freedom ; he let them state their case ; and threw 
 almost as much ingenuity into the pleading of it as into the 
 refuting of it. Of late, since he had made "friends with Davy 
 Grieve, he had contracted a curious habit of weaving the boy 
 into his visions. 
 
 ' Davy, what's your opinion o' that ? ' or, ' Davy, my lad, did 
 yo iver hear sich clit-clat i' your life ? ' or again, ' Davy, yo'll 
 not be misled, surely, by sich a piece o' speshul-plcadin as that ? ' 
 
 So the appeals would run, and the boy, at first bewildered, 
 and even irritated by them, as by something which threw hin- 
 drances in the way of the only dramatic entertainment the High 
 Peak was likely to afford him, had learnt at last to join in them 
 with relish. Many meetings with 'Lias on the moorside, which 
 the old seer made alive for both of them— the plundering of 
 'Lias's books, whence he had drawn the brown ' Josephus ' in 
 his pocket — these had done more than anything else to stock 
 the boy's head with its present strange jumble of knowledge 
 and ideas. Knowledge, indeed, it scarcely was, but rather the 
 materials for a certain kind of excitement. 
 
 ' Wal, Davy, did yo hear that ? ' said 'Lias, presently, look- 
 ing round on the boy with a doubtful countenance, after Crom- 
 well had given an unctuous and highly Biblical account of the 
 slaughter at Drogheda and its reasons. 
 
14 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 ' How mony did he say he killed at that place ? ' asked the 
 boy sharply. 
 
 ' Thoosands,' said Dawson, solemnly. ' Theer was naw mercy 
 asked nor gi'en. And those wha escaped knockin on t' yead 
 were aw sold as slaves — every mon jock o' them ! ' 
 
 A strong light of anger showed itself in David's face. 
 
 ' Then he wor a cantin murderer ! Yo mun tell him so ! If 
 I'd my way, he'd hang for 't ! ' 
 
 'Eh, laddie, they were no wt but rebels an Papists,' said the 
 old man, complacently. 
 
 ' Don't yo becall Papists ! ' cried David, fiercely, facing round 
 upon him. ' My mither wor a Papist.' 
 
 A curious change of expression appeared on 'Lias's face. He 
 put his hand behind his ear that he might hear better, turned 
 a pair of cunning eyes on David, while his lips pressed them- 
 selves together. 
 
 ' Your mither wor a Papist ? an your feyther wor Sandy 
 Grieve. Ay, ay — I've yeerd tell strange things o' Sandy 
 Grieve's wife,' he said slowly. 
 
 Suddenly Louie, who had been lying full length on her back 
 in the sun, with her hat over her face, apparently asleep, sat 
 bolt upright. 
 
 'Tell us what about her,' she said imperiously. 
 
 ' Noa — noa,' said the old man, shaking his head, while a 
 sort of film seemed to gather over the eyes, and the face and 
 features relaxed — fell, as it were, into their natural expression 
 of weak senility, which so long as he was under the stress of 
 his favourite illusions was hardly apparent. ' But it's true — it's 
 varra true — I've yeerd tell strange things about Sandy Grieve's 
 wife. ' 
 
 And still aimlessly shaking his head, he sat staring at the 
 opposite side of the ravine, the lower jaw dropping a little. 
 
 'He knows nowt about it,' said David, roughly, the light of 
 a sombre, half -reluctant curiosity, which had arisen in his look, 
 dying down. 
 
 He threw himself on the grass by the dogs, and began teasing 
 and playing with them. Meanwhile Louie sat studying 'Lias 
 with a frowning hostility, making faces at him now and then 
 by way of amusement. To disappoint the impetuous will em- 
 bodied in that small frame was to commit an offence of the 
 first order. 
 
 But one might as well make faces at a stone post as at old 
 'Lias when his wandering fit was on him. When the entertain- 
 ment palled, Louie got up with a yawn, meaning to lounge back 
 to the farm and investigate the nearness of dinner. But, as she 
 turned, something caught her attention. It was the gleam of a 
 pool, far away beyond the Downfall, on a projecting spur of the 
 moor. 
 
 ' What d' yo coe that bit watter ? " she asked David, suddenly 
 pointing to it. 
 
CHAP. It CHILDHOOD 15 
 
 David rolled himself round on his face, and took a look at the 
 bluish patch on the heather. 
 
 ' It hasna got naw name,' he said, at a venture. 
 
 ' Then yo're a stoopid, for it has,' replied Louie, triumphantly. 
 ' It's t' Mermaid Pool. Theer wor a Manchester mon at Wig- 
 sons' last week, telling aw maks o' tales. Theer's a mermaid 
 lives in 't — a woman, I tell tha, wi a fish's tail — it's in a book, an 
 he read it out, soa theer — an on Easter Eve neet she cooms out, 
 an walks about t' Scout, combin her hair — an if onybody sees her 
 an wishes for soomthin, they get it, sartin sure ; an ' 
 
 ' Mermaids is just f addle an nonsense,' interrupted David, 
 tersely. 
 
 ' Oh, is they ? Then I spose books is faddle. Most on 'em 
 are — t' kind of books yo like — I'U uphowd yo ! ' 
 
 ' Oh, is they ? ' said David, mimicking her. ' Wal, I like 'em, 
 yo see, aw t' same. I tell yo, mermaids is nonsense, cos I know 
 'they are. Theer was yan at Hayfield Fair, an the feUys they 
 nearly smashed t' booth down, cos they said it wor a cheat. 
 Theer was just a gell, an they 'd stuffed her into a fish's skin 
 and sewed 'er up; an when yo went close yo could see t' 
 stuffin runnin out of her. An theer was a man as held 'er up 
 by a wire roun her waist, an waggled her i' t' watter. But t' foak 
 as had paid sixpence to coom in, they just took an tore down t' 
 place, an they 'd 'a dookt t' man an t' gell boath, if th' coonstable 
 hadn't coom. Naw, mermaids is faddle,' he repeated contemp- 
 tuously. 
 
 ' Faddle ? ' repeated 'Lias, interrogatively. 
 
 The children started. They had supposed 'Lias was off doting 
 and talking gibberish for the rest of the morning. But his tone 
 was brisk, and as David looked up he caught a queer flickering 
 brightness in the old man's eye, which showed him that 'Lias was 
 once more capable of furnishing amusement or information. 
 
 ' What do they coe that bit watter, 'Lias ? ' he inquired, point- 
 ing to it. 
 
 ' That bit watter ? ' repeated 'Lias, eyeing it. A sort of vague 
 trouble came into his face, and his wrinkled hands lying on his 
 stick began to twitch nervously. 
 
 ' Aye — theer's a Manchester man been cramming Wigsons wi 
 tales — says he gets 'em out of a book — 'bout a woman 'at walks t' 
 Scout Easter Eve neet, — an a lot o' ninny-hommer's talk. Yo 
 niver heerd nowt about it — did yo, 'Lias ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, yo did, Mr, Dawson — now, didn't yo ? ' said Louie, per- 
 suasively, enraged that David would never accept information 
 from her, while she was always expected to take it from him. 
 
 ' A woman — 'at walks t' Scout,' said 'Lias, uncertainly, flush- 
 ing as he spoke. 
 
 Then, looking tremulously from his companions to the pool, he 
 said, angrily raising his stick and shaking it at David, ' Davy, 
 yo're takin advantage — Davy, yo're doin what yo owt not. If 
 my Margret were here, she 'd let yo know ! ' 
 
16 THE HISTORY OP DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 The words rose into a cry of quavering passion. The children 
 stared at him in amazement. But as Davy, aggrieved, was 
 defending himself, the old man laid a violent hand on his arm and 
 silenced him. His eyes, which were black and keen still in the 
 blanched face, were riveted on the gleaming pool. His features 
 worked as though under the stress of some possessing force; a 
 shiver ran through the emaciated limbs. 
 
 'Oh! yo want to know abeawt Jenny Crum's pool, do yo?' 
 he said at last in a low agitated voice. ' Nobbut look, my lad!— 
 nobtaut look!— an see for yoursen.' 
 
 He paused, his chest heaving, his eye fixed. Then, suddenly, 
 he broke out in a flood of passionate speech, still gripping David. 
 
 ^ Fasson Maine! Passon 3Iaine/—hsL yo got her, th' owd 
 woman ? Aye, aye — sure enough — 'at 's she — as yo're aw drivin 
 afore yo — hoontit like a wild beeast — wi her grey hair streamin, 
 and her hands tied— Ah! '—and the old man gave a wild cry, 
 which startled both the children to their feet. ' Conno yo hear 
 lier ? — eh, but it's enough to tear a body's heart out to hear an 
 owd woman scream like tha t ! ' 
 
 He stopped, trembling, and listened, his hand hollowed to his 
 ear. Louie looked at her brother and laughed nervously; but her 
 little hard face had paled. David laid hold of her to keep her 
 quiet, and shook himself free of 'Lias. But 'Lias took no notice 
 of them now at all, his changed seer's gaze saw nothing but the 
 distance and the pool. 
 
 ' Are yo quite sure it wor her, Passon ? ' he went on, appeal- 
 ingly. ' She's nobbut owd, an it's a far cry fro her bit cottage to 
 owd Needham's Farm. An th' chilt might ha deed, and t' cattle 
 might ha strayed, and t' geyats might ha opened o' theirsels I 
 Yo'll not dare to speak agen that. They might f Ay, ay, we aw 
 know t' devil's strong ; but she's eighty-one year coom Christmas 
 
 — an— an . Doan't, doan't let t' childer see, nor t' yoong 
 
 gells ! If yo let em see sich sects they'll breed 5^0 wolves, not 
 babes ! Ah ! ' 
 
 And again 'Lias gave the same cry, and stood half risen, his 
 hands on his staff, looking. 
 
 ' What is it, 'Lias ? ' said David, eagerly ; ' what is 't yo see ? ' 
 
 'Theer's my grandfeyther,' said 'Lias, almost in a whisper, 
 ' an owd Needham an his two brithers, an yoong Jack Needham's 
 woife — her as losst her babby — an yoong lads an lasses fro 
 Clough End, childer awmost, and t' coonstable, an Passon Maine — 
 Ay — ay — yo've doon it ! Yo've doon it ! She'll mak naw moor 
 mischeef neets — she's gay quiet now ! T' watter's got her fasst 
 enough ! ' 
 
 And, drawing himself up to his full height, the old man 
 pointed a quivering finger at the pool. 
 
 ' Ay, it's got her — an your stones are tied fasst ! Passon 
 Maine says she's safe — that yo'll see her naw moor — 
 While holly sticks he green, 
 While stone on Kinder Scoot be seen. 
 
CHAP. II CHILDHOOD 17 
 
 But / tell yo, Passon Maine lees ! I tell yo t' witch uU walk — 
 t' witch ull walk ! ' 
 
 For several seconds 'Lias stood straining forward — out of 
 himself — a tragic and impressive figure. Then, in a moment, 
 from that distance his weird gift had been re-peopling, some- 
 thing else rose towards him— some hideous memory, as it seemed, 
 of personal anguish, personal fear. The exalted seer's look van- 
 ished, the tension within gave way, the old man shrank together. 
 He fell back heavily on the stone, hiding his face in his hands, 
 and muttering to himself. 
 
 The children looked at each other oddly. Then David, half 
 afraid, touched him. 
 
 ' What's t' matter, 'Lias ? Are yo bad ? ' 
 
 The old man did not move. They caught some disjointed 
 words, — ' cold — ay, t' neet's cold, varra cold ! ' 
 
 ' 'Lias ! ' shouted David. 
 
 'Lias looked up startled, and shook his head feebly. 
 
 ' Are yo bad, 'Lias ? ' 
 
 ' Ay ! ' said the old schoolmaster, in the voice of one speaking 
 through a dream — ' ay, varra bad, varra cold — I mun — lig me 
 down — a bit. ' 
 
 And he rose feebly. David instinctively caught hold of him, 
 and led him to a corner close by in the ruined walls, where the 
 heather and bilberry grew thick up to the stones. 'Lias sank 
 down, his head fell against the wall, and a light and restless 
 sleep seemed to take possession of him. 
 
 David stood studying him, his hands in his pockets. Never 
 in all his experience of him had 'Lias gone through such a perfor- 
 mance as this. What on earth did it mean ? There was more in 
 it than appeared, clearly. He would tell Margaret, 'Lias's old 
 wife, who kept him and tended him like the apple of her eye. 
 And he would find out about the pool, anyway. Jenny Cruin's 
 pool'? What on earth did that mean? The name had never 
 reached his ears before. Of course Uncle Reuben would know. 
 The boy eyed it curiously, the details of 'Lias's grim vision 
 returning upon him. The wild circling moor seemed suddenly to 
 have gained a mysterious interest. 
 
 ' Didn't I tell yo he wor gone silly ? ' said Louie, triumphantly, 
 at his elbow. 
 
 ' He's not gone that silly, onyways, but he can freeten little 
 gells,' remarked David, dryly, instinctively putting out an arm, 
 meanwhile, to prevent her disturbing the poor sleeper. 
 
 'I worn't freetened,' insisted Louie; ^ yo were! He may 
 skrike aw day if he likes — for aw I care. He'll be runnin into 
 hedges by dayleet soon. Owd churn-yed ! ' 
 
 ' Howd your clatterin tongue I ' said David, angrily, pushing 
 her out of the doorway. She lifted a loose sod of heather, which 
 lay just outside, flung it at him, and then took to her heels, and 
 made for the farm and dinner, with the speed of a wild goat. 
 
 David brushed his clothes, took a stroll with the dogs, and 
 
18 THE HISTORY OF DxiVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 recovered his temper as best he might. When he came back, 
 pricked by the state of his appetite, to see whether 'Lias had 
 recovered enough sanity to get home, he found the old man 
 sitting up, looking strangely white and exhausted, and fumbling, 
 in a dazed way, for the tobacco to which he always resorted at 
 moments of nervous fatigue. His good wife Margaret never sent 
 him out without mended clothes, spotless linen, and a paper of 
 tobacco in his pocket. He sat chewing it awhile in silence ; 
 David's remarks to him met with only incoherent answers, and 
 at last the schoolmaster got up and with the help of his stick 
 tottered off along the path by which he had come. David's eyes 
 followed the bent figure uneasily ; nor did he turn homeward till 
 it disappeared over the brow. 
 
 CHAPTEK III 
 
 Anyone opening the door of Needham Farm kitchen that night 
 at eight would have found the inmates at supper — a meagre 
 supper, which should, according to the rule of the house, have 
 been eaten in complete silence. Hannah Grieve, the children's 
 aunt, and mistress of the farm, thought it an offence to talk at 
 meals. She had not been so brought up. 
 
 But Louie this evening was in a state of nerves. The after- 
 noon had seen one of those periodical struggles between her and 
 Hannah, which did so much to keep life at Needham Farm from 
 stagnating into anything like comfort. The two combatants, 
 however, must have taken a certain joy in them, since they 
 recurred with so much regularity. Hannah had won, of course, 
 as the grim self-importance of her bearing amply showed. Louie 
 had been forced to patch the house-linen as usual, mainly by the 
 temporary confiscation of her Sunday hat, the one piece of decent 
 clothing she possessed, and to which she clung with a feverish 
 attachment — generally, indeed, sleeping with it beside her pillow. 
 But, though she was beaten, she was still seething with rebellion. 
 Her eyes were red, but her shaggy head was thrown back 
 defiantly, and theie was hysterical battle in the expression of 
 her sharply-tilted nose and chin. 
 
 ' Mind yorsel,' cried Hannah angrily, as the child put down 
 her plate of porridge with a bang which made the housewife 
 tremble for her crockery. 
 
 ' What's t' matter wi yo, Louie ? ' said Uncle Reuben, looking 
 at her with some discomfort. He had just finished the delivery 
 of a long grace, into which he had thrown much unction, and 
 Louie's manners made but an ill-fitting Amen. 
 
 ' It's nasty ! ' said the child passionately. ' It's alius porridge 
 — porridge — porridge — porridge — an I hate it — an it's bitter — an 
 it's a shame ! I wish I wor at Wigson's — 'at I do ! ' 
 
 Davy glanced up at his sister under his eyebrows. Hannah 
 scanned her niece all over with a slow, observant scrutiny, as 
 though she were a dangerous animal that must be watched. 
 
CHAP. Ill CHILDHOOD 19 
 
 Otherwise Louie might have spoken to the wall for all the effect 
 she produced. Keuben, however, was more vulnerable. 
 
 'What d' yo want to be at Wigson's for?' he asked. 'Yo 
 should be content wi your state o' life, Louie. It's a sin to "be 
 discontented — I've tellt yo so many times.' 
 
 ' They've got scones and rhubarb jam for tea ! ' cried the child, 
 tumbling the news out as though she were bursting with it. 
 ' Mrs. Wigson, she's alius makin em nice things. She's kind, she 
 is— she's nice— she wouldn't make em eat stuff like this— she'd 
 give it to the pigs — 'at she would ! ' 
 
 And all the time it was pitiful to see how the child was gob- 
 bling up her unpalatable food, evidently from the instinctive fear, 
 nasty as it was, that it would be taken from her as a punishment 
 for her behaviour. 
 
 'Now, Louie, yo're a silly gell,' began Reuben, expostulating ; 
 but Hannah interposed. 
 
 ' I wudn't advise yo, Reuben Grieve, to go wastin your breath 
 on sich a minx. If I were yo, I'd keep it fur my awn eating.' 
 
 And she calmly put another slice of cold bacon on his plate, 
 as though reminding him of his proper business. Reuben fell 
 silent and munched his bacon, though he could not forbear study- 
 ing his niece every now and then uncomfortably. He was a tall, 
 large-boned man, with weakish eyes, sandy whiskers and beard, 
 grown in a fringe round his long face, and a generally clumsy 
 and disjointed air. The tremulous, uncertain movements of his 
 hand as he stretched it out for one article of food after another 
 seemed to express the man's character. 
 
 Louie went on gulping down her porridge. Her plate was 
 just empty when Hannah caught a movement of Reuben's fork. 
 He was in the act of furtively transferring to Louie a portion of 
 bacon. But he could not restrain himself from looking at Han- 
 nah as he held out the morsel. Hannah's answering look was too 
 much for him. The bacon went into his mouth. 
 
 Supper over, Louie went out to sit on the steps, and Hannah 
 contemptuously forbore to make her come in and help clear away. 
 Out in the air, the child slowly quieted down. It was a clear, 
 frosty April night, promising a full moon. The fresh, nipping 
 air blew on the girl's heated temples and swollen eyes. Against 
 her will almost, her spirits came back. She swept Aunt Hannah 
 out of her mind, and began to plan something which consoled 
 her. When would they have their stupid prayers and let her get 
 upstairs ? « 
 
 David meanwhile hung about the kitchen. He would have 
 liked to ask Uncle Reuben about the pool and 'Lias's story, but 
 Hannah was bustling about, and he never mentioned 'Lias in her 
 hearing. To do so would have been like handing over something 
 weak, for which he had a tenderness, to be worried. 
 
 But he rummaged out an old paper-covered guide to the Peak, 
 which he remembered to have been left at the farm one summer's 
 day by a passing tourist, who paid Hannah handsomely for some 
 
20 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 bread and cheese. Turning to the part which concerned Clough 
 End, Hayfleld, and the Scout, he found : — 
 
 ' In speaking of the Mermaiden's Pool, it may be remarked 
 that the natives of several little hamlets surrounding Kinder 
 Scout have long had a tradition that there is a beautiful woman — 
 an English Hamadryad — ^lives in the side of the Scout ; that she 
 comes to bathe every day in the Mermaid's Well, and that the 
 man who has the good luck to behold her bathing will become 
 immortal and never die. ' 
 
 David shut the book and fell pondering, like many another 
 wiser mortal before him, on the discrepancies of evidence. What 
 was a Hamadryad ? and why no mention of Easter Eve ? and 
 what had it all to do with the witch and Parson Maine and 
 'Lias's excitement ? 
 
 Meanwhile, the thump made by the big family Bible as Han- 
 nah deposited it on the table warned both him and the truant 
 outside that prayer-time had come. Louie came in noisily when 
 she was called, and both children lounged unwillingly into their 
 appointed seats. 
 
 Nothing but the impatience and indifference of childhood, 
 however, could have grudged Reuben Grieve the half -hour which 
 followed. During that one half -hour in the day, the mild, effaced 
 man, whose absent-minded ways and complete lack of business 
 faculty were the perpetual torment of his wife, was master of his 
 house. While he was rolling out the psalm, expounding the 
 chapter, or ' wrestling ' in prayer, he was a personality and an 
 influence even for the wife who, in spite of a dumb congruity of 
 habit, regarded him generally as incompetent and in the way. 
 Reuben's religious sense was strong and deep, but some very 
 natural and pathetically human instincts entered also into his 
 constant pleasure in this daily function. Hannah, with her strong 
 and harsh features settled into repose, with her large hands, red- 
 dened by the day's work, lying idle in her lap, sat opposite to him 
 in silence ; for once she listened to him, whereas all day he had 
 listened to her ; and the moment made a daily oasis in the life of 
 a man who, in his own dull, peasant way, knew that he was a 
 failure, and knew also that no one was so well aware of it as his 
 wife. 
 
 With David and Louie the absorbing interest was generally to 
 see whether the prayer would be over before the eight-day clock 
 struck nine, or whether the loud whirr which preceded that event 
 would be suddenly and deafeningly let loose upon Uncle Reuben 
 in the middle of his peroration, as sometimes happened when 
 the speaker forgot himself. To-night that catastrophe was just 
 avoided by a somewhat obvious hurry through the Lord's Prayer. 
 When they rose from their knees Hannah put away the Bible, the 
 boy and girl raced each other upstairs, and the elders were left 
 alone. 
 
 An hour passed away. Reuben was dozing peacefully in the 
 chimney-corner; Aunt Hannah had just finished putting a patch 
 
CHAP. Ill CHILDHOOD 21 
 
 on a pair of Reuben's trousers, was folding up her work and pre- 
 paring to rouse her slumbering companion, when a sound over- 
 head caught her ear. 
 
 ' What's that chilt at now ? ' she exclaimed angrily, getting up 
 and listening. ' She'd owt ta been in bed long ago. Soomthin 
 mischeevous, I'll be bound.' And lighting a dip beside her, she 
 went upstairs with a treacherously quiet step. There was a sound 
 of an opening door, and then Reuben downstairs was startled out 
 of his snooze by a sudden gamut of angry cries, a scurrying of 
 feet, and Hannah scolding loudly — 
 
 * Coom downstairs wi yo ! — coom down an show your uncle 
 what a figure o' foon yo'n been makkin o' yorsel ! I'st teach yo to 
 burn three candles down awbut to nothink at yo may bedizen 
 yorsel in this way. Coom along wl yo. ' 
 
 There was a scuffle on the stairs, and then Hannah burst open 
 the door, dragging in an extraordinary figure indeed. Struggling 
 and crying in her aunt's grip was Louie. White trailing folds 
 swept behind her; a white garment underneath, apparently her 
 nightgown, was festooned with an old red-and-blue striped sash 
 of some foreign make. Round her neck hung a necklace of that 
 gold filigree workvrhich spreads from Genoa all along the Riviera; 
 her magnificent hair hung in masses over her shoulders, crowned 
 by the primroses of the morning, which had been hurriedly twisted 
 into a \^Teath by a bit of red ribbon rummaged out of some drawer 
 of odds-and-ends; and her thin brown arms and hands appeared 
 under the white cloak — nothing but a sheet — which was being 
 now trodden underfoot in the child's passionate efforts to get away 
 from her aunt. Ten minutes before she had been a happy queen 
 flaunting over her attic floor in a dream of joy before a broken, 
 propped-up looking-glass under the splendid illumination of three 
 dips, long since secreted for purposes of the kind. Now she was 
 a bedraggled, tear-stained Fury, -^ith a fierce humiliation and a 
 boundless hatred glaring out of the eyes, which in Aunt Hannah's 
 opinion were so big as to be ' right down oogly.' Poor Louie ! 
 
 Uncle Reuben, startled from his snooze by this apparition, 
 looked at it with a sleepy bewilderment, and fumbled for his spec- 
 tacles. ' Ay, yo'd better luke at her close,' said Hannah, grimly, 
 giving her niece a violent shake as she spoke; 'I wor set yo 
 should just see her fur yance at her antics. Yo sa^y soomtimes I'm 
 hard on her. Well, I'd ask ony pusson aloive if they'd put up wi 
 this soart o' thing — dressin up like a bad hizzy that waaks t' 
 streets, wi three candles— three, I tell yo, Reuben — flarin away, 
 and the curtains close to, an nothink but the Lord's mussy keepin 
 'em from cat chin. An she peacockm an gallivantin away enough 
 to mak a cat laugh ! ' 
 
 And Aunt Hannah in her enraged scorn even undertook a gro- 
 tesque and mincing imitation of the peacocking aforesaid. ' Let 
 goo ! ' muttered Ix)uie between her shut teeth, and with a wild 
 strength she at last flung off her aunt and sprang for the door. 
 But Hannah was too quick for her and put her back against it. 
 
23 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book I 
 
 < -^0 — yo'll not goo till your ooncle there's gien yo a word. He 
 shan't say I'm hard on yo for nothink, yo good-for-nowt little 
 powsement — he shall see yo as yo are ! ' 
 
 And with the bitterness of a smouldering grievance, expressed 
 in every feature, Hannah looked peremptorily at her husband. 
 He, poor man, was much perplexed. The hour of devotion was 
 past, and outside it he was not accustomed to be placed in impor- 
 tant situations. 
 
 ' Louie— didn't yo know yo wor a bad gell to stay up and burn 
 t' candles, an fret your aunt ? ' he said with a feeble solemnity, 
 his look fixed on the huddled white figure against the mahogany 
 press. 
 
 Louie stood with eyes resolutely cast down, and a forced smile, 
 tremulous, but insolent to a degree, slowly lifting up the corners 
 of her mouth as Uncle Reuben addressed her. The tears were 
 still running off her face, but she meant her smile to convey the 
 indomitable scorn for her tormentors which not even Aunt Hannah 
 could shake out of her. 
 
 Hannah Grieve was exasperated by the child's expression. 
 
 ' Yo little sloot ! ' she said, seizing her by the arm again, and 
 losing her temper for good and all, ' yo've got your mither's bad 
 blude in yo— an it ull coom out, happen what may ! ' 
 
 ' Hannah ! ' exclaimed Reuben, ' Hannah— mind yoursel.' 
 
 'My mither^s dead,' said the child, slowly raising her dark, 
 burning eyes. ' My mither worn't bad ; an if yo say she wor, 
 yo're a beast for sayin it ! I wish it wor yo wor dead, an my 
 mither wor here instead o' yo ! ' 
 
 To convey the concentrated rage of this speech is impossible. 
 It seemed to Hannah that the child had the evil eye. Even she 
 quailed under it. 
 
 ' Go 'long wi yo,' she said grimly, in a white heat, while she 
 opened the door—' an the less yo coom into my way for t' future, 
 the better.' 
 
 She pushed the child out and shut the door. 
 
 ' Yo are hard on her, Hannah ! ' exclaimed Reuben, in his 
 perplexity— pricked, too, as usual in his conscience. 
 
 The ^ repetition of this parrot-cry, as it seemed to her, mad- 
 dened his wife. 
 
 ' She's a wanton's brat,' she said violently ; ' an she's got t 
 wanton's blood.' 
 
 Reuben was silent. He was afraid of his wife in these moods. 
 Hannah began, with trembling hands, to pick up the contents of 
 her work-basket, which had been overturned in the scuffle. 
 
 Meanwhile Louie rushed upstairs, stumbling over and tearing 
 her finery, the convulsive sobs beginning again as soon as the 
 tension of her aunt's hated presence was removed. 
 
 At the top she ran against something in the dark. It was 
 David, who had been hanging over the stairs, listening. But she 
 flung past him. 
 
 ' What's t' matter, Louie ? ' he asked in a loud whisper through 
 
CHAP. Ill CHILDHOOD 28 
 
 the door she shut in his face ; ' what's th' owd crosspatch been 
 slangin about ? ' 
 
 But he got no answer, and he was afraid of being caught 
 by Aunt Hannah if he forced his way in. So he went back to 
 his own room, and closed, without latching, his door. He had 
 had an inch of dip to go to bed with, and had spent that on 
 reading. His book was a battered copy of 'Anson's Voyages,' 
 which also came from 'Lias's store, and he had been straining his 
 eyes over it with enchantment. Then had come the sudden noise 
 upstairs and down, and his candle and his pleasure had gone out 
 together. The heavy footsteps of his uncle and aunt ascending 
 warned him to keep quiet. They turned into their room, and 
 locked their door as their habit was. David noiselessly opened 
 his window and looked out. 
 
 A clear moonlight reigned outside. He could distinguish the 
 rounded shapes, the occasional movements of the sheep in their 
 pen to the right of the farmyard. The trees in the field threw 
 long shadows down the white slope ; to his left was the cart-shed 
 with its black caverns and recesses, and the branches of the 
 apple-trees against the luminous sky. Owls were calling in the 
 woods below ; sometimes a bell round the neck of one of the 
 sheep tinkled a little, and the river made a distant background of 
 sound. 
 
 The boy's heai-t grew heavy. After the noises in the Grieves' 
 room ceased he listened for something which he knew must be 
 in the air, and caught it— the sound of a child's long, smothered 
 sobs. On most nights they would not have made much impression 
 on him. Louie's ways with her brother were no more engaging 
 than with the rest of the wortd; and she was not a creature who 
 invited consolation from anybody. David, too, with his power of 
 escape at any time into a world of books and dreams or simply 
 into the wild shepherd life of the moors, was often inclined to a 
 vague irritation with Louie's state of perpetual revolt. The food 
 was nasty, their clothes were ugly and scanty, Aunt Hannah was 
 as hard as nails— at the same time Louie was enough to put 
 anybody's back up. What did she get by it?— that was his 
 feeling ; though, perhaps, he never shaped it. He had never 
 felt much pity for her. She had a way of putting herself out of 
 court, and he was, of course, too young to see her life or his 
 own as a whole. What their relationship might mean to him 
 was still vague— to be decided by the future. Whatever softness 
 there was in the boy was at this moment called out by other 
 people— by old 'Lias and his wife ; by Mr. Ancrum, the lame 
 minister at Clough End ; by the dogs ; hardly ever by Louie. 
 He had grown used, moreover, to her perpetual explosions, and 
 took them generally with a boy's natural callousness. 
 
 But to-night her woes affected him as they had never done 
 before. The sound of her sobbing, as he stood listening, 
 gradually roused in him an unbearable restlessness. An un- 
 accountable depression stole upon him — the reaction, perhaps, 
 
24 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 from a good deal of mental exertion and excitement in the day. 
 A sort of sick distaste awoke in him for most of the incidents 
 of existence — for Aunt Hannah, for Uncle Reuben's incompre- 
 hensible prayers, for the thought of the long Puritanical Sunday 
 just coming. And, in addition, the low vibrations of that distant 
 sobbing stirred in him again, by association, certain memories 
 which were like a clutch of physical pain, and which the healthy 
 young animal instinctively and passionately avoided whenever it 
 could. But to-night, in the dark and in solitude, there were 
 no distractions, and as the boy put his head down on his arms, 
 rolling it from side to side as though to shake them off, the 
 same old images pursued him — the lodging-house room, and 
 the curtainless iron bed in which he slept with his father ; remi- 
 niscences of some long, inexplicable anguish through which that 
 father had passed ; then of his death, and his own lonely crjing. 
 He seemed still to feel the strange sheets in that bed upstairs, 
 where a compassionate fellow-lodger had put him the night after 
 his father died ; he sat up again bewildered in the cold dawn, 
 filled with a home-sickness too benumbing for words. He 
 resented these memories, tried to banish them ; but the nature 
 on which they were impressed was deep and rich, and, once 
 shaken, vibrated long. The boy trembled through and through. 
 The more he was ordinarily shed abroad, diffused in the life 
 of sensation and boundless mental curiosity, the blacker were 
 these rare moments of self-consciousness, when all the world 
 seemed pain, an iron vice which pinched and tortured him. 
 
 At last he went to his door, pulled it gently open, and with 
 bare feet went across to Louie's room, Avhich he entered with 
 infinite caution. The moonlight was streaming in on the poor 
 gauds, which lay wildly scattered over the floor. David looked 
 at them with amazement. Amongst them he saw something 
 glittering. He picked it up, saw it was a gold necklace which 
 had been his mother's, and carefully put it on the little toilet 
 table. 
 
 Then he walked on to the bed. Louie was lying ^vith her face 
 turned away from him. A certain pause in the sobbing as he 
 came near told him that she knew he was there. But it began 
 again directly, being indeed a physical relief which the child could 
 not deny herself. He stood beside her awkwardly. He could 
 think of nothing to say. But timidly he stretched out his hand 
 and laid the back of it against her wet cheek. He half expected 
 she would shake it off, but she did not. It made him feel less 
 lonely that she let it stay; the impulse to comfort had somehow 
 brought himself comfort. He stood there, feeling very cold, 
 thinking a whirlwind of thouglits about old 'Lias, about the sheep, 
 about Titus and Jerusalem, and a jout Louie's extraordinary pro- 
 ceedings — till suddenly it struck him that Louie was not crying 
 any more. He bent over her. The sobs had changed into the 
 long breaths of sleep, and, gently drawing away his hand, he 
 crept off to bed. 
 
CHAP. IV • CHILDHOOD 35 
 
 CHAPTER ly 
 
 It was Sunday afternoon, still cold, nipping, and sunny. Reuben 
 Grieve sat at the door of the farmhouse, his pipe in his hand, a 
 ' good book ' on his knee. Beyond the wall which bounded the 
 farmyard he could hear occasional voices. The children were 
 sitting there, he supposed. It gave him a sensation of pleasure 
 once to hear a shrill laugh, which he knew was Louie's. For all 
 this morning, through the long services in the ' Christian Brethren ' 
 chapel at Clough End, and on the walk home, he had been once 
 more pricked in his conscience. Hannah and Louie were not on 
 speaking terms. At meals the aunt assigned the child her coarse 
 food without a word, and on the way to chapel and back there 
 had been a stony silence between them. It was evident, even to 
 his dull mind, that the girl was white and thin, and that between 
 her wild temper and mischief and the mirth of other children 
 there was a great difference. Moreover, certain passages in the 
 chapel prayers that morning had come home sharply to a mind 
 whereof the only definite gift was a true religious sensitiveness. 
 The text of the sermon especially — ' Whoso loveth not his brother, 
 whom he hath seen, how shall he love God, whom he hath not 
 seen ? ' — vibrated like an accusing voice within him. As he sat 
 in the doorway, with the sun stealing in upon him, the clock 
 ticking loudly at his back, and the hens scratching round the 
 steps, he began to think with much discomfort about his dead 
 brother and his brother's children. 
 
 As to his memories of the past, they may perhaps be trans- 
 formed here into a short family history, with some details added 
 which had no place in Reuben's mind. Twenty years before this 
 present date Needham — once Needham's — Farm had been held by 
 Reuben's father, a certain James Grieve. He had originally been 
 a kind of farm-labourer on the Berwickshire border, who, driven 
 southwards in search of work by the stress of the bad years which 
 followed the great war, had wandered on, taking a job of work 
 here and another there, and tramping many a score of weary 
 miles between, till at last in this remote Derbyshire valley he had 
 found a final anchorage. Needham Farm was then occupied by 
 a young couple of the name of Pierson, beginning Mfe under 
 fairly prosperous circumstances. James Grieve took service with 
 them, and they valued his strong sinews and stern Calvinistic 
 probity as they deserved. But he had hardly been two years on the 
 farm when his young employer, dozing one winter evening on the 
 shafts of his cart coming back from. Glossop market, fell off, was 
 run over, and killed. The widow, a young thing, nearly lost her 
 senses with grief, and James, a man of dour exterior and few 
 words, set himself to keep things going on the farm till she was 
 able to look life in the face again. Her sister came to be with 
 her, and there was a child born, which died. She was left better 
 
26 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book 1 
 
 provided for than most women of her class, and she had expecta- 
 tions from her parents. After the child's death, when the widow 
 began to go about again, and James still managed all the work of 
 the farm, the neighbours 'naturally fell talking. James took no 
 notice, and he was not a man to meddle with, either in a public- 
 house or elsewhere. But presently a crop of suitors for the widow 
 began to appear, and it became necessary also to settle the destiny 
 of the farm. No one outside ever knew how it came about, for 
 Jenny Pierson, who was a soft, prettyish creature, had given no 
 particular sign ; but one Sunday morning the banns of James 
 Grieve, bachelor, and Jenny Pierson, widow, were suddenly given 
 out in the Presbyterian chapel at Clough End, to the mingled 
 astonishment and disgust of the neighbourhood. 
 
 Years passed away. James held his own for a time with any 
 farmer of the neighbourhood. But, by the irony of fate, the 
 prosperity which his industry and tenacity deserved was filched 
 from him little by little by the ill-health of his wife. She bore 
 him two sons, Reuben and Alexander, and then she sank into a 
 hopeless, fretful invalid, tormented by the internal ailment of 
 which she ultimately died. But the small farmer who employs 
 little or no labour is lost without an active wife. If he has to pay 
 for the milking of his cows, the making of his butter, the cooking 
 of his food, and the nursing of his children, his little margin of 
 profit is soon eaten away ; and with the disappearance of this 
 margin, existence becomes a blind struggle. Even James Grieve, 
 the man of iron will and indomitable industry, was beaten at last 
 in the unequal contest. The life at the farm became bitter and 
 tragic. Jenny grew more helpless and more peevish year by year; 
 James was not exactly unkind to her, but he could not but 
 revenge upon her in some degree that ruin of his silent ambitions 
 which her sickliness had brought upon him. 
 
 The two sons grew up in the most depressing atmosphere 
 conceivable. Reuben, who was to have the farm, developed a 
 shy and hopeless taciturnity under the pressure of the family 
 chagrin and privations, and found his only relief in the emo- 
 tions and excitements of Methodism. Sandy seemed at first 
 more fortunate. An opening was found for him at Sheffield, 
 where he was apprenticed to a rope-maker, a cousin of his 
 mother's. This man died before Sandy was more than half- 
 way through his time, and the youth went through a period 
 of hardship and hand-to-mouth living which ended at last in 
 the usual tramp to London. Here, after a period of semi-star- 
 vation, he found it impossible to get work at his own trade, 
 and finally drifted into carpentering and cabinet-making. 
 The beginnings of this new line of life were incredibly diffi- 
 cult, owing to the jealousy of his fellow-workmen, who had 
 properly served their time to the trade, and did not see why 
 an interloper from another trade, without qualifications, should 
 be allowed to take the bread out of their mouths. One of 
 Sandy's first successes was in what was called a ' shop-meet- 
 
CHAP. IV CHILDHOOD 27 
 
 ing,' a gathering of all the employes of the firm he worked 
 for, before whom the North- countryman pleaded to be allowed 
 to earn his bread. The tall, finely grown, famished-looking lad 
 spoke with a natural eloquence, and here and there with a 
 Biblical force of phrase — the inheritance of his Scotch blood 
 and training — which astonished and melted most of his hearers. 
 He was afterwards let alone, and even taught by the men 
 about him, in return for ' drinks,' which swallowed up some- 
 times as much as a third of his wages. 
 
 After two or three years he was fully master of his trade, an 
 admirable workman, and a keen politician to boot. All this time 
 he had spent his evenings in self-education, buying books with 
 every spare penny, and turning specially to science and mathe- 
 matics. His abilities presently drew the attention of the heads 
 of the Shoreditch firm for which he worked, and when the post 
 of a foreman in a West-end shop, in which they were largely 
 interested, fell vacant, it was their influence which put Sandy 
 Grieve into the well-paid and coveted post. He could hardly 
 believe his own good fortune. The letter in which he announced 
 it to his father reached the farm just as the last phase of his 
 mother's long martyrdom was developing. The pair, already old 
 — James with work and anxiety, his wife with sickness — read it 
 together. They shut it up without a word. Its tone of jubilant 
 hope seemed to have nothing to do with them, or seemed rather 
 to make their own narrowing prospects look more narrow, and 
 the approach of the King of Terrors more black and relentless, 
 than before. Jenny lay back on her poor bed, with the tears of 
 a dumb self-pity running down her cheeks, and James's only 
 answer to it was conveyed in a brief summons to Sandy to 
 come and see his mother before the end. The prosperous son, 
 broadened out of knowledge . almost by good feeding and good 
 clothes, arrived. He brought money, which was accepted without 
 much thanks ; but his mother treated him almost as a stranger, 
 and the dour James, while not unwilling to draw out his 
 account of himself, would look him up and down from under 
 his bushy grey eyebrows, and often interpose with some sarcasm 
 on his 'foine' ways of speaking, or his ' gen'leman's cloos.' 
 Sandy was ill at ease. He was really anxious to help, and his 
 heart was touched by his mother's state; but perhaps there was a 
 strain of self-importance in his manner, a half-conscious inclina- 
 tion to thank God that his life was not to be as theirs, which 
 came out in spite of him, and dug a gulf between him and them. 
 Only his brother Reuben, dull, pious, affectionate Reuben, took 
 to him, and showed that patient and wondering admiration 
 of the younger's cleverness, which probably Sandy had reckoned 
 on as his right from his parents also. 
 
 On the last evening of his stay — he had luckily been able 
 to make his coming coincide with an Easter three days' holi- 
 day — he was sitting beside his mother in the dusk, thinking, 
 with a relief which every now and then roused in him a 
 
28 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 pang of shame, that in fourteen or fifteen more hoAirs he should 
 be back in London, in the world which made much of him and 
 knew what a smart fellow he was, when his mother opened her 
 eyes — so wide and blue they looked in her pinched, death-stricken 
 face — and looked at him full. 
 
 ' Sandy ! ' 
 
 ' Yes, mother ! ' he said, startled — for he had been sunk in his 
 own thoughts — and laying his hand on hers. 
 
 ' You should get a wife, Sandy.' 
 
 ' Well, some day, mother, I suppose I shall,' he said, with a 
 change of expression which the twilight concealed. 
 
 She was silent a minute, then she began again, slow and feebly, 
 but with a strange clearness of articulation. 
 
 ' If she's sick, Sandy, doanH grudge it her. Women 'ud die 
 fasster iv they could.' 
 
 The whole story of the slow consuming bitterness of years 
 spoke through those fixed and filmy eyes. Her son gave a sud- 
 den irrepressible sob. There was a faint lightening in the Little 
 wrinkled face, and the lips made a movement. He kissed her, 
 and in that last moment of consciousness the mother almost for- 
 gave him his good clothes and his superior airs. 
 
 Poor Sandy ! Looking to his after story, it seems strange 
 that any one should ever have felt him unbearably prosperous. 
 About six months after his mother's death he married a milliner's 
 assistant, whom he met first in the pit of a theatre, and whom 
 he was already courting when his mother gave him the advice 
 recorded. She was French, from the neighbourhood of Aries, 
 and of course a Catholic. She had come to London originally as 
 lady's-maid to a Russian family settled at Nice. Shortly after 
 their arrival, her master shot his young wife for a supposed 
 intrigue, and then put an end to himself. Naturally the whole 
 establishment was scattered, and the pretty Louise Suveret found 
 herself alone, with a few pounds, in London. Thanks to the 
 kind offices of the book-keeper in the hotel where they had been 
 staying, she had been introduced to a milliner of repute in the 
 Bond Street region, and the results of a trial given her, in which 
 her natural Frenchwoman's gift and her acquired skill came out 
 triumphant, led to her being permanently engaged. Thencefor- 
 ward her good spirits — which had been temporarily depressed, 
 not so much by her mistress's tragic ending as by her own unex- 
 pected discomfort — reappeared in all their native exuberance, 
 and she proceeded to enjoy London. She defended herself first 
 against the friendly book-keeper, who became troublesome, and 
 had to be treated with the most decided ingratitude. Then she 
 gradually built herself up a store of clothes of the utmost 
 elegance, which were the hopeless envy of the other girls 
 employed at Madame Catherine's. And, finally, she looked about 
 for serviceable acquaintances. 
 
 One night, in the pit of Drury Lane Theatre, while ' The Lady 
 of Lyons ' was going on, Sandy Grieve found himself next to a 
 
CHAP. IV CHILDHOOD 29 
 
 dazzling creature, with fine black eyes, the smooth olive skin of 
 the South, white teeth, and small dimpled hands, hardly spoilt at 
 all by her trade. She had with her a plain girl-companion, and 
 her manner, though conscious and provocative, had that haughti- 
 ness, that implied readiness to take offence, which is the grisette's 
 substitute for breeding. She was, however, affable to Sandy, 
 whose broad shoulders and handsome, well-to-do air attracted 
 her attention. She allowed him to get her a programme, to 
 beguile her into conversation, and, finally, to offer her a cup of 
 coffee. Afterwards he escorted the two to the door of their 
 lodging, in one of the streets off Theobald's Eoad, and walked 
 home in a state of excitement which astonished him. 
 
 This happened immediately before his visit to the farm and 
 his mother's death. During the six months after that event 
 Sandy knew the 'joy of eventful living.' He was establishing 
 his own business position, and he was courting Louise Suveret 
 with alternations of despair and flattered passion, which stirred 
 the now burly, full-blooded North-countryman to his depths. 
 She let him escort her to her work in the morning and take her 
 home in the evening, and she allowed him to give her as many 
 presents of gloves, ribbons, bonbons — for which last 3he had a 
 childish passion — and the like, as he pleased. But when he 
 pressed her to marry him she generally laughed at him. She 
 was, in reality, observing her world, calculating her chances, and 
 she had several other strings to her bow, as Sandy shrewdly sus- 
 pected, though she never allowed his jealousy any information to 
 feed upon. It was simply owing to the failure of the most pro- 
 mising of thes3 other strings — a failure which roused in Louise 
 one of those white heats of passion which made the chief flaw in 
 her organisation, viewed as a pleasure-procuring machine — that 
 Sandy found his opportunity. In a moment of mortal chagrin 
 and outraged vanity she consented to marry him, and three 
 weeks afterwards he was the blissful owner of the black eyes, the 
 small hands, the quick tongue, and the seductive chiffons he had 
 so long admired more or less at a distance. 
 
 Their marriage lasted six years. At first Louise found some 
 pleasure in arranging the little house Sandy had taken for her in 
 a new suburb, and in making, wearing, and altering the addi- 
 tional gowns which their joint earnings — for she still worked 
 intermittently at her trade — allov»Td her to enjoy. After the 
 first infatuation was a little cooled, Sandy discovered in her a 
 paganism so unblushing that his own Scotch and Puritan 
 instincts reacted in a sort of superstitious fear. It seemed 
 impossible that God Almighty should long allow Himself to be 
 flouted as Louise flouted Him. He found also that the sense of 
 truth was almost non-existent in her, and her vanity, her greed 
 of dress and admiration, was so consuming, so frenzied, that his 
 only hope of a peaceful life — as he quickly realised — lay in minis- 
 tering to it. Her will soon got the upper hand, and he sank into 
 the patient servant of her pleasures, tsnatching feverishly at all 
 
30 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 she gave him in return with the instinct of a man who, having 
 sold his soul, is determined at least to get the last farthing he 
 can of the price. 
 
 They had two children in four years — David Suveret and 
 Louise Stephanie. Louise resented the advent of the second so 
 intensely that poor Sandy become conscious, before the child 
 appeared, of a fatal and appalling change in her relation to him. 
 She had been proud of her first-born — an unusually handsome 
 and precocious child — and had taken pleasure in dressing it and 
 parading it before the eyes of the other mothers in their terrace, 
 all of whom she passionately despised. But Louie nearly died of 
 neglect, and the two years that followed her birth were black 
 indeed for Sandy. His wife, he knew, had begun to hate him ; 
 in business his energies failed him, and his employers cooled 
 towards him as he grew visibly less pushing and inventive. The 
 little household got deeper and deeper into debt, and towards the 
 end of the time Louise would sometimes spend the whole day 
 away from home without a word of explanation. So great was 
 his nervous terror — strong, broad fellow that he was — of that 
 pent-up fury in her, which a touch might have unloosed, that 
 he never questioned her. At last the inevitable end came. He 
 got home one summer evening to find the house empty and ran- 
 sacked, the children — little things of five and two — sitting crying 
 in the desolate kitchen, and a crowd of loud-voiced, indignant 
 neighbours round the door. To look for her would have been 
 absurd. Louise was much too clever to disappear and leave 
 traces behind. Besides, he had no wish to find her. The heredi- 
 tary self in him accepted his disaster as representing the natural 
 retribution which the canny Divine vengeance keeps in store for 
 those who take to themselves wives of the daughters of Heth. 
 And there was the sense, too, of emerging from something 
 unclean, of recovering his manhood. 
 
 He took his two children and went to lodgings in a decent 
 street near the Gray's Inn Road. There for a year things went 
 fairly well with him. His boy and girl, whom he paid a neigh- 
 bour to look after during the day, made something to come home 
 to. As he helped the boy, who was already at school, with his 
 lesson for the next day, or fed Louie, perched on his knee, with 
 the bits from his plate demanded by her covetous eyes and open 
 mouth, he got back, little by little, his self-respect. He returned, 
 too, in the evenings to some of his old pursuits, joined a Radical 
 club near, and some science lectures. He was aged and much 
 more silent than of yore, but not unhappy ; his employers, too, 
 feeling that their man had somehow recovered himself, and hear- 
 ing something of his history, were sorry for him, and showed it. 
 
 Then one autumn evening a constable knocked at his door, 
 and, coming in upon the astonished group of father and children, 
 produced from his pocket a soaked and tattered letter, and show- 
 ing Sandy the address, asked if it was for him. Sandy, on seeing 
 it, stood up, put down Louie, who, half undressed, had been 
 
CHAP. IV CHILDHOOD 31 
 
 having a ride on his knee, and asked his visitor to come out on 
 to the landing. There he read the letter under the gas-lamp, and 
 put it deliberately into his pocket. 
 
 ' Where is she ? ' he asked. 
 
 ' In Lambeth mortuary,' said the man briefly — ' picked up two 
 hours ago. Nothing else found on her but this.' 
 
 Half an hour afterwards Sandy stood by a slab in the mortuary, 
 and, drawing back a sheet which covered the burden on it, stood 
 face to face with his dead wife. The black brows were drawn, 
 the small hands clenched. What struck Sandy with peculiar 
 horror was that one delicate wrist was broken, having probably 
 struck something in falling. She — who in life had rebelled so 
 hotly against the least shadow of physical pain ! Thanks to the 
 bandage which had been passed round it, the face was not much 
 altered. She could not have been long in the water. Probably 
 
 about the time when he was walking home from work, she 
 
 He felt himself suffocating — the bare whitewashed walls grew dim 
 and wavermg. 
 
 The letter found upon her was the strangest appeal to his pity. 
 Her seducer had apparently left her ; she was in dire straits, and 
 there was, it seemed, no one but Sandy in all London on whose 
 compassion she could throw herself. She asked him, callously, 
 for money to take her back to some Mce relations. They need 
 only know what she chose to tell them, as she calmly pointed out, 
 and, once in Nice, she could make a living. She would like to 
 see her children, she said, before she left, but she supposed he 
 would have to settle that. How had she got his address ? From 
 his place of business probably, in some roundabout way. 
 
 Then what had happened ? Had she been seized with a sudden 
 persuasion that he would not answer, that it was all useless 
 trouble; and in one of those accesses of blind rage by which her 
 clear, sharp brain-life was at all times apt to be disturbed, had 
 she rushed out to end it all at once and for ever ? It made him 
 forgive her that she could have destroyed herself— could have 
 faced that awful plunge— that icy water— that death-struggle for 
 breath. He gauged the misery she must have gone through by 
 what he knew of her sensuous love for comfort, for hien-etre. He 
 saw her again as she had been that night at the theatre when they 
 first met, — the little crisp black curls on the temples, the dazzling 
 eyes, the artificial pearls round the neck, the slight traces of 
 powder and rouge on brow and cheek, which made her all the 
 more attractive and tempting to his man's eye — the pretty foot, 
 which he first noticed as she stepped from the threshold of the 
 theatre into the street. Nature had made all that, to bring her 
 work to this grim bed at last ! 
 
 He himself died eighteen months afterwards. His acquaint- 
 ances never dreamt of connecting his death with his wife's, and 
 the connection, if it existed, would have been difficult to trace. 
 Still, if little David could have put his experiences at this time 
 into words, they might have thrown some light on an event which 
 
32 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book I 
 
 was certainly a surprise to the small world which took an interest 
 in Sandy Grieve. 
 
 There was a certain sound which remained all through his life 
 firmly fixed in David's memory, and which he never thought of 
 without a sense of desolation, a shiver of sick dismay, such as 
 belonged to no other association whatever. It was the sound of 
 a long sigh, brought up, as it seemed, from the very depths of 
 being, and often, often repeated. The thought of it brought with 
 it a vision of a small bare room at night, with two iron bedsteads, 
 one for Louie, one for himself and his father ; a bit of smoulder- 
 ing fire in a tiny grate, and beside it a man's figure bowed over 
 the warmth, thrown out dark against the distempered wall, and 
 sitting on there hour after hour ; of a child, wakened intermit- 
 tently by the light, and tormented by the recurrent sound, till it 
 had once more burrowed into the bed-clothes deep enough to shut 
 out everything but sleep. All these memories belonged to the 
 time immediately following on Louise's suicide. Probably, during 
 the interval between his wife's death and his own, Sandy sufi'ered 
 severely from the effects of strong nervous shock, coupled with a 
 certain growth of religious melancholy, the conditions for which 
 are rarely wanting in the true Calvinist blood. Owing to the 
 privations and exposure of his early manhood, too, it is possible 
 that he was never in reality the strong man he looked. At any 
 rate, his fight for his life when it came was a singularly weak one. 
 The second winter after Louise's death was bitterly cold ; he was 
 overworked, and often without sleep. One bleak east-wind day 
 struck home. He took to his bed with a chill, which turned to 
 peritonitis; the system showed no power of resistance, and he 
 died. 
 
 On the day but one before he died, when the mortal pain was 
 gone, but death was absolutely certain, he sent post-haste for his 
 brother Reuben. Reuben he believed was married to a decent 
 woman, and to Reuben he meant to commend his children. 
 
 Reuben arrived, looking more bewildered and stupid than 
 ever, pure countryman that he was, in this London which he 
 teid never seen. Sandy looked at him with a deep inward dis- 
 satisfaction. But what could he do ? His marriage had cut him 
 off from his old friends, and since its wreck he had had no 
 energy wherewith to make new ones. 
 
 ' I've never seen your wife, Reuben,' he said, when they had 
 talked awhile. 
 
 Reuben was silent a minute, apparently collecting his 
 thoughts. 
 
 ' Naw,' he said at last ; ' naw. She sent yo her luve, and 
 she hopes iv it's the Lord's will to tak yo, that it uU foind yo 
 prepared.' 
 
 He said it like a lesson. A sort of nervous tremor and shrink- 
 ing overspread Sandy's face. He had suffered so much through 
 religion during the last few months, that in this final moment of 
 humanity the soul had taken refuge in numbness — apathy. Let 
 
CHAP. IV CHILDHOOD 33 
 
 God decide. He could think it out no more ; and in this utter 
 feebleness his terror of hell — the ineradicable deposit of child- 
 hood and inheritance — had passed away. He gathered his forces 
 for the few human and practical things which remained to him to 
 do. 
 
 ' Did she get on comfortable with father ? ' he asked, fixing 
 Reuben with his eyes, which had the penetration of death. 
 
 Reuben looked discomposed, and cleared his throat once or 
 twice. 
 
 ' Wal, it warn't what yo may call just coomfortable atween 
 'em. Naw, I'll not say it wor.' 
 
 ' What was wrong ? ' demanded Sandy. 
 
 Eeuben fidgeted. 
 
 'Wal,' he said at last, throwing up his head in desperation, 
 ' I spose a woman likes her house to hersel when she's fust 
 married. He wor childish like, an mighty trooblesome times. 
 An she's alius stirrin, and rootin, is Hannah. Udder foak mus 
 look aloive too.' 
 
 The conflict in Reuben's mind between his innate truthfulness 
 and his desire to excuse his wife was curious to see. Sandy had a 
 vision of his father sitting in his dotage by his own hearth, and 
 ministered to by a daughter-in-law who grudged him his years 
 and his infirmities, as he had grudged his wife all the trouble- 
 some incidents of her long decay. But it only affected him 
 now as it bore upon what was still living in him, the one feeling 
 which stiU survived amid the wreck made by circumstance and 
 disease. 
 
 ' Will she be kind to them ? ' he said sharply, with a motion of 
 the head towards the children, first towards David, who sat droop- 
 ing on his father's bed, where for some ten or twelve hours now 
 he had remained glued, refusing to touch either breakfast or 
 dinner, and then towards Louie, who was on the floor by the 
 fire, with her rag dolls, which she was dressing up with smiles 
 and chatter in a strange variety of finery. ' If not, she shan't 
 have 'em. There's time yet.' 
 
 But the grey hue was already on his cheek, his feet were 
 already cold. The nurse in the far corner of the room, looking 
 up as he spoke, gave him mentally ' an hour or two. ' 
 
 Reuben flushed and sat bolt upright, his gnarled and wrinkled 
 hands trembling on his knees. 
 
 ' She shall be kind to 'em,' he said with energy. ' Gie 'em 
 to us, Sandy. Yo wouldna send your childer to strangers ? ' 
 
 The clannish instinct in Sandy responded. Besides, in spite 
 of his last assertion, he knew very well there was nothing else 
 to be done. 
 
 ' There's money,' he said slowly. ' She'll not need to stint them 
 of anything. This is a poor place,' for at the word ' money' he 
 noticed that Reuben's eyes travelled with an awakening shrewd- 
 ness over the barely furnished room; ' but it was the debts first, 
 and then I had to put by for the children. None of the shop-folk 
 
34 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 or the fellows at the club ever came here. We lived as we liked. 
 There's an insurance, and there's some savings, and there's some 
 commission money owing from the firm, and there's a bit invest- 
 ment Mr. Gurney (naming the head partner) helped me into last 
 year. There's altogether about six hundred pound. You'll get 
 the interest of it for the children ; it'll go into Gurneys', and 
 they'll give five per cent, for it. Mr. Gurney's been very kind. 
 He came here yesterday, and he's got it all. You go to him.' 
 
 He stopped for weakness. Reuben's eyes were round. Six 
 hundred pounds ! Who'd have thought it of Sandy ?— after that 
 bad lot of a wife, and he not thirty ! 
 
 ' An what d' yo want Davy to be, Sandy ? ' 
 
 ' You must settle,' said the father, with a long sigh. ' Depends 
 on him— what he turns to. If he wants to farm, he can learn 
 with you, and put in his money when he sees an opening. For 
 the bit farms in our part there'd be enough. But I'm feeart ' (the 
 old Derbyshire word slipped out unawares) ' he'll not stay in the 
 country. He's too sharp, and you mustn't force him. If you see 
 he's not the farming sort, when he's thirteen or fourteen or so, 
 take Mr. Gurney's advice, and bind him to a trade. Mr. Gurney 
 '11 pay the premiums for him and he can have the balance of the 
 money — for I've left him to manage it all, for himself and Louie 
 too — when he's fit to set up for himself. — You and Hannah '11 deal 
 honest wi 'em ? ' 
 
 The question was unexpected, and as he put it with a startling 
 energy the dying man raised himself on his elbow, and looked 
 sharply at his brother. 
 
 'D' yo think I'd cheat yo, or your childer, Sandy?' cried 
 Reuben, flushing and pricked to the heart. 
 
 Sandy sank back again, his sudden qualm appeased. 'No,' 
 he said, his thoughts returning painfully to his son. ' I'm feeart 
 he'll not stay wi you. He's cleverer than I ever was, and I was 
 the cleverest of us all.' 
 
 The words had in them a whole epic of human fate. Under 
 the prick of them Reuben found a tongue, not now for his wife, 
 but for himself. 
 
 ' It's not cliverness as ull help yo now, Sandy, wi your Maaker ! 
 and j^o feeace t' feeace wi 'un ! ' he cried. ' It's nowt but satis- 
 f acshun by t' blood o' Jesus ! ' 
 
 Sandy made no answer, unless, indeed, the poor heart within 
 made its last cry of agony to heaven at the words. The sinews of 
 the spiritual as well as the physical man were aU spent and 
 useless 
 
 ' Davy,' he called presently. The child, who had been sitting 
 motionless during this talk watching his father, slid along the bed 
 with alacrity, and tucking his httle legs and feet well away from 
 Sandy's long frame, put his head down on the pillow. His father 
 turned his eyes to him, and with a solemn, lingering gaze took in 
 the childish face, the thick, tumbled hair, the expression, so 
 piteous, yet so intelligent. Then he put up his own large hand, 
 
CHAP. IV CHILDHOOD 35 
 
 and took both the boy's into its cold and feeble grasp. His 
 eyelids fell, and the breathing changed. The nurse hurriedly 
 rose, lifted up Louie from her toys, and put her on the bed beside 
 him. The child, disturbed in her play and frightened by she 
 knew not what, set up a sudden cry. A tremor seemed to pass 
 through the shut lids at the sound, a slight compression of pain 
 appeared in the grey lips. It was Sandy Grieve's last sign of life. 
 
 Keuben Grieve remembered well the letter he had written to 
 his wife, with infinite difficulty, from beside his brother's dead 
 body. He told her that he was bringing the children back with 
 him. The poor bairns had got nobody in the world to look to but 
 their uncle and aunt. And they would not cost Hannah a penny. 
 For Mr. Gurney would pay thirty pounds a year for their keep 
 and bringing up. 
 
 With what care and labour his clumsy fingers had penned that 
 last sentence so that Hannah might read it plain ! 
 
 Afterwards he brought the children home. As he drove his 
 light cart up the rough and lonely road to Needham Farm, Louie 
 cried with the cold and the dark, and Davy, with his hands tucked 
 between his knees, grew ever more and more silent, his restless 
 little head turning perpetually from side to side, as though he 
 were trying to discover something of the strange, new world to 
 which he had been brought, through the gloom of the February 
 evening. 
 
 Then at the sound of wheels outside in the lane, the back door 
 of the farm was opened, and a dark figure stood on the threshold. 
 
 'Yo're late,' Keuben heard. It was Hannah's piercing voice 
 that spoke. ' Bring 'em into t' back kitchen, an let 'em take their 
 shoes off afore they coom ony further. ' 
 
 By which Reuben knew that it had been scrubbing-day, and 
 that her flagstones were more in Hannah's mind than the guests 
 he had brought her. He obeyed, and then the barefooted trio 
 entered the front kitchen together. Hannah came forward and 
 looked at the children — at David white and blinking — at the four- 
 year-old Louie, bundled up in an old shawl, which dragged on the 
 ground behind her, and staring wildly round her at the old 
 low-roofed kitchen with the terror of the trapped bird. 
 
 'Hannah, they're varra cold,' said Reuben — 'ha yo got 
 summat hot ? ' 
 
 'Theer'll be supper bime-by,' Hannah replied with decision. 
 ' I've naw time scrubbin-days to be foolin about wi things out o' 
 hours. I've nobbut just got straight and cleaned mysel. They 
 can sit down and warm theirsels. I conno say they feature ony 
 of yo7' belongins, Reuben.' And she went to put Louie on the 
 settle by the fire. But as the tall woman in black approached 
 her, the child hit out madly with her small fists and burst into a 
 loud howl of crying. 
 
 ' Get away, nasty woman 1 Nasty woman — ugly woman ! 
 Take me away — I want my daddy,-— I want my daddy. ' 
 
36 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 And she threw herself kicking on the floor, while, to Hannah's 
 exasperation, a piece of crumbUng bun she had been holding tight 
 in her sticky little hand escaped and littered all the new-washed 
 stones. , 
 
 ' Tak yor niece oop, Reuben, an mak her behave ' — the mistress 
 of the house commanded angrily. ' She'll want a stick takken to 
 her, soon, / can see. ' 
 
 Reuben obeyed so far as he could, but Louie's shrieks only 
 ceased when, by the combined efforts of husband and wife, she 
 had been put to bed, so exhausted with rage, excitement, and the 
 journey, that sleep mercifully took possession of her just after she 
 had performed the crowning feat of knocking the tea and bread 
 and butter Reuben brought her out of her uncle's hand and all 
 over the room. 
 
 Meanwhile, David sat perfectly still in a chair agamst the wall, 
 beside the old clock, and stared about him ; at the hams and 
 bunches of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling ; at the chiffon- 
 nier, with its red baize doors under a brass trellis- work ; at the 
 high wooden settle, the framed funeral cards, and the two or three 
 coloured prints, now brown with age, which Reuben had hung up 
 twenty years before, to celebrate his marriage. Hannah was 
 propitiated by the boy's silence, and as she got supper ready she 
 once or twice noticed his fine black eyes and his curly hair. 
 
 'Yo can coom an get yor supper,' she said to him, more 
 graciously than she had spoken yet. ' It's a mussy yo doant goo 
 skrikin hke your sister.' 
 
 ' Thank you, ma'am,' said the little fellow, with a townsman s. 
 politeness, hardly understanding, however, a word of her north- 
 country dialect— 'I'm not hungry.— You've got a picture of 
 General Washington there, ma'am ; ' and, raising a small hand 
 trembling with nervousness and fatigue, he pointed to one of the 
 prints opposite. 
 
 ' Wal, I niver,' said Hannah, with a stare of astonishment. 
 * Yo're a quare lot— the two o' yer.' 
 
 One thing more Reuben remembered with some vividness in 
 connection with the children's arrival. When they were both at 
 last asleep — Louie in an unused room at the back, on an old 
 wooden bedstead, which stood solitary in a wilderness of bare 
 boards ; David in a sort of cupboard off the landing, which got 
 most of its light and air from a wooden trellis-work, overlooking 
 the staircase— Hannah said abruptly to her husband, as they two 
 were going to bed, ' When ull Mr. Gurney pay that money ? ' 
 
 ' Twice a year — so his clerk towd me — Christmas an Mid- 
 summer. Praps we shan't want to use it aw, Hannah ; praps we 
 might save soom on it for t' childer. Their keep, iv yo feed em 
 on parritch, is nobbut a fleabite, an they'n got a good stock o' 
 cloos, Sandy's nurse towd me.' 
 
 He looked anxiously at Hannah. In his inmost heart there 
 was a passionate wish to do his duty to Sandy's ori^hans, fighting 
 
CHAP. IV \ja.lLiUXX^KJLf 61 
 
 with a dread of his wife, which was the fruit of long habit and 
 constitutional weakness. 
 
 Hannah faced round upon him. It was Keuben's misfortune 
 that dignity was at all times impossible to him. Now, as he sat 
 in his shirt-sleeves and stocking-feet, flushed with the exertion of 
 pulling off his heavy boots, the light of the tallow candle falling 
 on his weak eyes with their red rims, on his large open mouth 
 with the conspicuous gap in its front teeth, and his stubby hair, 
 he was more than usually grotesque. ' As slamp an wobbly as an 
 owd corn-boggart,' so his neighbours described him when they 
 wished to be disrespectful, and the simile fitted very closely with 
 the dishevelled, disjointed appearance which was at all times 
 characteristic of him, Sundays or weekdays. No one studying 
 the pair, especially at such a moment as this — the malaise of the 
 husband — the wife towering above him, her grey hair hanging 
 loose round her black brows and sallow face instinct with a 
 rugged and indomitable energy— could have doubted in whose 
 hands lay the government of Needham Farm. 
 
 ' rU thank yo not to talk nonsense, Reuben Grieve,' said his 
 wife sharply. 'D'yo think they're my flesh an blood, thoose 
 childer ? An who'll ha to do for 'em but me, I should loike to 
 know ? Who'll ha to put up wi their messin an their dirt but 
 me f Twenty year ha yo an I been married, Reuben, an niver 
 till this neet did I ha to goo down on my knees an sweep oop 
 after scrubbin-day ! Iv I'm to be moidered wi em, I'll be paid 
 for 't. Soa I let yo know— it's little enough.' 
 
 And Hannah took her payment. As he sat in the sun, looking 
 back on the last seven years, with a slow and dreaming mind, 
 Reuben recognised, using his o^mi phrases for the matter, that the 
 children's tliirty pounds had been the pivot of Hannah's existence. 
 He was but a small sheep farmer, with very scanty capital. By 
 dint of hard work and painful thrift, the childless pair had 
 earned a sufficient living in the past— nay, even put by a b't, if 
 the truth of Hannah's savings-bank deposits were known. But 
 every fluctuation in their small profits tried them sorely— tried 
 Hannah especially, whose temper was of the brooding and grasp- 
 ing order. The certainty of Mr. Gurney's cheques made them 
 very soon the most cheerful facts in the farm life. On two days 
 in the year— the 20th of June and the 20th of December— Reuben 
 might be sure of finding his wife in a good temper, and he had 
 long shrewdly suspected, without inquiring, that Hannah's sav- 
 ings-bank book, since the children came, had been very pleasant 
 reading to her. 
 
 Reuben fidgeted uncomfortably as he thought of those savings. 
 Certainly the children had not cost what was paid for them. He 
 began to be oddly exercised this Sunday morning on the sub- 
 ject of the porridge Louie hated so much. Was it his fault or 
 Hannah's if the frugal living which had been the rule for all the 
 remoter farms of the Peak— nay, for the whole north country— 
 
36 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book I 
 
 And she threw herself kicking on the floor, while, to Hannah's 
 exasperation, a piece of crumbUng bun she had been holding tight 
 in her sticky little hand escaped and littered all the new-washed 
 
 stones. , , , 1 . ^ 
 
 ' Tak yor niece oop, Reuben, an mak her behave '—the mistress 
 of the house commanded angrily. ' She'll want a stick takken to 
 her, soon, /can see.' 
 
 Reuben obeyed so far as he could, but Louie's shrieks only 
 ceased when, by the combined efforts of husband and wife, she 
 had been put to bed, so exhausted with rage, excitement, and the 
 journey, that sleep mercifully took possession of her just after she 
 had performed the crowning feat of knocking the tea and bread 
 and butter Reuben brought her out of her uncle's hand and all 
 over the room. 
 
 Meanwhile, David sat perfectly still in a chair against the wall, 
 beside the old clock, and stared about him ; at the hams and 
 bunches of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling ; at the chiffon- 
 nier, with its red baize doors under a brass trellis-work ; at the 
 high wooden settle, the framed funeral cards, and the two or three 
 coloured prints, now brown with age, which Reuben had hung up 
 twenty years before, to celebrate his marriage. Hannah was 
 propitiated by the boy's silence, and as she got supper ready she 
 once or twice noticed his fine black eyes and his curly hair. 
 
 'Yo can coom an get yor supper,' she said to him, more 
 graciously than she had spoken yet. ' It's a mussy yo doant goo 
 skrikin like your sister.' 
 
 ' Thank you, ma'am,' said the little fellow, with a townsman's, 
 politeness, hardly understanding, however, a word of her north- 
 country dialect— 'I'm not hungry.— You've got a picture of 
 General Washington there, ma'am ; ' and, raising a small hand 
 trembling with nervousness and fatigue, he pointed to one of the 
 prints opposite. 
 
 ' Wal, I niver,' said Hannah, with a stare of astonishment. 
 ' Yo're a quare lot — the two o' yer.' 
 
 One thing more Reuben remembered with some vividness in 
 connection with the children's arrival. When they were both at 
 last asleep — Louie in an unused room at the back, on an old 
 wooden bedstead, which stood solitary in a wilderness of bare 
 boards ; David in a sort of cupboard off the landing, which got 
 most of its light and air from a wooden trellis-work, overlooking 
 the staircase— Hannah said abruptly to her husband, as they two 
 were going to bed, ' When ull Mr. Gurney pay that money ? ' 
 
 ' Twice a year— so his clerk towd me— Christmas an Mid- 
 summer. Praps we slian't want to use it aw, Hannah ; praps we 
 might save soom on it for t' childer. Their keep, iv yo feed em 
 on parritch, is nobbut a fleabite, an tliey'n got a good stock o' 
 cloos, Sandy's nurse towd me.' 
 
 He looked anxiously at Hannah. In his inmost heart there 
 was a passionate wish to do his duty to Sandy's orphans, fighting 
 
CHAP. IV CHILDHOOD 37 
 
 \nth a dread of his wife, which was the fruit of long habit and 
 constitutional weakness. 
 
 Hannah faced round upon him. It was Keuben's misfortune 
 that dignity was at all times impossible to him. Now, as he sat 
 in his shirt-sleeves and stocking-feet, flushed with the exertion of 
 pulling off his heavy boots, the light of the tallow candle falling 
 on his weak eyes with their red rims, on his large open mouth 
 with the conspicuous gap in its front teeth, and his stubby hair, 
 he was more than usually grotesque. ' As slamp an wobbly as an 
 owd corn-boggart,' so his neighbours described him when they 
 wished to be disrespectful, and the simile fitted very closely with 
 the dishevelled, disjointed appearance which was at all times 
 characteristic of him, Sundays or weekdays. No one studying 
 the pair, especially at such a moment as this — the malaise of the 
 husband — the wife towering above him, her grey hair hanging 
 loose round her black brows and sallow face instinct with a 
 rugged and indomitable energy — could have doubted in whose 
 hands lay the government of Needham Farm. 
 
 ' I'll thank yo not to talk nonsense, Reuben Grieve,' said his 
 wife sharply. 'D'yo think they're mr/ flesh an blood, thoose 
 childer ? An who'll ha to do for 'em but me, I should loike to 
 know ? Who'll ha to put up wi their messin an their dirt but 
 me ? Twenty year ha yo an I been married, Reuben, an niver 
 till this neet did I ha to goo down on my knees an sweep oop 
 after scrubbin-day ! Iv I'm to be moidered wi em, I'll be paid 
 for 't. Soa I let yo know— it's little enough.' 
 
 And Hannah took her pajTnent. As he sat in the sun, looking 
 back on the last seven yeai-s, with a slow and dreaming mind, 
 Reuben recognised, using his own. phrases for the matter, that the 
 children's tliirty pounds had been the pivot of Hannah's existence. 
 He was but a small sheep farmer, with very scanty capital. By 
 dint of hard work and painful thrift, the childless pair had 
 earned a sufficient living in the past— nay, even put by a b't, if 
 the truth of Hannah's savings-bank deposits were known. But 
 every fluctuation in their small profits tried them sorely— tried 
 Hannah especially, whose temper was of the brooding and grasp- 
 ing order. The certainty of Mr. Gurney's cheques made them 
 very soon the most cheerful facts in the farm life. On two days 
 in the year—the 20th of June and the 20th of December— Reuben 
 might be sure of finding his wife in a good temper, and he had 
 long shrewdly suspected, without inquiring, that Hannah's sav- 
 ings-bank book, since the children came, had been very pleasant 
 reading to her. , ^ ., 
 
 Reuben fidgeted uncomfortably as he thought of those savings. 
 Certainly the children had not cost what was paid for them. He 
 began to be oddly exercised this Sunday morning on the sub- 
 ject of the porridge Louie hated so much. Was it his fault or 
 Hannah's if the frugal living which had been the rule for all the 
 remoter farms of the Peak— nay, for the whole north country— 
 
38 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 in his father's time, and had been made doubly binding, as it 
 were, on the dwellers in Needham Farm by James Grieve's Scotch 
 blood and habits, had survived under their roof, while all about 
 them a more luxurious standard of food and comfort was begin- 
 ning to obtain among their neighbours ? Where could you find a 
 finer set of men than the Berwickshire hinds, of whom his father 
 came, and who were reared on ' parritch ' from year's end to year's 
 end? 
 
 And yet, all the same, Reuben's memory was full this morning 
 of disturbing pictures of a little London child, full of town dainti- 
 ness and accustomed to the spoiling of an indulgent father, crying 
 herself into fits over the new unpalatable food, refusing it day 
 after day, till the sharp, wilful face had grown pale and pinched 
 with famine, and caring no more apparently for her aunt's beat- 
 ings than she did for the clumsy advances by which her uncle 
 would sometimes try to propitiate her. There had been a great 
 deal of beating — whenever Reuben thought of it he had a super- 
 stitious way of putting Sandy out of his mind as much as possible. 
 Many times he had gone far away from the house to avoid the 
 sound of the blows and shrieks he was powerless to stop. 
 
 "Well, but what harm had come of it all ? Louie was a strong 
 lass now, if she were a bit thin and overgrown. David was as 
 fine a boy as anyone need wish to see. 
 
 David ? 
 
 Reuben got up from his seat at the farm' door, took his pipe 
 out of his pocket, and went to hang over the garden-gate, that he 
 might unravel some very worrying thoughts at a greater distance 
 from Hannah. 
 
 The day before he had been overtaken coming out of Clough 
 End by Mr. Ancrum, the lame minister. He and Grieve liked 
 one another. If there had been .intrigues raised against the 
 minister within the ' Christian Brethren ' congregation, Reuben 
 Grieve had taken no part in them. 
 
 After some general conversation, Mr. Ancrum suddenly said, 
 ' Will you let me have a word with you, Mr. Grieve, about your 
 nephew David — if you'll not think me intruding ? ' 
 
 ' Say on, sir — say on,' said Reuben hastily, but with an inward 
 shrinking. 
 
 ' Well, Mr. Grieve, you've got a remarkable boy there — a curi- 
 ous and remarkable boy. What are you going to do with him ? ' 
 
 'Do wi him?— me, sir? Wal, I doan't know as I've iver 
 thowt mich about it,' said Reuben, but with an agitation of 
 manner that struck his interrogator. ' He be varra useful to 
 me on t' farm, Mr. Ancrum. Soom toimes i' t' year theer's a 
 lot doin, yo knaw, sir, even on a bit place like ours, and he ha 
 gitten a good schoolin, he ha. ' 
 
 The apologetic incoherence of the little speech was curious 
 Mr. Ancrum did not exactly know how to take his man. 
 
 ' I dare say he's useful. But he's not going to be the ordi- 
 nary labourer, Mr. Grieve— he's made of quite different stuff, and, 
 
CHAP. IV CHILDHOOD 39 
 
 if I may say so, it will pay you very well to recognise it in good 
 time. That boy will read books now which, hardly any grown 
 man of his class — about here, at any rate — would be able to read. 
 Aye, and talk about them, too, in a way to astonish you ! ' 
 
 ' Yes, I know 'at he's oncommon cliver wi his books, is Davy, ' 
 Reuben admitted. 
 
 ' Oh ! it's not only that. But he's got an unusual brain and 
 a wonderful memory. And it would be a thousand pities if he 
 were to make nothing of them. You say he's useful, but — excuse 
 me, Mr. Grieve— he seems to me to spend three parts of his time 
 in loafing and desultory reading. He wants more teaching — he 
 wants steady training. Why don't you send him to Manchester,' 
 said the minister boldly, ' and apprentice him ? It costs money, 
 no doubt.' 
 
 And he looked interrogatively at Eeuben. Reuben, however, 
 said nothing. They were toiling up the steep road from Clough 
 End to the high farms under the Scout, a road which tried the 
 minister's infirm limb severely ; otherwise he would have taken 
 more notice of his companion's awkward flush and evident dis- 
 composure. 
 
 'But it would pay you in the long run,' he said, when they 
 stopped to take breath ; ' it would be a capital investment if the 
 boy lives, I promise you that, Mr. Grieve. And he could carry 
 on his education there, too, a bit — what with evening classes and 
 lectures, and the different libraries he could get the use of. It's 
 wonderful how all the facilities for working-class education have 
 grown in Manchester during the last few years.' 
 
 'Aye, sir — I spose they have— I spose they have,' said Reuben, 
 uncomfortably, and then seemed incapable of carrying on the 
 conversation any further. Mr. Ancrum talked, but nothing more 
 was to be got out of the farmer. At last the minister turned 
 back, saying, as he shook hands, ' Well, let me know if I can be 
 of any use. I have a good many friends in Manchester. I tell 
 you that's a boy to be proud of, Mr. Grieve, a boy of promise, if 
 ever there was one. But he wants taking the right way. He]s 
 got plenty of mixed stuff in him, bad and good. I should feel it 
 anxious work, the next few years, if he were my boy.' 
 
 Now it was really this talk which was fermenting in Reuben, 
 and which, together with the ' rumpus ' between Hannah and 
 Louie, had led to his singularly disturbed state of conscience this 
 Sunday morning. As he stood, miserably pulling at his pipe, the 
 whole prospect of sloping field, and steep distant moor, gradually 
 vanished from his eyes, and, instead, he saw the same London 
 room which David's memory held so tenaciously — he saw Sandy 
 raising himself from his deathbed with that look of sudden dis- 
 trust — ' Now, you'll deal honest wi 'em, Reuben ? ' 
 
 Reuben groaned in spirit. ' A boy to be proud of ' indeed. 
 It seemed to him, now that he was perforce made to think about 
 it, that he had never been easy in his mind since Sandy's orphans 
 came to the house. On the one hand, his wife had had her way 
 
40 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 —how was he to prevent it? On the other, his religious sense 
 had kept pricking and tormenting — like the gadfly that it 
 was. 
 
 Who, in the name of fortune, was to ask Hannah for money 
 to send the boy to Manchester and apprentice him ? And who 
 was going to write to Mr. Gurney about it without her leave ? 
 Once upset the system of things on which those two half-yearly 
 cheques depended, how many more of them would be forth- 
 coming ? And how was Hannah going to put up with the loss 
 of them ? It made Reuben shiver to think of it. 
 
 Shouts from the lane behind. Reuben suddenly raised him- 
 self and made for the gate at the corner of the farmyard. He 
 came out upon the children, who had been to Sunday school at 
 Clough End since dinner, and were now in consequence in a state 
 of restless animal spirits. Louie was swinging violently on the 
 gate which barred the path on to the moor. David was shying 
 stones at a rook's nest opposite, the clatter of the outraged colony 
 to which it belonged sounding as music in his ears. 
 
 They stared when they saw Reuben cross the road, sit down 
 on a stone beside David, and take out his pipe. David ceased 
 throwing, and Louie, crossing her feet and steadying herself as 
 she sat on the topmost bar of the gate by a grip on either side, 
 leant hard on her hands and watched her uncle in silence. When 
 caught unawares by their elders, these two had always something 
 of the air of captives defending themselves in an alien country. 
 
 'Wal, Davy, did tha have Mr. Ancrum in school?' began 
 Reuben, affecting a brisk manner, oddly unlike him. 
 
 ' Naw. It wor Brother Winterbotham from Halifax, or soom 
 sich name.' 
 
 ' Wor he edif yin, Davy ? ' 
 
 'He wor — he wor— a leather-yed,' said David, with sudden 
 energy, and, taking up a stone again, he flung it at a tree trunk 
 opposite, with a certain vindictiveness as though Brother Winter- 
 botham were sitting there. 
 
 ' Now, yo're not speakin as yo owt, Davy,' said Reuben 
 reprovingly, as he puffed away at his pipe and felt the pleasant- 
 ness of the spring sunshine which streamed down into the lane 
 through the still bare but budding branches of the sycamores. 
 
 ' He wor a leather-yed,' David repeated with emphasis. ' He 
 said it wor Alexander fought t' battle o' Marathon.' 
 
 Reuben was silent for a while. When tests of this kind were 
 going, he could but lie low. However, David's answer, after a 
 bit, suggested an opening to him. 
 
 ' Yo've a rare deal o' book-larnin for a farmin lad, Davy. If 
 yo wor at a trade now, or a mill-hand, or summat o' that soart, 
 yo'd ha noan so mich time for readin as yo ha now.' 
 
 The boy looked at him askance, with his keen black eyes. His 
 uncle puzzled him. 
 
 ' Wal, I'm not a mill-hand, onyways,' he said, shortly, 'an I 
 doan't mean to be. ' 
 
CHAP. IV CHILDHOOD 41 
 
 'Noa, yo're too lazy,' said Louie shrilly, from the top of the 
 gate. ' Theer's heaps o' boys no bigger nor yo, ams their ten 
 shillins a week.' 
 
 ' They're welcome,' said David laconically, throwing another 
 stone at the water to keep his hand in. For some years now the 
 boy had cherished a hatred of the mill-life on which Clough End 
 and the other small towns and villages in the neighbourhood ex- 
 isted. The thought of the long monotonous hours at the mules or 
 the looms was odious to the lad whose joys lay in free moorland 
 wanderings with the sheep, in endless reading, in talks with 'Lias 
 Dawson. 
 
 ' Wal, now, I'm real glad to heer yo say sich things, Davy, lad,' 
 said Eeuben, with a curious flutter of manner. ' I'm real glad. 
 So yo take to the farmin, Davy ? Wal, it's nateral. All yor 
 forbeai*s — all on em leastways, nobbut yor feyther — got their livin 
 off t' land. It cooms nateral to a Grieve. ' 
 
 The boy made no answer — did not commit himself in any way. 
 He went on absently tlirowing stones. 
 
 ' Why doan't he larn a trade ? ' demanded Louie. ' Theer's 
 Harry Wigson, he's gone to Manchester to be prenticed. He 
 doan't goo loafin round aw day. ' 
 
 Her sharp wits disconcerted Reuben. He looked anxiously at 
 David. The boy coloured furiously, and cast an angry glance at 
 his sister. 
 
 ' Theer's money wanted for prenticin,' he said shortly. 
 
 Eeuben felt a stab. Neither of the children knew that they 
 possessed a penny. A blunt word of Hannah's first of all, about 
 ' not gien 'em ony high noshuns o' theirsels,' aided on 'Eeuben's 
 side by the natural secretiveness of the peasant in money affairs, 
 had effectually concealed all knowledge of their own share in the 
 family finances from the orphans. 
 
 He reached out a soil-stained hand, shaking already with 
 incipient age, and laid it on David's sleeve. 
 
 ' Art tha hankerin after a trade, lad ? ' he said hastily, nay, 
 harshly. 
 
 Da^id looked at his uncle astonished. A hundred thoughts 
 flew through the boy's mind. Then he raised his head and caught 
 sight of the great peak of Kinder Low in the distance, beyond the 
 green swells of meadowland, — the heathery slopes running up 
 into its rocky breast, — the black patch on the brown, to the left, 
 which marked the site of the smithy. 
 
 ' No,' he said decidedly. ' No ; I can't say as I am. I like t' 
 farmin well enough.' 
 
 And then, boy-like, hating to be talked to about himself, he 
 shook himself free of his uncle and walked away. Eeuben fell to 
 his pipe again with a beaming countenance. 
 
 ' Louie, my gell,' he said. 
 
 ' Yes,' said the child, not moving. 
 
 ' Coom yo heer, Louie. ' 
 
 She unwillingly got down and came up to him. 
 
43 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 Reuben put down his pipe, and fumbled in his waistcoat 
 pocket. Out of it, with difficulty, he produced a sixpence. 
 
 ' Art tha partial to goodies, Louie ? ' he said, dropping his voice 
 almost to a whisper, and holding up the coin before her. 
 
 Louie nodded, her eyes glistening at the magnitude of the coin. 
 Uncle Reuben might be counted on for a certain number of 
 pennies during the year, but silver was unheard of. 
 
 ' Tak it then, child, an welcome. If yo have a sweet tooth — 
 an it's t' way wi moast gells — I conno see as it can be onythin 
 else but Providence as gave it yo. So get yorsel soom bull's-eyes, 
 Louie, an — an ' — he looked a little conscious as he slipped the coin 
 into her eager hand — ' doan't let on ti your aunt ! She'd think 
 mebbe I wor spoilin your teeth, or summat, — an, Louie — ' 
 
 Was Uncle Reuben gone mad ? For the first time in her life, 
 as it seemed to Louie, he was looking at what she had on, nay, 
 was even taking up her dress between his finger and thumb. 
 
 ' Is thissen your Sunday frock, chilt ? ' 
 
 'Yes,' said the girl, fiushing scarlet, 'bean't it a dish- 
 clout ? ' 
 
 And she stood looking down at it with passionate scorn. It 
 was a worn and patched garment of bro^m alpaca, made out of an 
 ancient gown of Hannah's. 
 
 ' Wal, I'm naw judge i' these matters,' said Reuben, dubiously, 
 drawing out his spectacles. ' It's got naw holes 'at I can see, but 
 it's not varra smart, perhaps. Satan's varra active wi gells on 
 this pint o' dress — yo mun tak noatice o' that, Louie — but — listen 
 heer — ' 
 
 And he drew her nearer to him by her skirt, looking cautiously 
 up and down the lane and across to the farm. 
 
 ' If I get a good price for t' wool this year — an theer's a new 
 merchant coomin round, yan moor o' t' buyin soart nor owd 
 Croker, soa they say, I'st save yo five shillin for a frock, chilt. 
 Yo can goo an buy it, an I'st mak it straight wi yor aunt. But I 
 mun get a good price, yo know, or your aunt uU be fearfu' bad to 
 manage. ' 
 
 And he gazed up at her as though appealing to her common 
 sense in the matter, and to her understanding of both his and her 
 situation. Louie's cheeks were red, her eyes did not meet his. 
 They looked away, down towards Clough End. 
 
 'Theer's a blue cotton at Hinton's,' she said, hurriedly — 'a 
 light-blue cotton. They want sixpence farthin, — but Annie Wig- 
 son says yo could bate 'em a bit. But what's t' use ? ' she added, 
 with a sudden savage darkening of her bright look — ' she'd tak it 
 away.' 
 
 The tone gave Reuben a shock. But he did not rebuke it. 
 For the first time he and Louie were conspirators in the same 
 plot. 
 
 ' No, no, I'd see to 'at. But how ud yo get it made ? ' He was 
 beginning to feel a childish interest in his scheme. 
 
 * Me an Annie Wigson ud mak it oop fast enough. Theer are 
 
CHAP. IV CHILDHOOD 43 
 
 things I can do for her ; she'd not want no payin, an she's fearfii' 
 good at dressmakin. She wor prenticed two years afore she took 
 ill.' 
 
 ' Gie me a kiss then, my gell ; doan't yo gie naw trooble, an 
 we'st see. But I mun get a good price, yo know.' 
 
 And rising, Reuben bent towards his niece. She rose on tip- 
 toe, and just touched his rough cheek. There was no natural 
 childish effusiveness in the action. For the seven years since she 
 left her father, Louie had quite unlearnt kissing. 
 
 Reuben proceeded up the lane to the gate leading to the moor. 
 He was in the highest spirits. What a mercy he had not bothered 
 Hannah with Mr. Ancrum's remarks ! Why, the boy wouldn't go 
 to a trade, not if he were sent ! 
 
 At the gate he ran against David, who came hastily out of the 
 farmyard to intercept him. 
 
 ' Uncle Reuben, what do they coe that bit watter up theer ? ' 
 and he pointed up the lane towards the main ridge of the Peak. 
 ' Yo know— that bit pool on t' way to th' Downfall ? ' 
 
 The farmer stopped bewildered. 
 
 ' That bit watter ? What they coe that bit watter ? Why, they 
 coe it t' Witch's Pool, or used to i' my yoong days. An for varra 
 good reason too. They drownded an owd witch theer i' my grand- 
 feyther's time — I've heerd my grandmither tell th' tale on't scores 
 o' times. An theer's aw mak o' tales about it, or used to be. I 
 hannot yeerd mony words about it o' late years. Who's been 
 talkin to yo, Davy ? ' 
 
 Louie came running up and listened. 
 
 ' I doan't know,' said the boy, — ' what soart o' tales ? ' 
 
 ' Why, they'd use to say th' witch walked, on soom neets i' th' 
 year— Easter Eve, most pertickerlerly— an foak wor feeart to goo 
 onywhere near it on those neets. But doan't yo goo listenin to 
 tales, Davy,' said Reuben, with a paternal effusion most rare with 
 him, and born of his recent proceedings ; ' yo'll only freeten yorsel 
 o' neets for nothin.' 
 
 ' What are witches ?' demanded Louie, scornfully. ' I doan't 
 bleeve in 'em.' 
 
 Reuben frowned a little. 
 
 ' Theer wor witches yance, my gell, becos it's in th' Bible, an 
 whativer's in th' Bible's true^' and the farmer brought his hand 
 down on the top bar of the gate. ' I'm no gien ony judgment 
 about 'em nowadays. Theer wor aw mak o' queer things said 
 about Jenny Crum an Needham Farm i' th' owd days. I've heerd 
 my grandmither say it worn't worth a Christian man's while to 
 live in Needham Farm when Jenny Crum wor about. She med- 
 dled wi everythin— wi his lambs, an his coos, an his childer. I 
 niver seed nothin mysel, so I doan't say nowt— not o' my awn 
 knowledge. But I doan't soomhow bleeve as it's th' Awmighty's 
 will to freeten a Christian coontry wi witches, ^' tK present dis- 
 pensation. An murderin's a graat sin, wheder it's witches or 
 Gother foak.' 
 
44 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 'In t' books they doan't coe it t' Witch's Pool at aw,' said 
 Louie, obstinately. ' They coe it t' Mermaid's Pool.' 
 
 ' An anoother book coes it a " Hammer-dry-ad," ' said David, 
 mockingly, ' soa theer yo are. ' 
 
 ' Aye, soom faddlin kind of a name they gie it — I know — 
 those Manchester chaps, as cooms trespassin ower t' Scout wheer 
 they aren't wanted. To hear ony yan o' them talk, yo'd think 
 theer wor only three fellows like 'im cam ower i' three ships, an 
 two were drownded. T'aint ov ony account what they an their 
 books coe it.' 
 
 And Reuben, as he leant against the gate, blew his smoke 
 contemptuously in the air. It was not often that Reuben Grieve 
 allowed himself, or was allowed by his world, to use airs of 
 superiority towards any other human being whatever. But in 
 the case of the Manchester clerks and warehousemen, who came 
 tramping over the grouse moors which Reuben rented for his 
 sheep, and were always being turned back by keepers or himself 
 — and in their case only — did he exercise, once in a while, the 
 commonest privilege of humanity. 
 
 ' Did yo iver know onybody 'at went up on Easter Eve ? ' 
 asked David. 
 
 Both children hung on the answer. 
 
 Reuben scratched his head. The tales of Jenny Crum, once 
 well known to him, had sunk deep into the waves of memory of 
 lat€ years, and his slow mind had some difficulty in recovering 
 them. But at last he said with the sudden brightening of 
 recollection : 
 
 ' Aye — of coorse ! — I knew theer wor soom one. Yo know 'im, 
 Davy, owd 'Lias o' Frimley Moor ? He wor alius a foo'hardy sort 
 o' creetur. But if he wor short o' mts when he gan up, he wor 
 mich shorter when he cam down. That wor a rum skit ! — now I 
 think on 't. Sich a sect he wor ! He came by here six o'clock i' 
 th' mornin. I found him hangin ower t' yard gate theer, as white 
 an slamp as a puddin cloth oop on eend ; an I browt him in, an 
 was for gien him soom tay. An yor aunt, she gien him a warld 
 o' good advice about his gooins on. But bless yo, he didn't tak in 
 a word o' 't. An for th' tay, he'd naw sooner swallowed it than he 
 runs out, as quick as leetnin, an browt it aw up. He wor fairly 
 clemmed \nV t' cold, — 'at he wor. I put in th' horse, an I took 
 him down to t' Frimley carrier, an we packed him i' soom rugs an 
 str^w, an soa he got home. But they put him out o' t' school, an 
 he wor months in his bed. An they do tell me, as nobory can 
 mak owt o' 'Lias Dawson these mony years, i' th' matter o' brains. 
 Eh, but yo shudno meddle v/i Satan. ' 
 
 ' What d'yo think he saw ? ' asked David, eagerly, his black 
 eyes all aglow. 
 
 'He saw t' woman wi t' fish's tail — 'at's what he saw,' said 
 Louie, shrilly. 
 
 Reuben took no notice. He was sunk in silent reverie poking 
 at his pipe. In spite of his confidence in the Almighty's increased 
 
CHAP. V CiSlLDHOOD 45 
 
 goodwill towards the present dispensation, he was not prepared 
 to say for certain what 'Lias Dawson did or didn't see. 
 
 ' Nobory should goo an meddle wi Satan,' he repeated slowly 
 after an interval ; and then opening the yard gate he went off on 
 his usual Sunday walk over the moors to have a look at his more 
 distant sheep. 
 
 Davy stood intently looking after him ; so did Louie. She 
 had clasped her hands behind her head, her eyes were wide, her 
 look and attitude all eagerness. She was putting two and two 
 together — her uncle's promise and the mermaid story as the 
 Manchester man had delivered it. You had but to see her and 
 wish, and, according to the Manchester man and his book, you 
 got your wish. The child's hatred of sermons and ministers had 
 not touched her capacity for belief of this sort in the least. She 
 believed feverishly, and was enraged with David for setting up a 
 rival creed, and with her uncle for endorsing it. 
 
 David turned and walked towards the farmyard. Louie 
 followed him, and tapped him peremptorily on the arm. ' I'm 
 gooin up theer Easter Eve — Saturday week ' — and she pointed 
 over her shoulder to the Scout. 
 
 ' Gells conno be out neets,' said David firmly ; ' if I goo I can 
 tell yo.' 
 
 ' Yo'll not goo without me — I'd tell Aunt Hannah ! ' 
 
 ' Yo've naw moor sense nor rotten sticks ! ' said David, 
 angrily. 'Yo'll get your death, an Aunt Hannah '11 be stick 
 stock mad wi boath on us. If I goo she'll niver find out. ' 
 
 Louie hesitated a moment. To provoke Aunt Hannah too 
 much might, indeed, endanger the blue frock. But daring and 
 curiosity triumphed. 
 
 ' I doan't care ! ' she said, tossing her head ; ' I'm gooin.' 
 
 David slammed the yard gate, and, hiding himself in a corner 
 of the cowhouse, fell into moody meditations. It took all the 
 tragic and mysterious edge off an adventure he had set his heart 
 on that Louie should insist on going too. But there was no help 
 for it. Next day they planned it together. 
 
 CHAPTEE V 
 
 ' Reuben, ha yo seen t' childer ? ' inquired Aunt Hannah, poking 
 her head round the door, so as to be heard by her husband, who 
 was sitting outside cobbling at a bit of broken harness. 
 
 ' Noa ; niver seed un since dinner.' 
 
 'They went dowm to Clough End, two o'clock about, for t' 
 bread, an I've yerd nothin ov em since. Coom in to your tay, 
 Reuben ! I'll keep nothin waitin for them ! They may goo empty 
 if they conno keep time ! ' 
 
 Reuben went in. An hour later the husband and wife came 
 
46 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE Book 1 
 
 out together, and stood looking down the steep road leading to 
 the town. 
 
 ' Just cast your eye on aw them stockins waitin to be mended,' 
 said Hannah, angrily, turning back to the kitchen, and pointing 
 to a chair piled with various garments. ' That's why she doon it, 
 I spose. I'll be even wi her ! It's a poor soart of a supper she'll 
 get this neet, or he noather. An her stomach aw she cares for ! ' 
 
 Reuben wandered down into the road, strolled up and down 
 for nearly an hour, while the sun set and the light waned, went as 
 far as the corner by Wigson's farm, asked a passer-by, saw and 
 heard nothing, and came back, shaking his head in answer to his 
 wife's shrill interrogations. 
 
 ' Wal, if I doan't gie Louie a good smackin,' ejaculated 
 Hannah, exasperated; and she was just going back into the house 
 when an exclamation from Reuben stopped her; instead, she ran 
 out to him, holding on her cap against the east wind. 
 
 ' Look theer,' he said, pointing; ' what iver is them two up to ? ' 
 
 For suddenly he had noticed outside the gate leading into the 
 field a basket lying on the ground against the wall. The two 
 peered at it with amazement, for it was their own basket, and in 
 it reposed the loaves David had been told to bring back from 
 Clough End, while on the top lay a couple of cotton reels and a 
 card of mending which Louie had been instructed to buy for her 
 aunt. 
 
 After a moment Reuben looked up, his face working. 
 
 ' I'm thinkin, Hannah, they'n roon away ! ' 
 
 It seemed to him as he spoke that such a possibility had been 
 always in his mind. And during the past week there had been 
 much bad blood between aunt and niece. Twice had the child 
 gone to bed supperless, and yesterday, for some impertinence, 
 Hannah had given her a blow,"^ the marks of which on her cheek 
 Reuben had watched guiltily all day. At night he had dreamed 
 of Sandy. Since Mr. Ancrum had set him thinking, and so stirred 
 his conscience in various indirect and unforeseen ways, Sandy had 
 been a terror to him; the dead man had gained a mysterious hold 
 on the living. 
 
 ' Roon away ! ' repeated Hannah scornfully ; ' whar ud they 
 roon to ? They're just at soom o' their divilments, 'at's what they 
 are. An if yo doan't tak a stick to boath on them when they coom 
 back, / will^ soa theer, Reuben Grieve. Yo niver had no sperrit 
 wi 'em — niver — and that's yan reason why they've grown up soa 
 ramjam full o' wickedness.' 
 
 It relieved her to abuse her husband. Reuben said nothing, 
 but hung over the wall, straining his eyes into the gathering dark- 
 ness. The wooded sides of the great moor which enclosed the 
 valley to the north were fading into dimness, and to the east, 
 above the ridge of Kinder Low, a young moon was rising. The 
 black steep waU of the Scout was swiftly taking to itself that 
 majesty which all mountains win from the approach of night. 
 Involuntarily, Reuben held his breath, listening, hungering for 
 
CHAP. V CHILDHOOD 47 
 
 the sound of children's voices on the still air. Nothing — but a 
 few intermittent bird notes and the eternal hurry of water from 
 the moorland to the plain. 
 
 There was a step on the road, and a man passed whistling. 
 
 ' Jim Wigson ! ' shouted Hannah, ' is that yo, Jim ? ' 
 
 The man opened the yard gate, and came through to them. 
 Jim was the eldest son of the neighbouring farmer, whose girls 
 were Louie's only companions. He was a full-blooded swaggering 
 youth, with whom David was generally on bad terms. David 
 despised him for an oaf who could neither read nor write, and 
 hated him for a bully. 
 
 He grinned when Hannah asked him questions about the 
 truants. 
 
 ' Why, they're gone to Edale, th' yoong rascots, I'll uphowd 
 yo ! There's a parcel o' gipsies there tellin fortunes, an lots o' 
 foak ha gone ower there to-day. You may mak your mind up 
 they've gone to Edale. That Louie's a limb, she is. She's got 
 spunk enough to waak to Lunnon if she'd a mind. Oh, they'll be 
 back here soon enough, trust 'em.' 
 
 ' I shut my door at nine o'clock,' said Hannah, grimly. ' Them 
 as cooms after that, may sleep as they can. ' 
 
 'Well, that'll be sharp wark for th' eyes if they're gone to 
 Edale,' said Jim, with a laugh. 'It's a good step fro here to 
 Edale.' 
 
 ' Aye, an soom o' 't bad ground,' said Keuben uneasily — ' varra 
 bad ground.' 
 
 ' Aye, it's not good walkin, neets. If they conno see their 
 way when they get top o' t' Downfall, they'll stay theer till it gets 
 mornin, if they've ony sort o' gumption. But, bless yo, it bean't 
 gooin to be a dark neet,' — and he pointed to the moon. ' They'll 
 be here afore yo goo to bed. An if yo want onybody to help yo 
 gie Davy a bastin, just coe me, Mr. Grieve. Good neet to yo.' 
 
 Eeuben fidgeted restlessly all the evening. Towards nine he 
 went out on the pretext of seeing to a cow that had lately calved 
 and was in a weakly state. He gave the animal her food and 
 clean litter, doing everything more clumsily than usual. Then 
 he went into the stable and groped about for a lantern that stood 
 in the corner. 
 
 He found it, slipped through the farmyard into the lane, and 
 then lit it out of sight of the house. 
 
 ' It's bad ground top o' t' Downfall,' he said to himself, apolo- 
 getically, as he guiltily opened the gate on to the moor — ' varra 
 bad ground.' 
 
 Hannah shut her door that night neither at nine nor at ten. 
 For by the latter hour the master of the house was still absent, 
 and nowhere to be found, in spite of repeated calls from the door 
 and up the lane. Hannah guessed where he had gone without 
 much difficulty ; but her guess only raised her wrath to a white 
 heat. Troublesome brats Sandy's children had always been — 
 Louie more especially — but they had never perpetrated any such 
 
48 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 overt act of rebellion as this before, and the dour, tyrannical 
 woman was filled with a kind of silent frenzy as she thought of 
 her husband going out to welcome the wanderers. 
 
 ' It's a quare kind o' fatted calf they'll get Avhen / lay hands 
 on 'em,' she thought to herself as she stood at the front door, in 
 the cold darkness, listening. 
 
 Meanwhile David and Louie, high up on the side of Kinder 
 Scout, were speculating with a fearful Joy as to what might be 
 happening at the farm. The manner of their escape had cost them 
 much thought. Should they slip out of the front door instead of 
 going to bed ? But the woodwork of the farm was old and creak- 
 ing, and the bolts and bars heavy. They were generally secured 
 before supper by Hannah herself, and, though they might be 
 surreptitiously oiled, the children despaired — considering how 
 close the kitchen was to the front door — of getting out without 
 rousing Hannah's sharp ears. Other projects, in which windows 
 and ropes played a part, were discussed. David held strongly 
 that he alone could have managed any one of them, but he 
 declined flatly to attempt them with a ' gelL' In the same way he 
 alone could have made his way up the Scout and over the river 
 in the dark. But who'd try it with a ' gell ' ? 
 
 The boy's natural conviction of the uselessness of ' gells ' was 
 never more disagreeably expressed than on this occasion. But he 
 could not shake Louie off. She pinched him when he enraged 
 her beyond bounds, but she never wavered in her determination 
 to go too. 
 
 Finally they decided to brave Aunt Hannah and take the con- 
 sequences. They meant to be out all night in hiding, and in the 
 morning they would come back and take their beatings. David 
 comfortably reflected that Uncle Reuben couldn't do him much 
 harm, and,' though Louie could hardly flatter herself so far, her 
 tone, also, in the matter was philosophical. 
 
 'Theer's soom bits o' owd books i' th' top-attic,' she said to 
 David ; ' I'll leave 'em in t' stable, an when we coom home, I'll 
 tie 'em on my back — under my dress — an she may leather away 
 till Christmas.' 
 
 So on their return from Clough End with the bread— about 
 five o'clock — they slipped into the field, crouching under the wall, 
 so as to escape Hannah's observation, deposited their basket by 
 the gate, took up a bundle and tin box which David had hidden 
 that morning under the hedge, and, creeping back again into the 
 road, passed noiselessly through the gate on to the moor, just as 
 Aunt Hannah was lifting the kettle off the fire for tea. 
 
 Then came a wild and leaping flight over the hill, down to the 
 main Kinder stream, across it, and up the face of the Scout — up, 
 and up, with smothered laughter, and tumbles and scratches at 
 every step, and a glee of revolt and adventure swelling every vein. 
 
 It was then a somewhat stormy afternoon, with alternate 
 gusts of wind and gleams of sun playing on the black boulders, 
 the red-brown slopes of the mountain. The air was really cold 
 
CHAP. V CHILDHOOD 49 
 
 and cutting, promising a frosty night. But the children took no 
 notice of it. Up, and on, through the elastic carpet of heather 
 and bilberry, and across bogs which showed like veins of vivid 
 green on the dark surface of the moor ; under circling peewits, 
 who fled before them, crying with plaintive shrillness to each 
 other, as though in protest ; and past grouse-nests, whence the 
 startled mothers soared precipitately with angry duckings, each 
 leaving behind her a loose gathering of eggs lying wide and open 
 on the heather, those newly laid gleaming a brighter red beside 
 their fellows. The tin box and its contents rattled under David's 
 arm as he leapt and straddled across the bogs, choosing always 
 the widest jump and the stifl'est bit of climb, out of sheer wanton- 
 ness of life and energy. Louie's thin figure, in its skimp cotton 
 dress and red crossover, her long legs in their blue worsted 
 stockings, seemed to fly over the moor, winged, as it were, by an 
 ecstasy of freedom. If one could but be in two places at once — 
 on the Scout — and peeping from some safe corner at Aunt Han- 
 nah's wrath ! 
 
 Presently they came to the shoulder whereon — gleaming under 
 the level light — lay the Mermaid's Pool. David had sufficiently 
 verified the fact that the tarn did indeed bear this name in the 
 modern guide-book parlance of the district. Young men and 
 women, out on a holiday from the big towns near, and carrying 
 little red or green 'guicles,' spoke of the 'Mermaid's Pool' with 
 the accent of romantic interest. But the boy had also discovered 
 that no native-born farmer or shepherd about had ever heard of the 
 name, or would have a word to say to it. And for the first time 
 he had stumbled full into the deep deposit of witch-lore and belief 
 still surviving in the Kinder Scout district, as in all the remoter 
 moorland of the North. Especially had he won the confidence of 
 a certain ' owd Matt,' a shepherd from a farm high on Mardale 
 Moor ; and the tales ' owd Matt ' had told him — of mysterious 
 hares coursed at night by angry farmers enraged by the ' bedivil- 
 ment ' of their stock, shot at with silver slugs, and identified next 
 morning with some dreaded hag or other lying groaning and 
 wounded in her bed— of calves' hearts burnt at midnight with 
 awful ceremonies, while the baffled witch outside flung herself in 
 rage and agony against the close-barred doors and windows — of 
 spells and wise men — these things had sent chills of pleasing 
 horror through the boy's frame. They were altogether new to 
 him, in this vivid personal guise at least, and mixed up with all 
 the familiar names and places of the district ; for his childish life 
 had been singularly solitary, giving to books the part which half 
 a century ago would have been taken by tradition ; and, more- 
 over, the witch-belief in general had now little foothold among 
 the younger generation of the Scout, and was only spoken of with 
 reserve and discretion among the older men. 
 
 But the stories once heard had struck deep into the lad's quick 
 and pondering mind. Jenny Crum seemed to have been the 
 latest of all the great witches of Kinder Scout. The memory of 
 
50 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 her as a real and awful personage was still fresh in the mind of 
 many a grey-haired farmer ; the history of her death was well 
 known ; and most of the local inhabitants, even the boys and 
 girls, turned out, when you came to inquire, to be familiar with 
 the later legends of the Pool, and, as David presently discovered, 
 with one or more tales — for the stories were discrepant — of 'Lias 
 Dawson's meeting with the witch, now fifteen years ago. 
 
 ' What had 'Lias seen ? What would they see ? ' His flesh 
 crept deliciously. 
 
 ' Wal, owd Mermaid ! ' shouted Louie, defiantly, as soon as she 
 had got her breath again. ' Are yo coomin out to-night ? Yo '11 
 ha coompany if yo do. ' 
 
 David smiled contemptuously and did not condescend to argue. 
 
 ' Are yo coomin on ? ' he said, shouldering his box and bundle 
 again. ' They'st be up after us if we doan't look out.' 
 
 And on they went, climbing a steep boulder-strewn slope above 
 the pool till they came to the ' edge ' itself, a tossed and broken 
 battlement of stone, running along the top of the Scout. Here 
 the great black slabs of grit were lying fantastically piled upon 
 each other at every angle and in every possible combination. 
 The path which leads from the Hayfield side across the desolate 
 tableland of the Scout to the Snake Inn on the eastern side of the 
 ridge, ran among them, and many a wayfarer, benighted or mist- 
 bound on the moor, had taken refuge before now in their caverns 
 and recesses, waiting for the light, and dreading to find himself 
 on the cliffs of the Downfall. 
 
 But David pushed on past many hiding-places weU known to 
 him, till the two reached the point where the mountain face 
 sweeps backward in the curve of which the Downfall makes the 
 centre. At the outward edge of the curve a great buttress of 
 ragged and jutting rocks descends perpendicularly towards the 
 valley, like a ruined staircase with displaced and gigantic steps. 
 
 Down this David began to make his way, and Louie jumped, 
 and slid, and swung after him, as lithe and sure-footed as a cat. 
 Presently David stopped. 'This ull do,' he said, surveying the 
 place with a critical eye. 
 
 They had just slid down a sloping chimney of rock, and were 
 now standing on a flat block, over which hung another like a 
 penthouse roof. On the side of the Downfall there was a project- 
 ing stone, on which David stepped out to look about him. 
 
 Holding on to a rock above for precaution's sake, he recon- 
 noitred their position. To his left was the black and semicircular 
 cliff, down the centre of which the Downfall stream, now tamed 
 and thinned by the dry spring winds, was trickling. The course 
 of the stream was marked by a vivid orange colour, produced, 
 apparently, in the grit by the action of water ; and about halfway 
 down the fall a mass of rock had recently slipped, leaving a bright 
 scar, through which one saw, as it were, the inner mass of the 
 Peak, the rectangular blocks, now thick, now thin, as of some 
 Cyclopean masonry, wherewith the earth-forces had built it up in 
 
CKAP. V CHILDHOOD 51 
 
 days before a single alp had yet risen on the face of Europe. 
 Below the boy's feet a precipice, which his projecting stone over- 
 hung, fell to the bed of the stream. On this side at least they 
 were abundantly protected. 
 
 On the moorside the steep broken ground of the hill came up 
 to the rocky line they had been descending, and offered no diffi- 
 culty to any sure-footed person. But no path ran anywhere near 
 them, and from the path up above they were screened by the grit 
 'edge' already spoken of. Moreover, their penthouse, or half- 
 gable, had towards the Downfall a tolerably wide opening ; but 
 towards the moor and the north there was but a narrow hole, 
 which David soon saw could be stopped by a stone. When he 
 crept back into their hiding-place, it pleased him extremely. 
 
 ' They'll niver find us, if they look till next week ! ' he 
 exclaimed exultantly, and, slipping off the heavy bundle strapped 
 on his back, he undid its contents. Two old woollen rugs 
 appeared — one a blanket, the other a horse-rug — and wrapped 
 up in the middle of them a jagged piece of tarpaulin, a hammer, 
 some wooden pegs, and two or three pieces of tallow dip. Louie, 
 sitting cross-legged in the other corner, with her chin in her 
 hands, looked on with her usual detached and critical air. David 
 had not allowed her much of a voice in the preparations, and she 
 felt an instinctive aversion towards other people's ingenuities. 
 All she had contributed was something to while away the time, 
 in the shape of a bag of bull's-eyes, bought with some of the six- 
 pence Uncle Reuben had given her. 
 
 Having laid out his stores, David went to work. Getting out 
 on the projecting stone again, he laid the bit of tarpaulin along 
 the sloping edge of the rock which roofed them, pegged it down 
 into crevices at either end, and laid a stone to hold it in the 
 middle. Then he slipped back again, and, behold, there was a 
 curtain between them and the Downfall, which, as the dusk was 
 fast advancing, made the little den inside almost completely dark. 
 
 ' What's t' good o' that ? ' inquired Louie, scornfully, more 
 than half inclined to put out a mischievous hand and pull it 
 down again. 
 
 'Doan't worrit, an yo'll see,' returned David, and Louie's 
 curiosity got the better of her malice. 
 
 Stooping down beside her, he looked through the hole which 
 opened to the moor. His eye travelled down the hillside to the 
 path far below, just visible in the twilight to a practised eye, to 
 the river, to the pasture-fields on the hill beyond, and to the 
 smoke, rising above the tops of some unseen trees, which marked 
 the site of the farmhouse. No one in sight. The boy crawled 
 out, and searched the moor till he found a large flatfish stone, 
 which he brought and placed against the opening, ready to be 
 drawn quite across it from inside. 
 
 Then he slipped back again, and in the glimmer of light 
 which remained groped for his tin box. Louie stooped over and 
 eagerly watched him open it. Out came a bottle of milk, some 
 
52 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 large slices of bread, some oatcake, and some cheese. In the 
 corner, recklessly near the cheese, lurked a grease-bespattered 
 lantern and a box of matches. David had borrowed the lantern 
 that afternoon from a Clough End friend under the most solemn 
 vows of secrecy, and he drew it out now with a deliberate and 
 special relish. When he had driven a peg into a cranny of the 
 rock, trimmed half a dip carefully, lighted it, put it into the 
 lantern, and hung the lantern on the peg, he fell back on his 
 heels to study the effect, with a beaming countenance, filled all 
 through with the essentially human joy of contrivance. 
 
 ' Now, then, d'yo see what that tarpaulin 's for ? ' he inquired 
 triumphantly of Louie. 
 
 But Louie's mouth was conveniently occupied with a bull's- 
 eye, and she only sucked it the more vigorously in answer. 
 
 ' Why, yo little silly, if it worn't for that we couldno ha no 
 leet. They'd see us from t' fields even, as soon as it 's real dark.' 
 'Doan't bleeve it,' said Louie, laconically, in a voice much 
 muffled by bull's-eyes. 
 
 ' Wal, yo needn't ; I'm gooin to have my tea.' 
 And David, diving into the tin, brought out a hunch of bread 
 and a knob of cheese. The voracity with which he fell on them, 
 soon, with him also, stopped up the channels of speech. Louie, 
 alarmed perhaps by the rapidity with which the mouthfuls disap- 
 peared, slid up on her heels and claimed her share. Never was 
 there a more savoury meal than that ! Their little den with its 
 curtain felt warm for the moment after the keen air of the moor ; 
 the lantern light seemed to shut them in from the world, gave 
 them the sense of settlers carving a home out of the desert, and 
 milk which had been filched from Aunt Hannah lay like nectar in 
 the mouth. 
 
 After their meal both children crept out on to the moor to see 
 what might be going on in the world outside. Darkness was 
 fast advancing. A rising wind swept through the dead bracken, 
 whirled round the great grit boulders, and sent a shiver through 
 Louie's thin body. 
 
 ' It's cowd,' she said pettishly ; ' I'm gooin back.' 
 ' Did yo spose it wor gooin to be warm, yo little silly ? That's 
 why I browt t' rugs, of course. Gells never think o' nothin. It's 
 parishin cowd here, neets— fit to tie yo up in knots wi th' rheu- 
 matics, like Jim Spedding, if yo doan't mind yorsel. It wor only 
 laying out a neet on Frimley Moor— poachin, I guess— 'at twisted 
 Jim that way. ' 
 
 Louie's countenance fell. Jim Spedding was a little crooked 
 greengrocer in Clough End, of whom she had a horror. The 
 biting hostile wind, which obliged her to hold her hat on against 
 it with both hands, the black moor at their feet, the grey sweep 
 of sky, the pale cloudy moon, the darkness which was fast enve- 
 loping them— blotting out the distant waves of hill, and fusing 
 the great blocks of grit above them into one threatening mass — 
 all these became suddenly hateful to her. She went back into 
 
CHAP. V CHILDHOOD 53 
 
 their den, wrapped herself up in one of the tattered rugs, and 
 crept sulkily into a corner. The lantern gleamed on the child's 
 huddled form, the frowning brow, the great vixenish eyes. She 
 had half a mind to run home, in spite of Aunt Hannah. Hours 
 to wait ! and she loathed waiting. 
 
 But gradually, as the rug warmed her, the passion for adven- 
 ture and mystery — the vision of the mermaid — the hope of the 
 blue cotton — reasserted themselves, and the little sharp face 
 relaxed. She began to amuse herself with hunting the spiders 
 and beetles which ran across the rocky roof above her head, or 
 crept in and out of the crevices of stone, wondering, no doubt, at 
 this unbidden and tormenting daylight. She caught one or two 
 small blackbeetles in a dirty rag of a handkerchief — for she 
 would not touch them if she could help it^ — and then it delighted 
 her to push aside the curtain, stretch her hand out into the void 
 darkness, and let them fall into the gulf below. Even if they 
 could fly, she reflected, it must ' gie 'em a good start. ' 
 
 Meanwhile, David had charged up the hill, filled with a 
 sudden curiosity to see what the top of the Scout might look like 
 by night. He made his way through the battlement of grit, 
 found the little path behind, gleaming white in the moonlight; 
 because of the quartz sheddings which wind and weather are for 
 ever teasing out of the grit, and which drift into the open spaces; 
 and at last, guided by the sound and the gleam of water, he 
 made out the top of the Downfall, climbed a high peat bank, and 
 the inimitable plateau of the Scout lay wide and vast before him. 
 
 Here, on the mountain-top, there seemed to be more daylight 
 left than on its rocky sides, and the moon among the parting 
 clouds shone intermittently over the primeval waste. The top of 
 the Peak is, so to speak, a vast black glacier, whereof the crevasses 
 are great fissures, ebon- black in colour, sometimes ten feet deep, 
 and with ten feet more of black water at the bottom. For miles 
 on either side the ground is seamed and torn with these crevasses, 
 now shallower, now deeper, succeeding each other at intervals of 
 a yard or two, and it is they which make the crossing of the Peak 
 in the dark or in mist a matter of danger sometimes even for the 
 native. David, high on his bank, from which the black over- 
 hanging eaves curled inwards beneath his feet to a sullen depth 
 of water, could see against the moonlit sky the posts which 
 marked the track from the Downfall to the Snake Inn on the 
 Glossop Road. Miss that track — a matter of some fifteen minutes' 
 walk for the sturdy farmer who knows it well — and you find 
 yourself lost in a region which has no features and no landmarks, 
 where the earth lays snares for you and the mists betray you, 
 and where even in bright sunshine there reigns an eternal and 
 indescribable melancholy. The strangeness and wildness of the 
 scene entered the boy's consciousness, and brought with them a 
 kind of exaltation. He stood 'gazing ; that inner life of his, of 
 which Louie, his constant companion, knew as good as nothing, 
 asserting itself. 
 
54 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 For the real companions of his heart were not Louie or the 
 boys with whom he had joked and sparred at school ; they were 
 ideas, images, sounds, imaginations, caught from books or from 
 the talk of old 'Lias and Mr. Ancrum. He had but to stand still 
 a moment, as it were, to listen, and the voices and sights of 
 another world came out before him like players on to a stage. 
 Spaces of shining water, crossed by ships with decks manned by 
 heroes for whom the blue distance was for ever revealing new 
 lands to conquer, new adventures to affront ; the plumed Indian 
 in his forest divining the track of his enemy from a displaced leaf 
 or twig ; the Zealots of Jehovah urging a last frenzied defence of 
 Jehovah's Sanctuary against the Roman host ; and now, last of 
 all, the gloom and flames, the infernal palaces, the towering 
 fiends, the grandiose and lumbering war of ' Paradise Lost ' : 
 these things, together with the names and suggestions of 'Lias's 
 talk — that whole crew of shining, fighting, haranguing men and 
 women whom the old dreamer was for ever bringing into weird 
 action on the moorside — lived in the boy's mind, and in any pause 
 of silence, as we have said, emerged and took possession. 
 
 It was only that morning, in an old meal-chest which had 
 belonged to his grandfather, James Grieve, he had discovered the 
 old calf -bound copy of ' Paradise Lost,' which was now in one of 
 his pockets, balanced by ' Anson's Voyages ' in the other. All the 
 morning he had been lying hidden in a corner of the sheepfold 
 devouring it, the rolling verse imprinting itself on the boy's 
 plastic memory by a sort of enchantment — 
 
 Yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild, 
 The seat of desolation, void of light. 
 Save what the glimmering of these livid flames 
 Casts pale and dreadful. 
 
 He chanted the words aloud, flinging them out in an ecstasy of 
 pleasure. Before him, as it seemed, there stretched that very 
 plain 'forlorn and wild,' with its black fissures and its impene- 
 trable horizons ; the fitful moonlight stood for the glimmering of 
 the Tartarean flames ; the remembered words and the actual 
 sights played into and fused with each other, till in the cold and 
 darkness the boy thrilled all through with that mingling of joy 
 and terror which is only possible to the creature of fine gifts and 
 high imagination. 
 
 Jenny Crum, too ! A fe^ more hours and he might see her 
 face to face — as 'Lias had seen her. He quaked a little at the 
 thought, but he would not have flinched for the world. He was 
 not going to lose his wits, as 'Lias did ; and as for Louie, if she 
 were frightened it would do her good to be afraid of something. 
 
 Hark ! He turned, stooped, put his hand to his ear. 
 
 The sound he heard had startled him, turned him pale. But 
 he soon recovered himself. It was the sound of heavy boots on 
 stones, and it was brought to him by the wind, as it seemed, from 
 
CHAP. V CHILDHOOD 55 
 
 far below. Some one was coming after them — perhaps more than 
 one. He thought he heard a voice. 
 
 He leapt fissure after fissure like a young roe, fled to the top 
 of the Downfall and looked over. Did the light show through the 
 tarpaulin ? Alack ! — there must be a rent somewhere — for he saw 
 a dim glow-worm light beyond the cliff, on the dark rib of the 
 mountain. It was invisible from below, but any roving eye from 
 the top would be caught by it in an instant. In a second he had 
 raced along the edge, dived in and out of the blocks, guiding his 
 way by a sort of bat's instinct, till he reached the rocky stairway, 
 which he descended at imminent risk of his neck. 
 
 ' Put your hand ower t' leet, Louie, till I move t' stone ! ' 
 
 The light disappeared, David crept in, and the two children 
 crouched together in a glow of excitement, 
 
 ' Is 't Uncle Reuben ? ' whispered Louie, pressing her face 
 against the side of the rocks, and trying to look through the 
 chink between it and the covering stone. 
 
 ' Aye — wi a lantern. But there's talkin — theer's someone else. 
 Jim Wigson, mebbe.' 
 
 'If it's Jim Wigson,' said Louie, between her small, shut 
 teeth, ' I'll bite him ! ' 
 
 ' Cos yo're a gell ! Gells and cats bite — they can't do nowt 
 else ! ' 
 
 Whereupon Louie pinched him, and David, giving an invo- 
 luntary kick as he felt the nip, went into first a fit of smothered 
 laughter, and then seized her arm in a tight grip. 
 
 ' Keep quiet, conno yo ? Now they're coomin, an I bleeve 
 they're coomin this way ! ' 
 
 But, after another minute's waiting, he was quite unable to 
 obey his own injunction, and he crept out on the stone overlooking 
 the precipice to look. 
 
 ' Coom back ! They'll see yo ! ' cried Louie, in a shrill whisper; 
 and she caught him by the ankle. 
 
 David gave a kick. ' Let goo; if yo do 'at I shall fall an be 
 kilt!' 
 
 She held her breath. Presently, with an exclamation, he 
 knelt down and looked over the edge of the great sloping block 
 which served them for roof. 
 
 ' Wal, I niver ! Theer's nobory but Uncle Reuben, an he's 
 talkin to hissel. Wal, this is a rum skit ! ' 
 
 And he stayed outside watching, in spite of Louie's angry 
 commands to him to come back into the den. David had no 
 fears of being discovered by Uncle Reuben. If it had been Jim 
 Wigson it would have been different. 
 
 Presently, on the path some sixty feet above them, but hidden 
 from them by the mass of tumbled rocks through which they had 
 descended, they heard some one puffing and blowing, a stick 
 striking and slipping on the stones, and weird rays of light stole 
 down the mountain-side, and in and out of the vast blocks with 
 which it was overstrewn. 
 
56 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 ' He's stopt up theer,' said David, creeping in under the gable, 
 ' an I mun hear what he's sayin. I'm gooin up nearer. If yo 
 coom we'll be caught.' 
 
 ' Yo stoopid ! ' cried Louie. But he had crawled up the narrow 
 chimney they had come down by in a moment, and she was left 
 alone. Her spirit failed her a little. She daren't climb after him 
 in the dark. 
 
 David clambered in and out, the fierce wind that beat the 
 side of the mountain masking whatever sounds he may have 
 made, till he found himself directly under the place where Reuben 
 Grieve sat, slowly recovering his breath. 
 
 ' Lord ! Lord ! They're aw reet, Sandy— they're aw 
 reet ! ' 
 
 The boy crouched down sharply under an overhanging stone, 
 arrested by the name — Sandy — his father's name. 
 
 Once or twice since he came to Kinder he had heard it on 
 Uncle Reuben's lips, once or twice from neighbours who had 
 known James Grieve's sons in their youth. But Sandy had left 
 the farm early and was little remembered, and the true story of 
 Sandy's life was unknown in the valley, though there were many 
 rumours. What the close and timid Reuben heard from Mr. 
 Gurney, the head of Sandy's firm, after Sandy's death, he told to 
 no one but Hannah. The children knew generally, from what 
 Hannah often let fall when she was in a temper, that their mother 
 was a disgrace to them, but they knew no more, and, with the 
 natural instinct of forlorn creatures on the defensive, studiously 
 avoided the subject within the walls of Needham Farm. They 
 might question old 'Lias ; they would sufi;er many things rather 
 than question their uncle and aunt. 
 
 But David especially had had many secret thoughts he could 
 not put away, of late, about his parents. And to hear his father's 
 name dropped like this into the night moved the lad strangely. 
 He lay close, listening with all his ears, expecting passionately, he 
 knew not what. 
 
 But nothing came — or the wind carried it away. When he 
 was rested, Reuben got up and began to move about with the 
 lantern, apparently throwing its light from side to side. 
 
 ' David ! Louie ! ' 
 
 The hoarse, weak voice, strained to its utmost pitch, died 
 away on the night wind, and a weird echo came back from the 
 clift's of the Downfall. 
 
 There was no menace in the cry — rather a piteous entreaty. 
 The truant below had a strange momentary impulse to answer — 
 to disclose himself. But it was soon past, and instead, he crept 
 well out of reach of the rays which flashed over the precipitous 
 ground about him. As he did so he noticed the Mermaid's Pool, 
 gleaming in a pale ray of moonlight, some two hundred feet below. 
 A sudden alarm seized him, lest Reuben should be caught by it, 
 put two and two together and understand. 
 
 But Reuben was absorbed in a discomfort, half moral, half 
 
CHAP. V CHILDHOOD 57 
 
 superstitious, and nothing else reached the slow brain— which was 
 besides preoccupied by Jim Wigson's suggestion. After a bit he 
 picked up his stick and went on again. David, eagerly watching, 
 tracked him along the path which follows the ridge, and saw the 
 light pause once more close to the Downfall. 
 
 So far as the boy could see, his uncle made a long stay at f 
 point beyond the stream, the bed of which was just discernible, 
 as a sort of paler streak on the darkness. 
 
 'Why, that's about whar th' Edale path cooms in,' thought 
 David, wondering. ' What ud he think we'd be doin theer ? ' 
 
 Faint sounds came to him in a lull of the wind, as though 
 Reuben were shouting again— shouting many times. Then the 
 light went wavering on, defining in its course the curved ridge of 
 the further moor, till at last it made a long circuit downwards, 
 disappearing for a minute somewhere in the dark bosom of Kinder 
 Low, about midway between earth and sky. David guessed that 
 Uncle Reuben must be searching the smithy. Then it descended 
 rapidly, till finally it vanished behind the hill far below, which 
 was just distinguishable in the cloudy moonshine. Uncle Reuben 
 had gone home. 
 
 David drew a long breath. But that patient quest m the 
 dark— the tone of the farmer's call— that mysterious word Sandy, 
 had touched the boy, made him restless. His mood grew a little 
 flat, even a little remorseful. The joy of their great adventure 
 ebbed a little. 
 
 However, he climbed down again to Louie, and found a dark 
 elfish figure standing outside their den, and dancing with excite- 
 ment. 
 
 ' Wouldn't yo like to ketch us— wouldn't yo ?— wouldn't yo ? 
 screeched the child, beside herself. She too had been watching, 
 had seen the light vanish. 
 
 'Yo'll have t' parish up after yo if yo doan't howd your 
 tongue,' said David roughly. 
 
 And creeping into their den he relit the lantern. Then he 
 pulled out a watch, borrowed from the same friend who had pro- 
 vided the lantern. Past nine. Two hours and more before they 
 need think of starting downwards for the Pool. 
 
 Louie condescended to come in again, and the stone was drawn 
 close. But how fierce the wind had grown, and how nipping was 
 the air ! David shivered, and looked about for the rugs. He 
 wrapt Louie in the horse-rug, which was heaviest, and tucked the 
 blanket round himself. 
 
 'Howd that tight round yo,' he commanded, struck with an 
 uneasy sense of responsibility, as he happened to notice how 
 starved she looked, ' an goo to sleep if yo want to. I'll wake yo 
 — I'm gooin to read.' 
 
 Louie rolled the rug round her chrysalis-hke, and then, dis- 
 daining the rest of David's advice, sat bolt upright against the 
 rock, her wide-open eyes staring defiantly at all within their 
 ken. 
 
58 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 The minutes went by. David sat close up against the lantern, 
 bitterly cold, but reading voraciously. At last, however, a 
 sharper gust than usual made him look up and turn restive. 
 Louie still sat in the opposite corner as stiffly as before, but over 
 the great staring eyes the lids had just fallen, sorely against their 
 owner's will ; the head was dropping against the rock ; the child 
 was fast asleep. It occurred to David she looked odd ; the face 
 seemed so grey and white. He instinctively took his own blanket 
 and put it over her. The silence and helplessness of her sleep 
 seemed to appeal to him, to change his mood towards her, for the 
 action was brotherly and tender. Then he pushed the stone 
 aside and crept out on to the moor. 
 
 There he stood for a while, with his hands in his pockets, 
 marking time to warm himself. How the wind bit to be sure !— 
 and it would be colder still by dawn. 
 
 The pool showed dimly beneath him, and the gruesome hour 
 was stealing on them fast. His heart beat quick. The weirdness 
 and loneliness of the night came home to him more than they 
 had done yet. The old woman dragged to her death, the hooting 
 crowd, the inexorable parson, the struggle in the water, the last 
 gurgling cry — the vision rose before him on the dark with an ever 
 ghastlier plainness than a while ago on the mountain-top. How 
 had 'Lias seen her that the sight had changed him so ? Did she 
 come to him with her drowned face and floating grey hair — grip 
 him with her cold hands ? David, beginning to thrill in good 
 earnest, obstinately filled in the picture with all the horrible 
 detail he could think of, so as to harden himself. Only now he 
 wished with all his heart that Louie were safe at home. 
 
 An idea occurred to him. He smiled at it, turned it over, 
 gradually resolved upon it. She would lead him a life afterward, 
 but what matter ? — let her ! 
 
 From the far depths of the unseen valley a sound struck 
 upwards, piercing through the noises of river and wind. It was 
 the clock of Clough End church, tolling eleven. 
 
 Well, one could not stand perishing there another hour. He 
 stooped down and crawled in beside Louie. She was sleeping 
 heavily, the added warmth of David's blanket conducing thereto. 
 He hung over her, watching her breathing with a merry look, 
 which gradu-^.lly became a broad grin. It was a real shame — she 
 would be just mad when she woke up. But mermaids were all 
 stuff, and Jenny Crum would ' skeer ' her to death. Just in 
 proportion as the adventure became more awesome and more real 
 did the boy's better self awake. He grew soft for his sister, 
 while, as he proudly imaginea, iron for himself. 
 
 He crept in under the blanket carefully so as not to disturb 
 her. He was too tired and excited to read. He would think the 
 hour out. So he lay staring at the opposite wall of rock, at its 
 crevices, and creeping ants, at the odd lights and shadows thrown 
 by the lantern, straining his eyes every now and then, that he 
 might be the more sure how wide awake they were. 
 
CHAP. V CHILDHOOD 59 
 
 Louie stretched herself. What was the matter ? Where was 
 she ? What was that smell ? She leant forward on her elbow. 
 The lantern was just going out, and smelt intolerably. A cold 
 grey light was in the little den. What ? Where ? 
 
 A loud wail broke the morning silence, and David, sleeping 
 profoundly, his open mouth just showing above the horse-rug, 
 was roused by a shower of blows from Louie's fists. He stirred 
 uneasily, tried to escape them by plunging deeper into the folds, 
 but they pursued him vindictively. 
 
 ' Give ower ! ' he said at last, striking back at random, and 
 then sitting up he rubbed his eyes. There was Louie sitting 
 opposite to him, crying great tears of rage and pain, now rocking 
 her ankle as if it hurt her, and now dealing cufi's at him. 
 
 He hastily pulled out his watch. Half-past four o'clock ! 
 
 ' Yo great gonner, yo ! ' sobbed Louie, her eyes blazing at 
 him through her tears. ' Yo good-for-nowt, yo muffin-yed, yo 
 donkey ! ' And so on through all the words of reviling known to 
 the Derbyshire child. David looked extremely sheepish under 
 them. 
 
 Then suddenly he put his head down on his knees and shook 
 with laughter. The absurdity of it all — of their preparations, of 
 his own terrors, of the disturbance they had made, all to end in 
 this flat and futile over-sleeping, seized upon him so that he 
 could not control himself. He laughed till he cried, while Louie 
 hit and abused him and cried too. But her crying had a differ- 
 ent note, and at last he looked up at her, sobered. 
 
 * Howd your tongue ! — an doan't keep buUy-raggin like 'at ! 
 What's t' matter wi yo ? ' 
 
 For answer, she rolled over on the rock and lay on her face, 
 howling with pain. David sprang up and bent over her. 
 
 ' What iver's t' matter wi yo, Louie ? ' 
 
 But she kept him off like a wild cat, and he could make 
 nothing of her till her passion had spent itself and she was quiet 
 again, from sheer exhaustion. 
 
 Then David, who had been standing near, shivering, with his 
 hands in his pockets, tried again. 
 
 ' Now, Louie, do coom home,' he said appealingly. ' I can find 
 yo a place in t' stable ull be warmer nor this. You be parished 
 if yo stay here.' For, ignorant as he was, her looks began to 
 frighten him. 
 
 Louie would have liked never to speak to him again. The 
 thought of the blue cotton and of her own lost chance seemed to 
 be burning a hole in her. But the stress of his miserable look 
 drew her eyes open whether she would or no, and when she saw 
 him her self-pity overcame her. 
 
 ' I conuo walk,' she said, with a sudden loud sob. * It's my 
 leg.' 
 
 ' What's wrong wi't ? ' said David, inspecting it anxiously. 
 ' It's got th' cowd in 't, that's what it is ; it's th' rheumatics, I 
 speck. Tak howd on me, I'll help yo down. ' 
 
60 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book 1 
 
 And with mucli coaxing on his part and many cries and 
 outbursts on hers he got her up at last, and out of the den. He 
 had tied his tin box across his back, and Louie, with the rugs 
 wrapped about her, clung, limping, and with teeth chattering, on 
 to his arm. The child was in the first throes of a sharp attack of 
 rheumatism, and half her joints were painful. 
 
 That was a humiliating descent ! A cold grey morning was 
 breaking over the moor ; the chimneys of the distant cotton-towns 
 rose out of mists, under a sky streaked with windy cloud. The 
 Mermaid's Pool, as they passed it, looked chill and mocking ; and 
 the world altogether felt so raw and lonely that David welcomed 
 the first sheep they came across with a leap of the heart, and 
 positively hungered for a first sight of the farm. How he got 
 Louie — in whose cheeks the fever-spots were rising — over the river 
 he never quite remembered. But at last he had dragged her up 
 the hill, through the fields close to the house, where the lambs 
 were huddling in the nipping dawn beside their mothers, and into 
 the farmyard. 
 
 The house rose before them grey and frowning. The lower 
 windows were shuttered ; in the upper ones the bhnds were pulled 
 closely down ; not a sign of life anywhere. Yes ; the dogs had 
 heard them ! Such a barking as began ! Jock, in his kennel by 
 the front door, nearly burst his chain in his joyful efforts to get 
 at them ; while Tib, jumping the half -door of the out-house in 
 the back yard, where he had been curled up in a heap of bracken, 
 leapt about them and barked like mad. 
 
 Louie sank down crying and deathly pale on a stone by the 
 stable door. 
 
 'They'll hear that fast enoof,' said David, looking anxiously 
 up at the shut windows. 
 
 But the dogs went on barking, and nothing happened. Ten 
 minutes of chilly waiting passed away, 
 
 'Tak him away, do!^ she cried, as Tib jumped up at her. 
 ' No, I woan't ! — I woan't ! ' 
 
 The last words rose to a shriek, as David tried to persuade her 
 to go into the stable, and let him make her a bed in the straw. 
 He stood looking at her in despair. They had always supposed 
 they would be locked out ; but surely the sleepers inside must 
 hear the dogs. He turned and stared at the house, hungering 
 for some sign of life in it. Uncle Reuben would hear them— 
 Uncle Reuben would let them in ! 
 
 But the blinds of the top room never budged. Louie, with 
 her head against the stable-door, and her eyes shut, went on 
 convulsively sobbing, while Tibby sniffed about her for sympathy. 
 And the bitter wind coming from the Scout whistled through the 
 yard and seemed to cut the shivering child like a knife. 
 
 ' 111 mak a clunter agen th' window wi some gravel,' said 
 David at last, in desperation. And he picked up a handful and 
 threw it, first cautiously, then recklessly. Yes ! — at last a hand 
 moved the blind — a hand the children knew weU, and a face 
 
CHAP. V CHILDHOOD 61 
 
 appeared to one side of it. Hannah Grieve had -never looked so 
 forbidding as at that moment. The boy caught one glance of a 
 countenance pale with wrath and sleeplessness ; of eyes that 
 seemed to blaze at them through the window ; then the blind 
 fell. He waited breathlessly for minute after minute. Not a 
 sound. 
 
 Furiously he stooped for more gravel, and flung it again and 
 again. For an age, as it seemed to him, no more notice was 
 taken. At last, there was an agitation in the blind, as though 
 more than one person was behind it. It was Hannah who lifted 
 it again ; but David thought he caught a motion of her arm as 
 though she were holding some one else back. The lad pointed 
 excitedly to Louie. 
 
 ' She's took bad ! ' he shouted. ' Uncle Reuben ! — Uncle 
 Reuben ! — coom dov»ai an see for yorsel. If yo let her in, yo can 
 keep me out as long as yo like ! ' 
 
 Hannah looked at him, and at the figure huddled against the 
 stable-door — looked deliberately, and then, as deliberately, pulled 
 the blind down lower than before, and not a sign of Reuben 
 anywhere. 
 
 A crimson flame sprang to David's cheek. He rushed at the 
 door, and while with one hand he banged away at the old knocker, 
 he thumped with the other, kicking lustily the while at the panels, 
 till Louie, almost forgetting her pains in the fierce excitement of 
 the moment, thought he would kick them in. In the intervals of 
 his blows, David could hear voices inside in angry debate, 
 
 ' Uncle Reuben ! ' he shouted, stopping the noise for a moment, 
 ' Uncle Reuben, Louie's turned sick ! She's clemmed wi t' cold. 
 If yo doan't open th' door, I'll go across to Wigson's, and tell 'em 
 as Louie's jDarishin, an yo're bein th' death on her.' 
 
 The bolt shot back, and there stood Reuben, his red hair 
 sticking up wildly from his head, his frame shaking with unusual 
 excitement. 
 
 ' What are yo makin that roompus for, Davy ? ' began Reuben, 
 with would-be severity. ' Ha done wi yo, or I'll have to tak a 
 stick to yo. ' 
 
 But the boy stood akimbo on the steps, and the old farmer 
 shrank before him, as David's black eye travelled past him to a 
 gaunt figure on the stairs. 
 
 ' Yo'U tak noa stick to me. Uncle Reuben. I'll not put up wi 
 it, and yo know it. I'm goin to bring Louie in. We've bin on fc' 
 moor by t' Pool lookin for th' owd witch, an we both on us fell 
 asleep, an Louie's took the rheumatics. — Soa theer. — Stan out o' t' 
 way.' 
 
 And running back to Louie, who cried out as he lifted her up, 
 he half carried, half dragged her in. 
 
 'Why, she's like death,' cried Reuben. 'Hannah! summat 
 hot — at woonst.' 
 
 But Hannah did not move. She stood at the foot of the 
 stairs, barring the way, the chill morning light falling on her 
 
63 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 threatening attitude, lier grey dishevelled hair and aU the squalid 
 disarray of her dress. 
 
 ' Them as doos like beggar's brats,' she said grimly, ' may fare 
 like 'em. /'ll do nowt for 'em.' 
 
 The lad came up to her, his look all daring and resolution — his 
 sister on his arm. But as he met the woman's expression, his lips 
 trembled, he suddenly broke down. 
 
 ' Now, look here,' he cried, with a sob in his throat. ' I know 
 we're beggar's brats. I know yo hate th' seet on us. But I wor 
 t' worst. I'm t' biggest. Tak Louie in, and bully-rag me as 
 mich as yo like. Louie — Louie ! ' and he hung over her in a 
 frenzy, ' wake up, Louie ! ' 
 
 But the child was insensible. Fatigue, the excitement of the 
 struggle, the anguish of movement had done their work — she lay 
 like a log upon his arm. 
 
 ' She's fainted,' said Hannah, recognising the fact with a sort 
 of fierce reluctance. 'Tak her up, an doan't stan blatherin 
 theer. ' 
 
 And she moved out of the way. 
 
 The boy gathered up the thin figure, and, stumbling over the 
 tattered rugs, carried her up by a superhuman efilort. 
 
 Reuben leant against the passage wall, staring at his wife. 
 
 ' Yo're a hard woman, Hannah — a hard woman,' he said to her 
 under his breath, in a low, shaken voice. ' An yo coed 'em 
 beggar's brats — oh Lord — Lord ! ' 
 
 ' Howd your tongue, an blow up t' fire,' was all the reply she 
 vouchsafed him, and Reuben obeyed. 
 
 Meanwhile upstairs Louie had been laid on her bed. Con- 
 sciousness had come back, and she was moaning. 
 
 David stood beside her in utter despair. He thought she was 
 going to die, and he had done it. At last he sank down beside 
 her, and flinging an arm round her, he laid his hot cheek to her 
 icy one. 
 
 'Louie, doan't — doan't — I'll tak yo away from here, Louie, 
 when I can. I'll tak care on yo, Louie. Doan't, Louie, — doan't ! ' 
 
 His whole being seemed rent asunder by sympathy and remorse. 
 Uncle Reuben, coming up with some hot gruel, found him 
 sitting on the bed beside his sister, on whom he had heaped all 
 the clothing he could find, the tears running down his cheeks. 
 
 CHAPTER YI 
 
 From that night forward, David looked upon the farm and all his 
 life there with other eyes. 
 
 Up till now, in spite of the perennial pressure of Hannah's 
 tyrannies, which, however, weighed much less upon him than 
 upon Louie, he had been — as he had let Reuben see — happy 
 enough. The open-air life, the animals, his books, out of all of 
 them he managed to extract a very fair daily sum of enjoyment. 
 
CHAP. VI CHILDHOOD 68 
 
 And he had been content enough with his daily tasks — herding 
 the sheep, doing the rough work of the stable and cow-houso, 
 running Aunt Hannah's errands with the donkey-cart to Clough 
 End, helping in the haymaking and the sheep-shearing, or the 
 driving of stock to and from the various markets Reuben fre- 
 quented. All these things he had done with a curious placidity, 
 a detachment and yet readiness of mind, as one who lends 
 himself, without reluctance, to a life not his own. It was this 
 temper mainly, helped, no doubt, by his unusual tastes and his 
 share of foreign blood and looks, which had set him apart from 
 the other lads of his own class in the neighbourhood. He had 
 few friends of his own age, yet he was not unpopular, except, 
 perhaps, with an overbearing animal like Jim Wigson, who in- 
 stinctively looked upon other people's brains as an offence to his 
 own muscular pretensions. 
 
 But his Easter Eve struggle with Hannah closed, as it were, 
 a childhood, which, though hard and loveless, had been full of 
 compensations and ignorant of its own worst wants. It woke in 
 him the bitterness of the orphan dependant, who feels himself 
 a burden and loathes his dependence. That utter lack of the 
 commonest natural affection, in which he and Louie had been 
 brought up— for Reuben's timorous advances had done but little 
 to redress the balance — had not troubled him much, till suddenly 
 it was writ ao monstrous large in Hannah's refusal to take pity on 
 the fainting and agonised Louie. Thenceforward every morsel of 
 food he took at her hands seemed to go against him. They were 
 paupers, and Aunt Hannah hated them. The fact had been 
 always there, but it had never meant anything substantial to him 
 till now. Now, at last, that complete dearth of love, in which he 
 had lived since his father died, began to react in revolt and dis- 
 content. 
 
 The crisis may have been long preparing, those words of his 
 uncle as to his future, as well as the incident of their locking out, 
 may have had something to say to it. Anyway, a new reflective 
 temper set in. The young immature creature became self-con- 
 scious, began to feel the ferments of growth. The ambition and 
 the restlessness his father had foreseen, with dying eyes, began to 
 stir. 
 
 Reuben's qualms returned upon him. On the 15th of May, he 
 and David went to Woodhead, some sixteen or seventeen miles 
 off, to receive the young stock from the Yorkshire breeders, 
 which were to be grazed on the farm during the summer. In 
 general, David had taken the liveliest interest in the animals, in 
 the number and quality of them, in the tariff to be paid for them, 
 and the long road there and back had been cheered for the 
 farmer by the lad's chatter, and by the athletic antics he was 
 always playing with any handy gate or tree which crossed their 
 path. 
 
 * Them heifers uU want a deal o' grass puttin into 'em afoor 
 they'll be wuth onybody's buyin, Davy,' said Reuben, inspecting 
 
«4 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book I 
 
 his mixed herd with a critical eye from a roadside bank, as they 
 climbed the first hill on their return Journey. 
 
 ' Aye, they're a poor lot,' returned David, shortly, and walked 
 on as far in front of his uncle as might be, with his head in the 
 air and his moody look fixed on the distance. 
 
 ' T' Wigsons ull be late gettin whoam,' began Reuben again, 
 with an .uneasy look at the boy. ' Owd Wigson wor that full up 
 wi yell when I last seed him they'll ha ar job to get him started 
 straight this neet. ' 
 
 To this remark David had nothing at all to say, though in 
 general ht had a keen neighbourly relish for the misdeeds of the 
 Wigsons. Reuben did not know what to make of him. How- 
 ever, a mile further on he made another attempt : 
 
 ' Lord, how those Yorkshire breeders did talk ! Yo'd ha thowt 
 they'd throw their jaws ofl: the hinges. An a lot o' gimcrack 
 notions as iver wor — wi their new foods, an their pills an 
 strengthening mixtures — messin wi cows as though they wor 
 humans. Why conno they leave God Awmiglity alone ? He can 
 bring a calvin cow through beawt ony o' their meddhn, I'll up- 
 howd yo ! ' 
 
 But still not a word from the lad in front. Reuben might as 
 well have talked to the wall beside him. He had grown used to 
 the boy's companionship, and the obstinate silence which David 
 still preserved from hour to hour as they drove their stock home- 
 wards made a sensible impression on him. 
 
 Inside the house there was a constant, though in general a 
 silent, struggle going on between the boy and Hannah on the 
 subject of Louie. Louie, after the escapade of Easter Eve, was 
 visited with a sharp attack of inflammatory rheumatism, only just 
 stopping short of rheumatic fever. Hannah got a doctor, and 
 tended her sufiiciently while the worst lasted, partly because she 
 was, after all, no monster, but only a commonly sordid and hard- 
 natured woman, and partly because for a day or two Louie's state 
 set her pondering, perforce, what might be the effect on Mr. 
 Gurney's remittances if the child incontinently died. This 
 thought undoubtedly quickened whatever natural instincts might 
 be left in Hannah Grieve ; and the child had her doctor, and the 
 doctor's orders were more or less followed. 
 
 But when she came downstairs again — a lanky, ghostly crea- 
 ture, much grown, her fierce black eyes more noticeable than 
 ever in her pinched face — Hannah's appetite for ' snipin ' — to use 
 the expressive Derbyshire word — returned upon her. The child 
 was almost bullied into her bed again — or would have been if 
 David had not found ways of preventing it. He realised for the 
 first time that, as the young and active male of the household, 
 he was extremely necessary to Hannah's convenience, and now 
 whenever Hannah ill-treated Louie her convenience suffered. 
 David disappeared. Her errands were undone, the wood uncut, 
 and coals and water had to be carried as they best could. As to 
 reprisals, with a strong boy of fourteen, grown very nearly 
 
CHAP. VI CHILDHOOD 65 
 
 to a man's height, Hannah found herself a good deal at a loss. 
 ' BuUy-raggin ' he took no more account of than of a shower of 
 rain ; blows she instinctively felt it would have been dangerous to 
 attempt ; and as to deprivation of food, the lad seemed to thrive 
 on hunger, and never whistled so loudly as when, according to 
 Hannah's calculations, he must have been as ' keen-bitten as a 
 hawk.' For the first time in her life Hannah was to some extent 
 tamed. When there was business about she generally felt it 
 expedient to let Louie alone. 
 
 But this sturdy protection was more really a matter of roused 
 pride and irritation on David's part than of brotherly love. It 
 was the tragedy of Louie Grieve's fate— whether as child or 
 woman— that she was not made to be loved. Whether she could 
 love, her story will show ; but to love her when you were close to 
 her was always hard. How different the days would have been 
 for the moody lad, who had at last learnt to champion her, if 
 their common isolation and dependence had but brought out in 
 her towards him anything chnging— anything confidential, any 
 true spirit of comradeship ! On the contrary, while she was still 
 ill in bed, and almost absolutely dependent on what he might 
 choose to do for her, she gibed and flouted him past bearing, 
 mainly, no doubt, for the sake of breaking the tedium of her con- 
 finement a little. And when she was about again, and he was 
 defending her weakness from Aunt Hannah, it seemed to him 
 that she viewed his proceedings rather with a malicious than a 
 grateful eye. It amused and excited her to see him stand up to 
 Hannah, but he got little reward from her for his pains. 
 
 She was, as it were, always watching him with a sort of secret 
 discontent. He did not suit her — was not congenial to her. 
 Especially was she exasperated now more than ever by his bookish 
 tastes. Possibly she was doubly jealous of his books; at any rate, 
 unless he had been constantly on his guard, she would have 
 hidden them, or done them a mischief whenever she could, in her 
 teasing, magpie way. 
 
 One morning, in the grey summer dawn, Louie had just 
 wakened, and was staring sleepily at the door, when, all of a 
 sudden, it opened— very quietly, as though pushed by some one 
 anxious not to make a noise— and Reuben's head looked round it. 
 Louie, amazed, woke up in earnest, and Reuben came stealthily 
 in. He had his hat and stick under his arm, and one hand held 
 his boots, while he stepped noiselessly in his stocking feet across 
 the room to where Louie lay — ' Louie, are yo awake ? ' 
 
 The child stared up at him, seeing mostly his stubble of red 
 hair, which came like a grotesque halo between her and the wall. 
 Then she nodded. 
 
 ' Doan't let yor aunt hear nothin, Louie. She thinks I'm gone 
 out to th' calves. But, Louie, that merchant I towd yo on came 
 yesterday, an he wor a hard un, he wor— as tough as nails, a 
 sight worse nor owd Croker to deal wi, ony day in tb' week. I 
 
66 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 could mak nowt on him — an he gan me sich a poor price, I darn't 
 tak a penny on 't from your aunt — noa, I darn't, Louie, — not if it 
 wor iver so. She'll be reet down mad when she knaws — an I'm 
 real sorry about that bit dress o' yourn, Louie. ' 
 
 He stood looking down at her, his spectacles falling forward 
 on his nose, the corners of his mouth drooping — a big ungainly 
 culprit. 
 
 For a second or two the child was quite still, nothing but the 
 black eyes and tossed masses of hair showing above the sheet. 
 Then the eyes blinked suddenly, and flinging out her hand at him 
 with a passionate gesture, as though to push him away, she turned 
 on her face and drew the bedclothes over her head. 
 
 ' Louie ! ' he said — ' Louie ! ' 
 
 But she made no sign, and, at last, with a grotesquely con- 
 cerned face, he went out of the room and downstairs, hanging 
 his head. 
 
 Out of doors, he found David already at work in the cowhouse, 
 but as surly and uncommunicative as before when he was spoken 
 to. That the lad had turned ' agen his wark,' and was on his way 
 to hate the farm and all it contained, was plain even to Reuben. 
 Why was he so glum and silent — why didn't he speak up? 
 Perhaps he would, Reuben's conscience replied, if it were con- 
 veyed to him that he possessed a substantial portion of six 
 hundred pounds ! 
 
 The boy knew that his uncle watched him — anxiously, as one 
 watches something explosive and incalculable — and felt a sort of 
 contempt for himself that nothing practical came of his own 
 revolt and discontent. But he was torn with indecision. How 
 to leave Louie — what to do with himself without a farthing in the 
 world — whom to go to for advice? He thought often of Mr. 
 Ancrum, but a fierce distaste for chapels and ministers had been 
 growing on him, and he had gradually seen less and less of the 
 man who had been the kind comrade and teacher of his early 
 childhood. His only real companions during this year of moody 
 adolescence were his books. From the forgotten deposit in the 
 old meal-ark upstairs, which had yielded ' Paradise Lost,' he drew 
 other treasures by degrees. He found there, in all, some tattered 
 leaves — three or four books altogether — of Pope's ' lUad,' about 
 half of Foxe's ' Martyrs ' — the rest having been used apparently 
 by the casual nurses, who came to tend Reuben's poor mother in 
 her last days, to light the fire— a complete copy of Locke ' On the 
 Human Understanding,' and various volumes of old Calvinist 
 sermons, which he read, partly because his reading appetite was 
 insatiable, partly from a half -contemptuous desire to find out 
 what it might be that Uncle Reuben was always troubling his 
 head about. 
 
 As to 'Lias Dawson, David saw nothing of him for many long 
 weeks after the scene which had led to the adventure of the Pool. 
 He heard only that 'Lias was/ bad,' and mostly in his bed, and 
 
CHAP. VI CHILDHOOD 67 
 
 feeling a little guilty, he hardly knew why, the lad kept away 
 from his old friend. 
 
 Summer and the early autumn passed away. October brought 
 a spell of wintry weather ; and one day, as he was bringing the 
 sheep home, he met old Margaret, 'Lias's wife. She stopped and 
 accosted him. 
 
 ' Why doan't yo coom and see 'Lias sometimes, Davy, my lad ? 
 Yo might leeten him up a bit, an' he wants it, t' Lord knows. 
 He's been fearfu' bad in his sperrits this summer.' 
 
 The lad stammered out some sheepish excuses, and soon made 
 his way over to Frimley Moor. But the visits were not so much 
 pleasure as usual. 'Lias was very feeble, and David had a con- 
 stant temptation to struggle with. He understood that to excite 
 'Lias, to throw him again into the frenzy which had begotten the 
 vision of the Pool, would be a cruel act. But all the same he 
 found it more and more difficult to restrain himself, to keep back 
 the questions which burnt on his tongue. 
 
 As for 'Lias, his half-shut eye would brighten whenever David 
 showed himself at the door, and he would point to a wooden 
 stool on the other side of the fire. 
 
 ' Sit tha down, lad. Margret, gie him soom tay,' or ' Margret, 
 yo'll just find him a bit oatcake. ' 
 
 And then the two would fall upon their books together, and 
 the conversation would glide imperceptibly into one of those 
 scenes of half -dramatic impersonation, for which David's relish 
 was still unimpaired. 
 
 But the old man was growing much weaker ; his inventions 
 had less felicity, less range than of old ; and the watchful Mar- 
 garet, at her loom in the corner, kept an eye on any signs of an 
 undue excitement, and turned out David or any other visitor, 
 neck and crop, without scruple, as soon as it seemed to her that 
 her crippled seer was doing himself a mischief. Poor soul ! she 
 had lived in this tumult of 'Lias's fancies year after year, till the 
 solid world often turned about her. And she, all the while, so 
 simple, so sane — the ordinary good woman, with the ordinary 
 woman's hunger for the common blessings of life — a little love, a 
 little chat, a little prosaic well-being ! She had had two sons— 
 they were gone. She had been the proud wife ' o' t' cliverest 
 mon atwixt Sheffield an Manchester,' as Frimley and the adjacent 
 villages had once expressed it, when every mother that respected 
 herself sent her children to 'Lias Dawson's school. And the 
 mysterious chances of a summer night had sent home upon her 
 hands a poor incapable, ruined in mind and body, who was to 
 live henceforward upon her charity, wandering amid the chaotic 
 wreck and debris of his former self . 
 
 Well, she took up her burden ! 
 
 The straggling village on Frimley Moor was mainly inhabited 
 by a colony of silk hand-loom weavers — the descendants of 
 French prisoners in the great war, and employed for the most 
 part by a firm at Leek. Very dainty work was done at Frimley, 
 
68 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 and very beautiful stuffs made. The craft went from father to 
 son. All Margaret's belongings had been weavers ; but 'Lias, in 
 the pride of his schoolmaster's position, would never allow his 
 wife to use the trade of her youth. When he became dependent 
 on her, Margaret bought a disused loom from a cousin, had i!> 
 mended and repaired, and set to work. Her fingers had not for- 
 gotten their old cunning ; and when she was paid for her first 
 'cut,' she hurried home to 'Lias with a reviving joy in her 
 crushed heart. Thenceforward, she lived at her loom ; she 
 became a skilled and favoured worker, and the work grew dear 
 to her — first, because 'Lias lived on it, and, next, because the 
 bright roses and ribbon-patterns she wove into her costly stuffs 
 were a perpetual cheer to her. The moors might frown outside, 
 the snow might drift against the cottage Avails : Margaret had 
 always someSiing gay under her fingers, and threw her shuttle 
 with the more zest the darker and colder grew the Derbyshire 
 world without. 
 
 Naturally the result of this long concentration of effort had 
 been to make the poor soul, for whom each day was lived and 
 fought, the apple of Margaret's eye. So long as that bent, white 
 form sat beside her fire, Margaret was happy. Her heart sank 
 with every fresh sign of age and weakness, revived with every 
 brighter hour. He still lorded it over her often, as he had done 
 in the days of their prosperity, and whenever this old mood came 
 back upon him, Margaret could have cried for pleasure. 
 
 The natural correlative of such devotion was a drying up of 
 interest in all the world beside. Margaret had the selfishness of 
 the angelic woman — ever3i;hing was judged as it affected her 
 idol. So at first she took no individual interest in David — he 
 cheered up 'Lias — she had no other thought about him. 
 
 On a certain November day David was sitting opposite to 
 'Lias. The fire burnt between them, . and on the tire was a 
 griddle, whereon Margaret had just deposited some oatcakes for 
 tea. The old man was sitting drooped in his chair, his chin on 
 his breast, his black eyes staring beyond David at the wall. 
 David was seized with curiosity — what was he thinking about ? — 
 what did he see ? There Avas a mystery, a weirdness about the 
 figure, about that hungry gaze, which tormented him. His 
 temptation returned upon him irresistibly. 
 
 "Lias,' he said, bending forward, his dark cheek flushing 
 with excitement, * Louie and I went up, Easter Eve, to t' Pool, 
 but we went to sleep an saw nowi;. What was't yo saw, 'Lias ? 
 Did yo see her for sure ? ' 
 
 The old man raised his head frowning, and looked at the boy. 
 But the frown was merely nervous, he had heard nothing. On 
 the other hand, Margaret, whom David had supposed to be in the 
 back kitchen, but who was in reality a few steps behind him, 
 mending something which had gone wrong in her loom, ran for- 
 ward suddenly to the fire, and bending over her griddle somehow 
 promptly threw down the tongs, making a clatter and commo- 
 
CHAP. VI CHILDHOOD 69 
 
 tion, in the niidst of whicli the cakes caught, and old 'Lias moved 
 from the fender, saying fretfully, 
 
 'Yo're that orkard wi things, Margret, yo're like a dog 
 dancin.' 
 
 But in the bustle Margaret had managed to say to David, 
 ' Howd your tongue, noddle-yed, will yo ? ' 
 
 And so unexpected was the lightning from her usually mild 
 blue eyes that David sat dumbfounded, and presently sulkily got 
 up to go. Margaret followed him out and down the bit of garden. 
 
 And at the gate, when they were well out of hearing of 'Lias, 
 she fell on the boy with a torrent of words, gripping him the 
 while with her long thin hand, so that only violence could have 
 released him. Her eyes flamed at him under the brown woollen 
 shawl she wore pinned under her chin ; the little emaciated 
 creature became a fury. What did he come there for, ' moiderin 
 'Lias wi his divilments ' ? If he ever said a word of such things 
 again, she'd lock the door on him, and he might go to Jenny 
 Crum for his tea. Not a bite or a sup should he ever have in her 
 house again. 
 
 ' I meant no harm,' said the boy doggedly. ' It wor he towd 
 me about t' witch — it wor he as put it into our yeds — Louie an 
 me.' 
 
 Margaret exclaimed. So it was he that got 'Lias talking about 
 the Pool in the spring ! Some one had been ' cankin wi him about 
 things they didn't owt ' — that she knew—' and she might ha 
 thowt it wor ' Davy. For that one day's ' worritin ov him ' she 
 had had him on her hands for weeks — off his sleep, and off his 
 feed, and like a bhghted thing. ' Aye, it's aw play to yo,' she 
 said, trembling all through in her passion, as she held the boy — 
 ' it's aw play to yo and your minx of a sister. An if it means 
 deein to the old man hissel, ?/o don't care ! "Margaret," saj's 
 the doctor to me last week, "if you can keep his mind quiet he 
 may hang on a bit. But you munna let him excite hissel about owt 
 — he mun tak things varra easy. He's like a wilted leaf— nobbut 
 t' least thing will bring it down. He's worn varra thin like, heart 
 an lungs, and aw t' rest of him." An d' yo think I'st sit still an 
 see yo murder him — the poor lamb — afore my eyes— me as ha got 
 nowt else but him i' t' mde warld ? No— yo yoong varlet— goo an 
 ast soom one else about Jenny Crum if yo 're just set on meddlin 
 wi divil's wark— but yo '11 no trouble my 'Lias. ' 
 
 She took her hands off him, and the boy was going away in a 
 half -sullen silence, when she caught him again. 
 
 ' Who towd yo about 'Lias an t' Pool, nobbut 'Lias hissel ? ' 
 
 ' Uncle Reuben towd me summat. ' 
 
 'Aye, Reuben Grieve — he put him in t' carrier's cart, an 
 behaved moor like a Christian nor his wife— I alius mind that o' 
 Reuben Grieve, when foak coe him a foo. Wal, I'st tell yo, Davy, 
 an if iver yo want to say a word about Jenny Crum in our house 
 afterwards, yo mun ha a gritstone whar your heart owt to be— 
 that's aw.' 
 
70 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 And she leant over the wall of the little garden, twisting her 
 apron in her old, tremulous hands, and choking down the tears 
 which had begun to rise. Then, looking straight before her, and 
 in a low, plaintive voice, which seemed to float on hidden depths 
 of grief, she told her story. 
 
 It appeared that 'Lias had been ' queer ' a good while before 
 the adventure of the Pool. But, according to his wife, ' he wor 
 that cliver on his good days, foak could mak shift wi him on his 
 bad days ; ' the school still prospered, and money was still plentiful. 
 Then, all of a sudden, the moorland villages round were over- 
 taken by an epidemic of spirit-rapping and table-tuming. ' It 
 wor sperrits here, sperrits there, sperrits everywhere — t' w^arld 
 wor gradely swarmin wi 'em,' said Margaret bitterly. It was all 
 started, apparently, by a worthless ' felly ' from Castleton, who 
 had a great reputation as a medium, and would come over on 
 summer evenings to conduct seances at Frimley and the places 
 near. 'Lias, already in an excitable, overworked state, was 
 bitten by the new mania, and could think of nothing else. 
 
 One night he and the Castleton medium fell talking about 
 Jenny Crum, the witch of Kinder Scout, and her Easter Eve 
 performances. The medium bet 'Lias a handsome sum that he 
 would not dare face her. 'Lias, piqued and wrathful, and ' wi 
 moor yell on board nor he could reetly stan,' took the bet. 
 Margaret heard nothing of it. He announced on Easter Eve that 
 he was going to a brother in Edale for the Sunday, and gave her 
 the slip. She saw no more of him till the carrier brought home 
 to her, on the Sunday morning, a starved and pallid object — ' gone 
 clean silly, an hutched thegither like an owd man o' seventy — 
 he bein fifty-six by his reet years.' With woe and terror she 
 helped him to his bed, and in that bed he stayed for more than a 
 year, while everything went from them — school and savings, and 
 all the joys of life. 
 
 ' An yo'll be wantin to know, like t' rest o' 'em, what he saw ! ' 
 cried Margaret angrily, facing round upon the boy, whose face 
 was, indeed, one question. ' ' ' Margaret, did he tell tha what t' 
 witch said to un ? " — every blatherin idiot i' th' parish asked me 
 that, wi his mouth open, till I cud ha stopped my ears an run 
 wheniver I seed a livin creetur. What do I keer ? — what doos it 
 matter to me what he saw ? I doan't bleeve he saw owt, if yo ast 
 me. He wor skeert wi his own thinkins, an th' cowd gripped him 
 i' th' in'ards, an twisted him as yo may twist a withe of hay — 
 Aye ! it wor a cruel neet. When I opened t' door i' t' early 
 mornin, t' garden wor aw black — th' ice on t' reservoir wor inches 
 thick. Mony a year afterwards t' foak round here ud talk o' that 
 for an April frost. An my poor 'Lias — lost on that fearfu Scout 
 — sleepin out wi'out a rag to cover him, an skeert soomhow — t' 
 Lord or t' Devil knows how ! And then foak ud have me mak a 
 good tale out o' it — soomthin to gie 'em a ticklin down their back- 
 bane — soomthin to pass an evenin — Lord ! ' 
 
 The wife's voice paused abruptly on this word of imprecation, 
 
CHAP. VI CHILDHOOD 71 
 
 or appeal, as though her own passion choked her. David stood 
 beside her awkwardly, his eyes fixed on the gravel, wherewith one 
 foot was playing. There was no more sullenness in his expres- 
 sion. 
 
 Margaret's hand still played restlessly with the handkerchief. 
 Her eyes were far away, her mind absorbed by the story of her 
 own fate. Round the moorside, on which the cottage was built, 
 there bent a circling edge of wood, now aflame with all the colour 
 of late autumn. Against its deep reds and browns, Margaret's 
 small profile was thrown out — the profile already of the old woman, 
 with the meeting nose and chin, the hollo w^ cheek, the maze of 
 wrinkles round the eyes. Into that face, worn by the labour and 
 the grief of the poor — into that bending figure, with the peasant 
 shawl folded round the head and shoulders— there had passed 
 all the tragic dignity which belongs to the simple and heartfelt 
 things of human life, to the pain of helpless affection, to the 
 yearning of irremediable loss. 
 
 The boy beside her was too young to feel this. But he felt 
 more, perhaps, than any other lad of the moorside could have 
 felt. There was, at all times, a natural responsiveness in him of 
 a strange kind, vibrating rather to pain than joy. He stood by 
 her, embarrassed, yet drawn to her — waiting, too, as it seemed to 
 him, for something more that must be coming. 
 
 ' An then,' said Margaret at last, turning to him, and speaking 
 more quietly, but still in a kind of tense w^ay, ' then, when 'Lias 
 wor took bad, yo know, Davy, I had my boys. Did yo ever hear 
 tell o' what came to 'em, Davy ? ' 
 
 The boy shook his head. 
 
 ' Ah ! ' she said, catching her breath painfully, ' they're moast 
 forgotten, is my boys. 'Lias had been seven weeks i' his bed, an 
 I wor noan so mich cast down — i' those days I had a sperrit more 'n 
 most. I thowt th' boys ud keer for us — we'd gien em a good 
 bringin up, an they wor boath on 'em larnin trades i' Manchester. 
 Yan evenin — it wor that hot we had aw t' doors an windows 
 open — theer came a man runnin up fro t' railway. An my boys 
 were kilt, Davy — boath on 'em — i' Duley Moor Tunnel. They wor 
 coomin to spend Sunday wd us, an it wor an excursion train — I 
 niver knew t' reets on 't ! ' 
 
 She paused and gently wiped away her tears. Her passion had 
 all ebbed. 
 
 ' An I thowt if I cud ha got 'em home an buried 'em, Davy, 
 I could ha borne it better. But they wor aw crushed, an cut 
 about, an riddlet to bits — they w^udna let me ha em. And so we 
 kep it fro 'Lias. Soomtimes I think he know^s t' boys are dead — 
 an then soomtimes he frets 'at they doan't coom an see him. 
 Fourteen year ago ! An I goo on tellin him they'll coom soon. 
 An last week, when I towd him it, I thowt to mysel it wor just 
 th' naked truth ! ' 
 
 David leant over the gate, pulling at some withered hollyhocks 
 beside it. But when, after a minute of choking silence, Margaret 
 
73 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 caught his look, she saw, though he tried to hide it, that his black 
 eyes were swimming. Her full heart melted altogether. 
 
 ' Oh, Davy, I meant naw offence ! ' she said, catching him by 
 the arm again. ' Yo're a good lad, an yo're alius a welcome sect 
 to that poor creetur. But yo'll not say owt to trouble him again, 
 laddie — will yo? If he'd yeerd yo just now — but, by t' Lord's 
 blessin, he did na — he'd ha worked himsel up fearfu' ! I'd ha had 
 naw sleep wi him for neets — like It wor i' th' spring. Yo munna 
 — yo munna ! He's all I ha — his livin 's my livin, Davy — an when 
 he's took away — why, I'll mak shift soomhow to dee too ! ' 
 
 She let him go, and, with a long sigh, she lifted her trembling^ 
 hands to her head, put her frilled cap straight and her shawl. 
 She was just moving away, when something of a different sort 
 struck her sensitive soul, and she turned again. She lived for 
 'Lias, but she lived for her religion too, and it seemed to her she 
 had been sinning in her piteous talk. 
 
 ' Dinna think, Davy,' she said hurriedly, 'as I'm complainin 
 o' th' Lord's judgments. They're aw mercies, if we did but know. 
 An He tempers th' wind — He sends us help when we're droppin 
 for sorrow. It worn't for nothin He made us all o' a piece. 
 Theer's good foak i' th' warld — aye, theer is ! An what's moor, 
 theer's soom o' th' best mak o' foak gooin about dressed i' th' 
 worst mak o' clothes. Yo'll find it out when yo want 'em. ' 
 
 And with a clearing face, as of one who takes up a burden 
 again and adjusts it anew more easily, she walked back to the 
 house. 
 
 David went down the lane homewards, whistling hard. But 
 once, as he climbed a stile and sat dangling his legs a moment 
 on the top, he felt his eyes wet again. He dashed his hand 
 impatiently across them. At this stage of youth he was constantly 
 falling out with and resenting his own faculty of pity, of emotion. 
 The attitude of mind had in it a sort of secret half-conscious 
 terror of what feeling might do with him did he but give it head. 
 He did not want to feel — feeling only hurt and stabbed — he 
 wanted to enjoy, to take in, to discover — to fling the wild energies 
 of mind and body into some action Avorthy of them. And because 
 he had no knowledge to show him how, and a wavering will, he 
 suffered and deteriorated. 
 
 The Dawsons, indeed, became his close friends. In Margaret 
 there had sprung up a motherly affection for the handsome lonely 
 lad ; and he was grateful. He took her ' cuts ' down to the 
 Clough End office for her ; when the snow was deep on the Scout, 
 and Reuben and David and the dogs were out after their sheep 
 night and day, the boy still found time- to shovel the snow from 
 Margaret's roof and cut a passage for her to the road. The hours 
 he spent this winter by her kitchen fire, chatting mth 'Lias, or 
 eating havercakes, or helping Margaret with some household 
 work, supplied him for the first time with something of what his 
 youth was, in truth, thirsting for — the common kindliness of 
 natural affection. 
 
CHAP. Yi CHILDHOOD 73 
 
 But certainly, to most observers, he seemed to deteriorate, 
 Mr. Ancrum could make nothing of him. David held the minister 
 at arm's-length, and meanwhile rumours reached him that ' Reuben 
 Grieve's nevvy' was beginning to be much seen in the public- 
 houses ; he had ceased entirely to go to chapel or Sunday school ; 
 and the local gossips, starting perhaps from a natural prejudice 
 against the sons of unknown and probably disreputable mothers, 
 prophesied freely that the tall, queer-looking lad would go to the 
 bad. 
 
 All this troubled Mr. Ancrum sincerely. Even in the midst 
 of some rising troubles of his o^m he found the energy to button- 
 hole Reuben again, and torment him afresh on the subject of a 
 trade for the lad. 
 
 Reuben, flushed and tremulous, went straight from the minis- 
 ter to his wife — with the impetus of Mr. Ancrum's shove, as it 
 were, fresh upon him. Sitting opposite to her in the back kitchen, 
 while she peeled her potatoes with a fierce competence and energy 
 which made his heart sick within him, Reuben told her, with 
 incoherent repetitions of every phrase, that in his opinion the 
 time had come when Mr. Gurney should be written to, and some of 
 Sandy's savings applied to the starting of Sandy's son in the world. 
 
 There was an ominous silence. Hannah's knife flashed, and 
 the potato-peelings fell with a rapidity which fairly paralysed 
 Reuben. In his nervousness, he let fall the name of Mr. Ancrum. 
 Then Hannah broke out. ' Some foo',' she knew, had been med- 
 dling, and she might have guessed that fool was Mr. Ancrum. 
 Instead of defending her own position, she fell upon Reuben and 
 his supporter with a rhetoric whereof the moral flavour was 
 positively astounding. Standing with the potato-bowl on one 
 hip and a hand holding the knife on the other, she delivered her 
 views as to David's laziness, temper, and general good-for-no- 
 thingness. If Reuben chose to incur the risks of throwing such a 
 young lout into town- wickedness, with no one to look after him, 
 let him ; she'd be glad enough to be shut on him. But, as to 
 writing to Mr. Gurney and that sort of talk, she wasn't going to 
 bandy words — not she ; but nobody had ever meddled with 
 Hannah Grieve's affairs yet and found they had done well for 
 themselves. 
 
 ' An I wouldna advise yo, Reuben Grieve, to begin now — no, 
 I wouldna. I gie yo fair noatice. Soa theer's not enough for t' 
 lad to do, Mr. Ancrum, he thinks ? Perhaps he'll tak th' place 
 an try ? I'd not gie him as mich wage as ud fill his stomach i' 
 th' week — noa, I'd not, not if yo wor to ask ?7ie— a bletherin 
 windy chap as iver I saw. I'd as soon hear a bird-clapper preach 
 as him — theer'd be more sense an less noise ! An they're findin 
 it out down theer— we'st see th' back on him soon.' 
 
 And to Reuben, looking across the little scullery at his wife, 
 at the harsh face shaken with the rage which these new and 
 intolerable attempts of her husband to dislodge the yoke of years 
 excited in her, it was as though like Christian and Hopeful he 
 
74 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 were trying to get back into the Way, and found that the floods 
 had risen over it. 
 
 When he was out of her sight, he fell into a boundless per- 
 plexity. Perhaps she was right, after all. Mr. Ancrum was a 
 meddler and he an ass. When next he saw David, he spoke to 
 the boy harshly, and demanded to know where he went loafing 
 every afternoon. Then, as the days went on, he discovered that 
 Hannah meant to visit his insubordination upon him in various 
 unpleasant ways. There were certain little creature comforts, 
 making but small show on the surface of a life of general absti- 
 nence and frugality, but which, in the course of years, had grown 
 very important to Reuben, and which Hannah had never denied 
 him. They were now withdrawn. In her present state of temper 
 with her better half, Hannah could not be 'fashed' with pro- 
 viding them. And no one could force her to brew him his toddy 
 at night, or put his slippers to warm, or keep his meals hot and 
 tasty for him, if some emergency among the animals made him 
 late for his usual hours — certainly not the weak and stammering 
 Reuben. He was at her mercy, and he chafed indescribably 
 under her unaccustomed neglect. 
 
 As for Mr. Ancrum, his own affairs, poor soul, soon became 
 so absorbing that he had no thoughts left for David. There were 
 dissensions growing between him and the 'Christian Brethren.' 
 He spoke often at the Sunday meetings — too often, by a great 
 deal, for the other shining lights of the congregation. But his 
 much speaking seemed to come rather of restlessness than of a 
 full 'experience,' so torn, subtle, and difficult were the things he 
 said. Grave doubts of his doctrine were rising among some of 
 the 'Brethren'; a mean intrigue against him was just starting 
 among others, and he himself was tempest-tossed, not knowing 
 from week to week whether to go or stay. 
 
 Meanwhile, as the winter went on, he soon perceived that 
 Reuben Grieve's formidable wife was added to the ranks of his 
 enemies. She came to chapel, because for a Christian Brother or 
 Sister to go anywhere else would have been a confession of weak- 
 ness in the face of other critical and observant communities — such, 
 for instance, as the Calvinistic Methodists, or the Particular Bap- 
 tists — not to be thought of for a moment. But when he passed 
 her, he got no greeting from her ; she drew her skirts aside, and 
 her stony eye looked beyond him, as though there were nothing 
 on the road. And the sharp-tongued things she said of him came 
 round to him one by one. Reuben, too, avoided the minister, 
 who, a year or two before, had brought fountains of refreshing 
 to his soul, and in the business of the chapel, of which he was 
 still an elder, showed himself more inarticulate and confused 
 than ever. While David, who had won a corner in Mr. Ancrum's 
 heart since the days of their first acquaintance at Sunday-school 
 — David fled him altogether, and would have none of his counsel 
 or his friendship. The alienation of the Grieves made another 
 and a bitter drop in the minister's rising cup of failure. 
 
CHAP. VII CHILDHOOD 75 
 
 So the little web of motives and cross-motives, for the most 
 part of the commonest earthiest hue, yet shot every here and 
 there by a thread or two of heavenlier stuff, went spinning itself 
 the winter through round the unknowing children. The reports 
 which had reached Mr. Ancrum were true enough. David was, 
 in his measure, endeavouring to 'see life.' On a good many 
 winter evenings the lad, now nearly fifteen, and shooting up fast 
 to man's stature, might have been seen among the topers at the 
 ' Crooked Cow,' nay, even lending an excited ear to the Secularist 
 speakers, who did their best to keep things lively at a certain low 
 public kept by one Jerry Timmins, a Eadical wag, who had often 
 measured himself both in the meeting-houses and in the streets 
 against the local preachers, and, according to his own following, 
 with no small success. There was a covered skittle-ground 
 attached to this house in which, to the horrid scandal of church 
 and chapel, Sunday dances were sometimes held. A certain 
 fastidious pride, and no doubt a certain conscience towards 
 Reuben, kept David from experimenting in these performances, 
 which were made as demonstratively offensive to the pious as they 
 well could be without attracting the attention of the police. 
 
 But at the disputations between Timmins and a succession of 
 religious enthusiasts, ministers and others, which took place on 
 the same spot during the winter and spring, David was frequently 
 present. 
 
 Neither here, however, nor at the ' Crooked Cow ' did the 
 company feel the moody growing youth to be one of themselves. 
 He would sit with his pint before him, silent, his great black eyes 
 roving round the persons present. His tongue was sharp on 
 occasion, and his fists ready, so that after various attempts to 
 make a butt of him he was generally let alone. He got what he 
 wanted— he learnt to know what smoking and drinking might be 
 like, and the jokes of the taproom. And all by the help of a few 
 shillings dealt out to him this winter for the first time by Eeuben, 
 who gave them to him Tsith a queer deprecating look and an 
 injunction to keep the matter secret from Hannah. As to the use 
 the lad made of them, Eeuben was as ignorant as he was of all 
 other practical affairs outside his own. few acres. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 Spring came round again and the warm days of June. At Easter 
 time Da\id had made no further attempts to meet with Jenny 
 Crum on her midnight wanderings. The whole tendency of his 
 winter's mental growth, as well perhaps of the matters brutally 
 raised and crudely sifted in Jerry Timmins's parlour, had been 
 towards a harder and more sceptical habit of mind. For the 
 moment the supernatural had no thrill in it for an intelligence 
 fuU of contradictions. So the poor witch, if indeed she ' walked,' 
 revisited her place of pain unobserved of mortal eye. 
 
76 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book 1 
 
 About the middle of June David and his uncle went, as usual, 
 to Kettlewell and Masholme, in Yorkshire, for the purpose of 
 bringing home from thence some of that hardier breed of sheep 
 which was required for the moorland, a Scotch breed brought 
 down yearly to the Yorkshire markets by the Lowland farmers 
 beyond the border. This expedition was an annual matter, and 
 most of the farmers in the Kinder Valley and thereabouts joined 
 in it. They went together by train to Masholme, made their 
 purchases, and then drove their sheep over the moors home, filling 
 the wide ferny stretches and the rough upland road with a patri- 
 archal wealth of flocks, and putting up at night at the village inns, 
 while their charges strayed at will over the hills. These yearly 
 journeys had always been in former years a joy to David. The 
 wild freedom of the walk, the change of scene which every mile and 
 every village brought with it, the resistance of the moorland wind, 
 the spring of the moorland turf, every little incident of the road, 
 whether of hardship or of rough excess, added fuel to the flame of 
 youth, and went to build up the growing creature. 
 
 This year, however, that troubling of the waters which was 
 going on in the boy was especially active during the Masholme 
 expedition. He kept to himself and his animals, and showed such 
 a gruff unneighbourly aspect to the rest of the world that the 
 other drivers first teased and then persecuted him. He fought 
 one or two pitched battles on the way home, showed himself a 
 more respectable antagonist, on the whole, than his assailants had 
 bargained for, and was thenceforward contemptuously sent to 
 Coventry. ' Yoong man,' said an old farmer to him once reprov- 
 ingly, after one of these 'rumpuses,' ^ yor temper woan't mouldy 
 wi keepin.' Reuben coming by at the moment threw an unhappy 
 glance at the lad, whose bruised face and torn clothes showed he 
 had been fighting. To the uncle's mind there was a wanton, nay, 
 a ruffianly look about him, which was wholly new. Instead of 
 rebuking the culprit, Reuben slouched away and put as much 
 road as possible between himself and Davy. 
 
 One evening, after a long day on the moors, the party came, 
 late in the afternoon, to the Yorkshire village of Haworth. To 
 David it was a village like any other. He was already mortally 
 tired of the whole iDusiness — of the endless hills, the company, 
 the bleak grey weather. While the rest of the party were mop- 
 ping brows and draining ale-pots in the farmers' public, he was 
 employing himself in aimlessly kicking a stone about one of the 
 streets, when he was accosted by a woman of the shopkeeping 
 class, a decent elderly woman, who had come out for a mouthful 
 of air, with a child dragging after her. 
 
 ' Yoong mester, yo've coom fro a distance, hannot yo ? ' 
 
 The woman's tone struck the boy pleasantly as though it had 
 been a phrase of cheerful music. There was a motherliness in it 
 — a something, for which, perhaps all unknown to himself, his 
 secret heart was thirsting. 
 
 'Fro Masholme,' he said, looking at her full, so that she 
 
CHAP, yii CHILDHOOD 77 
 
 could see all the dark, richly coloured face she had had a curi- 
 osity to see ; then he added abruptly, ' We're bound Kinder way 
 wi t' sheep — reet t'other side o' t' Scout.' 
 
 The woman nodded. 'Aye, I know a good mony o' your 
 Kinder foak. They've coom by here a mony year passt. But I 
 doan't know as I've seen yo afoor. Yo're nobbut a yoong 'un. 
 Eh, but we get sicli a sight of strangers here now, the yan fairly 
 drives the tother out of a body's mind.' 
 
 ' Doos foak coom for t' summer ? ' asked David, lifting his eye- 
 brows a little, and looking round on the bleak and straggling 
 village. 
 
 ' Noa, they coom to see the church. Lor' bless ye ! ' said the 
 good woman, following his eyes towards the edifice and breaking 
 into a laugh, ' 'taint becos the church is ony thing much to look 
 at. 'Taint no"\vt out o' t' common that I knows on. Noa— but 
 they coom along o' t' monument, an' Miss Bronte — Mrs. MchoUs, 
 as should be, poor thing — rayder. ' 
 
 There was no light of understanding in David's face, but his 
 penetrating eyes, the size and beauty of which she could not help 
 observing, seemed to invite her to go on. 
 
 ' You niver heerd on our Miss Bronte ? ' said the woman, 
 mildly. ' Well, I spose not. She was just a bit quiet body. 
 Nobbody hereabouts saw mich in her. But she wrote bukes — 
 tales, yo know — tales about t' foak roun here ; an they do say, 
 them as has read 'em, 'at they're terr'ble good. Mr. Watson, at 
 t' Post Office, he's read 'em, and he's alius promised to lend 'em 
 me. But soomhow I doan't get th' time. An in gineral I've naw 
 moor use for a book nor a coo has for clogs. But she's terr'ble 
 famous, is Miss Bronte, now — an her sisters too, pore young 
 women. Yo should see t' visitors' book in th' church. Aw t' 
 grand foak as iver wor. They cooms fro Lunnon a purpose, 
 soom ov 'em, an they just takes a look roun t' place, an writes 
 their names, an goos away. Would yo like to see th' church ? ' 
 said the good-natured creature — looking at the tall lad beside her 
 with an admiring scrutiny such as every woman knows she may 
 apply to any male. ' I'm goin that way, an it's my brother 'at 
 has th' keys.' 
 
 David accompanied her with an alacrity which would have 
 astonished his usual travelling companions, and they mounted 
 the straggling village street together towards the church. As 
 they neared it the woman stopped and, shading her eyes against 
 the sunlight, pointed up to it and the parsonage. 
 
 ' Noa, it's not a beauty, isn't our church. They do say our 
 parson ud like to have it pulled clean down an a new one built. 
 Onyways, they're goin to clear th' Brontes' pew away, an sich a 
 rumpus as soom o' t' Bradford papers have bin makin, and a 
 gradely few o' t' people here too ! I doan't know t' reets on 't 
 missel, but I'st be sorry when yo conno see ony moor where Miss 
 Charlotte an Miss Emily used to sit o' Sundays — An theer's th' 
 owd house. Yo used to be 'lowed to see Miss Charlotte's room, 
 
78 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book I 
 
 where she did her writin, but they tell me yo can't be let in now. 
 Seems strange, doan't it, 'at onybody should be real fond o' that 
 place ? When yo go by it i' winter, soomtimes, it lukes that lone- 
 some, with t' churchyard coomin up close roun it, it's enoof to 
 gie a body th' shivers. But I do bleeve, Miss Charlotte she could 
 ha kissed ivery stone in 't ; an they do say, when she came back 
 fro furrin parts, she 'd sit an cry for joy, she wor that partial to 
 Haworth. It's a place yo do get to favour soomhow,' said the 
 good woman, apologetically, as though feeling that no stranger 
 could justly be expected to sympathise with the excesses of local 
 patriotism. 
 
 'Did th' oother sisters write books?' demanded David, his 
 eyes wandering over the bare stone house towards which the pas- 
 sionate heart of Charlotte Bronte had yearned so often from the 
 land of exile. 
 
 ' Bless yo, yes. An theer's mony foak 'at think Miss Emily 
 wor a deol cliverer even nor Miss Charlotte. Not but what yo 
 get a bad noshun o' Yorkshire folk fro Miss Emily's bukes— soa 
 I'm towd. Bit there's rough doins on t' moors soomtimes, I'll 
 uphowd yo ! An Miss Emily had eyes like gimlets — they seed 
 reet through a body. Deary me,' she cried, the fountain of 
 gossip opening more and more, ' to think I should ha known 'em 
 in pinafores, Mr. Patrick an aw ! ' 
 
 And under the stress of what was really a wonder at the 
 small beginnings of fame — a wonder which much repetition of 
 her story had only developed in her— she poured out upon her 
 companion the history of the Brontes ; of that awful winter in 
 which three of that weird band— Emily, Patrick, Anne — fell 
 away from Charlotte's side, met the death which belonged to 
 each, and left Charlotte alone to reap the harvest of their com- 
 mon life through a few burning years ; of the publication of the 
 books ; how the men of the Mechanics' Institute (the roof of 
 which she pointed out to him) went crazy over ' Shirley ' ; hovv^ 
 everybody about ' thowt Miss Bronte had bin puttin ov 'em into 
 prent,' and didn't know whether to be pleased or piqued ; how, 
 as the noise made by ' Jane Eyre ' and ' Shirley ' grew, a wave of 
 excitement passed through the whole countryside, and people 
 came from Halifax, and Bradford, and Huddersfield — ' aye, an 
 Lunnon soomtoimes ' — to Haworth church on a Sunday, to see the 
 quiet body at her prayers who had made all the stir ; how Mr. 
 NichoUs, the curate, bided his time and pressed his wooing ; how 
 he won her as Rachel was won ; and how love did but open the 
 gate of death, and the fiery little creature — exhausted by such an 
 energy of living as had possessed her from her cradle — sank and 
 died on the threshold of her new life. All this Charlotte Bronte's 
 townswoman told simply and garrulously, but she told it well 
 because she had felt and seen. 
 
 ' She wor so sma' and nesh ; nowt but a midge. Theer was no 
 lasst in her. Aye, when I heerd the bell tolling for Miss Charlotte 
 that Saturday mornin,' said the speaker, shaking her head as shd 
 
CHAP. VII CHILDHOOD 79 
 
 moved away towards the church, ' I cud ha sat down an cried 
 my eyes out. But if she'd ha seen me she'd ha nobbut said, 
 " Martha, get your house straight, an doan't fret for me ! " She 
 had sich a sperrit, had Miss Charlotte. Well, now, after aw, I 
 needn't go for t' keys, for th' church door's open. It's Bradford 
 early closin day, yo see, an I dessay soom Bradford foak's goin 
 over. ' 
 
 So she marched him in, and there indeed was a crowd in the 
 little ugly church, congregated especially at the east end, where 
 the Brontes' pew still stood awaiting demolition at the hands of a 
 reforming vicar. As David and his guide came up they found a 
 young weaver in a black coat, with a sallow oblong face, black 
 hair, high collars, and a general look of Lord Byron, haranguing 
 those about him on the iniquity of removing the pews, in a 
 passionate undertone, which occasionally rose high above the key 
 prescribed by decorum. It was a half-baked eloquence, sadly 
 liable to bathos, divided, indeed, between sentences ringing with 
 the great words 'genius' and 'fame,' and others devoted to an 
 indignant contemplation of the hassocks in the old pews, 'the 
 touching and well-worn implements of prayer,' to quote his 
 handsome description of them, which a meddlesome parson was 
 about to ' hurl away, ' out of mere hatred for intellect and con- 
 tempt of the popular voice. 
 
 But, half-baked or no, David rose to it greedily. After a few 
 moments' listening, he pressed up closer to the speaker, his broad 
 shoulders already making themselves felt in a crowd, his eyes 
 beginning to glow with the dissenter's hatred of parsons. In the 
 full tide of discourse, however, the orator was arrested by an 
 indignant sexton, who, coming quickly up the church, laid hold 
 upon him. 
 
 ' No speechmakin in the church, if you please^ sir. Move on 
 if yo're goin to th' vestry, sir, for I'll have to shut up directly.' 
 
 The young man stared haughtily at his assailant, and the men 
 and boys near closed up, expecting a row. But the voice of 
 authority within its own gates is strong, and the champion of 
 outraged genius collapsed. The whole flock broke up and meekly 
 followed the sexton, who strode on before them to the vestry. 
 
 ' William's a rare way wi un,' said his companion to David, 
 following her brother's triumph with looks of admiration. ' I 
 thowt that un wud ha bin harder to shift. ' 
 
 David, however, turned upon her with a frown. ' ^Tis a 
 black shame, ' he said ; ' why conno they let t' owd pew bide ? ' 
 
 'Ah, weel,' said the woman with a sigh, ' as I said afore, I'st 
 be reet sorry when Miss Charlotte's seat's gone. But yo conno 
 ha brawlin i' church. William's reet enough there.' 
 
 And beginning to be alarmed lest she should be raising up 
 fresh trouble for William in the person of this strange, foreign- 
 looking lad, with his eyes like ' live birds, ' she hurried him on to 
 the vestry, where the visitors' books were being displayed. Here 
 the Byronic young man was attempting to pick a fresh quarrel 
 
80 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 with the sexton, by way of recovering himself with his party. 
 But he took little by it ; the sexton was a tough customer. When 
 the local press Avas shaken in his face, the vicar's hireling, a 
 canny, weather-beaten Yorkshireman, merely replied with a twist 
 of the mouth, 
 
 ' Aye, aye, th' newspapers talk— there'd be soombody gom 
 hoongry if they didn't ; ' or—' Them 'at has to eat th' egg knaws 
 best whether it is addled or no— to my thinkin,' and so on 
 through a string of similar aphorisms which finally demolished 
 his antagonist. 
 
 David meanwhile was burning to be in the fray. He thought 
 of some fine Miltonic sayings to hurl at the sexton, but for the 
 life of him he could not get them out. In the presence of that 
 indifferent, sharp-faced crowd of townspeople his throat grew hot 
 and dry whenever he thought of speaking. 
 
 While the Bradford party struggled out of the church, David, 
 having somehow got parted from the woman who had brought 
 him in, lingered behind, before that plain tablet on the wall, 
 whereat the crowd which had just gone out had been worshipping. 
 
 Emily, aged 29. 
 
 Anne, aged 27. 
 
 CHARLOTTE, ill the 39th year of her age. 
 
 The church had grown suddenly quite still. The sexton was 
 outside, engaged in turning back a group of Americans, on the 
 plea that visiting hours were over for the day. Through the wide- 
 open door the fading yellow light streamed in, and with it a cool 
 wind which chased little eddies of dust about the pavement. In 
 the dusk the three names— black on the white— stood out with a 
 stern and yet piteous distinctness. The boy stood there feeling 
 the silence— the tomb near by— the wonder and pathos of fame, 
 and all that thrill of undefined emotion to which youth yields 
 itself so hungrily. 
 
 The sexton startled him by tapping him on the shoulder. 
 'Time to go home, yoong man. My sister she told me to say 
 good neet to yer, and she wishes yo good luck wi your journey. 
 Where are yo puttin up ? ' 
 
 'At the "Brown Bess,"' murmured the boy ungraciously, 
 and hurried out. But the good man, unconscious of repulse and 
 kindly disposed towards his sister's waif, stuck to him, and, as 
 they walked down the churchyard together, the difference between 
 the manners of official and those of private life proved to be so 
 melting to the temper that even David's began to yield. And a 
 little incident of the walk mollified him completely. As they 
 turned a corner they came upon a bit of waste land, and there in 
 the centre of an admiring company was the sexton's enemy, 
 mounted on a bit of wall, and dealing out their deserts in fine 
 style to those meddling parsons and their underlings who despised 
 genius and took no heed of the relics of the mighty dead. 
 
CHAP. Yii CHILDHOOD 81 
 
 The sexton stopped to listen when they were nearly out of 
 range, and was fairly carried away by the '"^go ' of the orator. 
 
 ' Doan't he do it nateral I ' he said with enthusiasm to David, 
 after a passage specially and unflatteringly devoted to himself. 
 ' Lor' bless yo, it don't hurt me. But I do loike a bit o' good 
 speakin, 'at I do. If fine worrds wor penny loaves, that yoong 
 gen'leman ud get a livin aisy ! An as for th' owd pew, I cud go 
 skrikin about th' streets mysel, if it ud do a ha'porth o' good. ' 
 
 David's brow cleared, and, by the time they had gone a 
 hundred yards further, instead of fighting the good man, he 
 asked a favour of him. 
 
 ' D' yo think as theer's onybody in Haworth as would lend me 
 a seet o' yan o' Miss Bronte's tales for an hour ? ' he said, redden- 
 ing furiously, as they stopped at the sexton's gate. 
 
 ' Why to be sure, mon,' said the sexton cheerily, pleased with 
 the little opening for intelligent patronage. ' Coom your ways in, 
 and we'll see if we can't oblige yo. I've got a tidy lot o' books in 
 my parlour, an I can give yo "Shirley," I know.' 
 
 David went into the stone-built cottage with his guide, and 
 was shown in the little musty front room a bookcase full of 
 books which made his eyes gleam with desire. The half-curbed 
 joy and eagerness he showed so touched the sexton that, after 
 inquiring as to the lad's belongings, and remembering that in his 
 time he had enjoyed many a pipe and ' glass o' yell ' with ' ov,'d 
 Reuben Grieve' at the 'Brown Bess,' the worthy man actually 
 lent him indefinitely three precious volumes — 'Shirley,' 'Ben- 
 jamin Franklin's Autobiography,' and 'Nicholas Mckleby.' 
 
 David ran off hugging them, and thenceforward 'he bore 
 patiently enough with the days of driving and tramping which 
 remained, for the sake of the long evenings when in some lonely 
 corner of moor and wood he lay full length on the grass revelling 
 in one or other of his new possessions. He had a voracious way of 
 tearing out the heart of a book first of all, and then beginning it 
 again with a different and a tamer curiosity, lingering, tasting, 
 and digesting. By the time he and Reuben reached home he had 
 rushed through all three books, and his mind was full of them. 
 
 ' Shirley ' and ' Nicholas Nickleby ' were the first novels of 
 modern life he had ever laid hands on, and before he had finished 
 them he felt them in his veins like new wine. The real world had 
 been to him for months something sickeningly narrow and empty, 
 from which at times he had escaped with passion into a distant 
 dream-life of poetry and history. Now the walls of this real world 
 were suddenly pushed back as it were on all sides, and there was 
 an inrush of crowd, excitement, and delight. Human beings like 
 those he heard of or talked with every day — factory hands and mill- 
 owners, parsons, squires, lads and lasses — the Yol'kes, and Robert 
 Moore, Squeers, Smike, Kate Mckleby and Xewman Xoggs, 
 came by, looked him in the eyes, made' him take sides, compare 
 himself with them, join in their fights and hatreds, pity and exult 
 with them. Here was something more disturbing, personal, and 
 
82 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 stimulating than that mere imaginative relief he had been getting 
 out of ' Paradise Lost,' or the scenes of the ' Jewish Wars ' ! 
 
 By a natural transition the mental tumult thus roused led to a 
 more intense self -consciousness than any he had yet known. In 
 measuring himself with the world of ' Shirley ' or of Dickens, he 
 began to realise the problem of his own life with a singular keen- 
 ness and clearness. Then— last of all— the record of Franklin's 
 life,_of the steady rise of the ill-treated printer's devil to know- 
 ledge and power— filled him with an urging and concentrating 
 ambition, and set his thoughts, endov>^ed with a new heat and 
 nimbleness, to the practical unravelling of a practical case. 
 
 They reached home again early on a May day. As he and 
 Reuben, driving their new sheep, mounted the last edge of the 
 moor which separated them from home, the Kinder Valley lay 
 before them, sparkling in a double radiance of morning and of 
 spring. David lingered a minute or- two behind his uncle. 
 What a glory of light and freshness in the air — what soaring larks 
 — what dipping swallows ! And the scents from the dew-steeped 
 heather— and the murmur of the blue and glancing stream i 
 
 The boy's heart went out to the valley— and in the same 
 instant he put it from him. An indescribable energy and 
 exultation took possession of him. The tide of will for which he 
 had been waiting all these months had risen ; and for the first 
 time he felt swelling mthin him the power to break with habit, to 
 cut his way. 
 
 But what first step to take ? Whom to consult ? * Suddenly he 
 remembered Mr. Ancrum, first with shame, then with hope. Had 
 he thrown away his friend? Rumour said that things were 
 getting worse and worse at chapel, and that Mr. Ancrum was 
 going to Manchester at once. 
 
 He ran down the slopes of heather towards home as though he 
 would catch and question Mr. Ancrum there and then. And 
 Louie ? Patience ! He would settle everything. Meanwhile, he 
 was regretfully persuaded that if you had asked Miss Bronte 
 what could be done with a creature like Louie she would have 
 had a notion or two. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 * Reach me that book, Louie,' said David peremptorily; ' it uU be 
 worse for yo if yo don't.' 
 
 The brother and sister were in the smithy. Louie was 
 squatting on the ground with her hands behind her, her lips 
 sharply shut as though nothing should drag a word out of them, 
 and her eyes blazing defiance at David, who had her by the 
 shoulder, and looked to the full as fierce as she looked provoking. 
 
 ' Find it ! ' was all she said. He had been absent for a few 
 minutes after a sheep that had got into difficulties in the Red 
 
CHAP. Yiii CHILDHOOD 83 
 
 Brook, and when he returned, his volume of KoUin's ' Ancient 
 History '—'Lias's latest loan— which he had imprudently forgotten 
 to take with him, had disappeared. 
 
 David gave her an angry shake, on which she toppled over 
 among the fallen stones with an exasperating limpness, and lay 
 there laughing. , 
 
 ' Oh, very well,' said David, suddenly recovering himself; yo 
 keep yor secret. I'st keep mine, that's aw.' 
 
 Louie lay quiet a minute or two, laughing artificially at inter- 
 vals, while David searched the corners of the smithy, turning 
 every now and then to give a stealthy look at his sister. 
 
 The bait took. Louie stopped laughing, sat up, put herself 
 straight, and looked about her. 
 
 ' Yo hain't got a secret,' she said coolly; 'I'm not to be took 
 in wi snuff that way. ' 
 
 ' Very well,' said David indifferently, ' then I haven't.' 
 
 And sitting down near the pan, he took out one of the little 
 boats from the hole near, and began to trim its keel here and 
 there with his knife. The occupation seemed to be absorbing. 
 
 Louie sat for a while, sucking at a lump of sugar she had 
 swept that morning into the omnium gatherum of her pocket. 
 At last she took up a little stone and threw it across at David. 
 
 ' What's yor silly old secret about, then ? ' 
 
 ' Where's my book, then V replied David, holding up the boat 
 and looking with one eye shut along the keel. 
 
 ' Iv I gie it yer, an yor secret ain't wo'th it, I'll put soom o' 
 that watter down yor neckhole,' said Louie, nodding towards the 
 
 place. p , 1 J 
 
 ' If yo don't happen to find yorsel in th' pan fust,' remarked 
 David unmoved. 
 
 Louie sucked at her sugar a little longer, with her hands round 
 her knees. She had thrown off her hat, and the May sun struck 
 full on her hair, on the glossy brilliance of it, and the natural 
 curls round the temples which disguised a high and narrow brow. 
 She no longer wore her hair loose. In passionate emulation of 
 Annie Wigson, she had it plaited behind, and had begged an end 
 of blue ribbon of Mrs. Wigson to tie it with, so that the beautiful 
 arch of the head showed more plainly than before, while the black 
 eyes and brows seemed to have gained in splendour and effective- 
 ness, from their simpler and severer setting. One could see, too, 
 the length of the small neck and of the thin falling shoulders. 
 It was a face now which made many a stranger in the Clough 
 End streets stop and look backward after meeting it. Not so 
 much because of its beauty, for it was still too thin and starved- 
 looking for beauty, as because of a singular daring and brilhance, 
 a sense of wild and yet conscious power it left behind it. The 
 child had grown a great piece in the last year, so that her knees 
 were hardly decently covered by the last year's cotton frock she 
 wore, and her brown sticks of arms were far beyond her sleeves. 
 David had looked at her once or twice lately with a new kind ot 
 
84 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 scrutiny. He decided that she was a ' rum-looking ' creature, not 
 the least like anybody else's sister, and on the whole his raw 
 Impression was that she was plain. 
 
 ' Hovvll I know yo'll not cheat ? ' she said at last, getting up 
 and surveying him with her arms akimbo. 
 
 'Can't tell, I'm sure,' was all David vouchsafed. ' Yo mun 
 find out.' 
 
 Louie studied him threateningly. 
 
 ' Weel, I'd be even wi yo soomhow,' was her final conclusion ; 
 and disappearing through the ruined doorway, she ran down the 
 slope to where one of the great mill-stones lay hidden in the 
 heather, and diving into its central hole, produced the book, 
 keenly watched the "while by David, who took mental note of the 
 hiding-place. 
 
 'Naw then,' she said, walking up to him with her hands 
 behind her and the book in them, ' tell me yor secret.' 
 
 David first forcibly abstracted the book and made believe to 
 box her ears, then went back to his seat and his boat. 
 
 ' Go on, can't yo ! ' exclaimed Louie, after a minute, stamping 
 at him. 
 
 David laid down his boat deliberately. 
 
 ' Well, yo won't Uke it',' he said ; ' I know that. But— I'm off 
 to Manchester, that's aw— as soon as I can goo ; as soon as iver I 
 can hear of onything. An I'm gooin if I don't hear of onything. 
 I'm gooin onyways ; I'm tired o' this. So now yo know.' 
 
 Louie stired at him. 
 
 ' Yo ain't ! ' she said, passionately, as though she were 
 choking. 
 
 David instinctively put up his hands to keep her off. He 
 thought she would have fallen upon him there and then and 
 beaten him for his ' secret.' 
 
 But, instead, she flung away out of the smithy, and David was 
 left alone and in amazement. Then he got up and went to look, 
 stirred with the sudden fear that she might have run off to the 
 farm with the news of what he had been saying, which would 
 have precipitated matters unpleasantly. 
 
 No one was to be seen from outside, either on the moor path 
 or in the fields beyond, and slie could not possibly have got out 
 of sight so soon. So he searched among the heather and the 
 bilberry hummocks, till he caught sight of a bit of print cotton in 
 a hollow just below the quaint stone shooting-hut, built some 
 sixty years ago on the side of the Scout for the convenience of 
 sportsmen. David stalked the cotton, and found her lying prone 
 and with her hat, as usual, firmly held down over her ears. At 
 sight of her something told him very plainly he had been a brute 
 to tell her his news so. There was a strong moral shock which 
 for the moment transformed him. 
 
 He went and lifted her up in spite of her struggles. Her face 
 was crimson with tears, but she hit out at him wildly to prevent 
 his seeing them. ' Now, Louie, look here, ' he said, holding her 
 
CHAP. VIII CHILDHOOD 85 
 
 hands, ' I didna mean to tell yo short and sharp like that, but yo 
 do put a body's back up so, there's no bearin it. Dcn't take on, 
 Louie. I'll coom back when I've found soomthin, an take yo 
 away, too, niver fear. Theer's lots o' things gells can do in 
 Manchester — tailorin, or machinin, or dress-makin, or soomthin 
 like that. But yo must get a bit older, an I must find a place 
 for us to live in, so theer's naw use fratchin, like a spiteful hen. 
 Yo must bide and I must bide. But I'll coom back for yo, I swear 
 I will, an we'll get shut on Aunt Hannah, an liye in a httle place 
 by ourselves, as merry as larks. ' 
 
 He looked at< her appealingiy. Her head was turned sullenly 
 away from him, her thin chest still heaved with sobs. But when 
 he stopped speaking she jerked round upon him. 
 
 ' Leave me behint, an I'll murder her ! ' 
 
 The child's look was demoniacal. 'No, yo won't,' said David, 
 laughing. ' I' th' fust place, Aunt Hannah could settle a midge 
 like yo wi yan finger. I' th' second, hangin isn't a coomfortable 
 way o' deein. Yo wait till I ccom for yo, an when we'st ha got 
 reet away, an can just laugh in her face if she riles us, — that '11 
 spite her mich moor nor murderin.' 
 
 The black eyes gleamed uncannily for a moment and the 
 sobbing ceased. But the gleam passed away, and the child sat 
 staring at the moorland distance, seeing nothing. There was 
 such an unconscious animal pain in the attitude, the pain of the 
 creature that feels itself alone and deserted, that David watched 
 her in a puzzled silence. Louie was always mysterious, whether 
 in her rages or her griefs, but he had never seen her sob quite hke 
 this before. He felt a sort of strangeness in her fixed gaze, and 
 with a certain timidity he put out his arm and laid it round her 
 shoulder. Still she did not move. Then he slid up closer in 
 the heather, and kissed her. His heart, which had seemed all 
 frostbound for months, melted, and that hunger for love — home- 
 love, mother-love— which was, perhaps, at the very bottom of his 
 moody complex youth, found a voice. 
 
 ' Louie, couldn't yo be nice to me soomtimes — couldn't yo just 
 take an interest, like, yo know — as if yo cared a bit — couldn't yo ? 
 Other gells do. I'm a brute to yo, I know, often, but yo keep 
 aggin an teasin, an theer's niver a bit o' peace. Look here, Loo, 
 yo give up, an I'st give up. Theer's nobbut us two— nawbody else 
 cares a ha'porth about the yan or the tother— coom along ! yo give 
 up, an I'st give up. ' 
 
 He looked at her anxiously. There was a new manliness in 
 his tone, answering to his growing manliness of stature. Two 
 slow tears rolled down her cheeks, but she said nothing. She 
 couldn't for the life of her. She blinked, furiously fighting with 
 her tears, and at last she put up an impatient hand which left a 
 long brown streak across her miserable little face. 
 
 ' Yo havn't got no trade,' she said. ' Yo'll be clemmed.' 
 
 David withdrew his arm, and gulped down his rebuff. 'No, 
 I sha'n't,' he said. ' Now voii just listen here.' And he described 
 
86 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 how, the day before, he had been to see Mr. Ancrum, to consult 
 him about leaving Kinder, and what had come of it. 
 
 He had been just in time. Mr. Ancrum, worn, ill, and 
 harassed to death, had been cheered a little during his last days 
 at Clough End by the appearance of David, very red and mono- 
 syllabic, on his doorstep. The lad's return, as he soon perceived, 
 was due simply to the stress of his own affairs, and not to any 
 knowledge of or sympathy with the minister's miseries. But, 
 none the less, there was a certain balm in it for Mr. Ancrum, and 
 they had sat long discussing matters. Yes, the minister was 
 going— would look out at Manchester for an opening for David, 
 in the bookselling trade by preference, and would write at once. 
 But Davy must not leave a quarrel behind him. He must, if 
 possible, get his uncle's consent, which Mr. Ancrum thought 
 would be given. 
 
 ' I'm willing to lend you a hand, Davy,' he had said, ' for 
 you're on the way to no trade but loafing as you are now ; but 
 square it with Grieve. You can, if you don't shirk the trouble of 
 it.' 
 
 Whereupon Davy had made a wry face and said nothing. 
 But to Louie he expressed himself plainly enough. 
 
 'I'll not say owt to oather on 'em,' he said, pointing to the 
 chimneys of the farm, ' till the day I bid 'em good-bye. Uncle 
 Reuben, mebbe, ud be for givin me somethin to start wi, an Aunt 
 Hannah ud be for cloutin him over the head for thinkin of it. 
 No, I'll not be beholden to yan o' them. I've got a shiUin or two 
 for my fare, an I'll keep mysel.' 
 
 ' What wages ull yo get ? ' inquired Louie sharply. 
 
 ' Nothin very fat, that's sure,' laughed David. ' If Mr. Ancrum 
 can do as he says, an find me a place in a book-shop, they'll, 
 mebbe, gie me six shillin to begin wi.' 
 
 ' An what ull yo do wi 'at ? ' 
 
 ' Live on't,' replied David briefly. 
 
 ' Yo conno, I tell yo ! Yo'll ha food an firin, cloos, an lodgin 
 to pay out o't. Yo conno do 't — soa theer.' 
 
 Louie looked him up and down defiantly. David was oddly 
 struck with the practical knowledge her remark showed. How 
 did such a wild imp know anything about the cost of lodging and 
 firing ? 
 
 'I tell yo I'll live on't,' he replied with energy; 'I'll get a 
 room for half a crown— two shillin, p'r'aps— an I'll live on six- 
 pence a day, see if I don't.' 
 
 ' See if yo do ! ' retorted Louie, ' clemm on it more like.' 
 
 'That's all yo know about if, miss,' said David, in a tone, 
 however, of high good humour ; and, stretching one of his hands 
 down a little further into his trousers pocket, he drew out a 
 paper-covered book, so that just the top of it appeared. ' Yo're 
 alius naggin about l)ooks. Well ; I tell yo, I've got an idea out 
 o' thissen ull be worth shillins a week to me. It's about Benjamin 
 Franklin, Never yo mind who Benjamin Franklin wor ; but he 
 
CHAP VIII CHILDHOOD 87 
 
 wor a varra cute soart of a felly ; an when he wor yoong, an 
 had nobbut a few shillins a week, he made shift to save soom o' 
 them shillins, becos he found he could do without eatin flesh 
 7neat, an that wi bread an meal an green stuff, a mon could do 
 very well, an save soom brass every week. When I go to Man- 
 chester,' continued David emphatically, 'I shall niver touch 
 meat. I shall buy a bag o' oatmeal like Grandfeyther Grieve 
 lived on, boil it for mysel, wi a sup o' milk, perhaps, an soom 
 salt or treacle to gi it a taste. An I'll buy apples an pears an 
 oranges cheap soomwhere, an store 'em. Yo mun ha a deal o' 
 fruit when yo doan't ha meat. Fourpence ! ' cried Davy, his 
 enthusiasm rising, ' I'll live on thruppence a day, as sure as yo're 
 sittin theer ! Seven thruppences is one an nine ; lodgin, two 
 shillin — three an nine. Two an three left over, for cloos, firin, 
 an pocket money. Why, I'll be rich before yo can look roun ! 
 An then, o' coorse, they'll not keep me long on six shillins a week. 
 In the book-trade I'll soon be wuth ten, an moor ! ' 
 
 And, springing up, he began to dance a sort of cut and shuffle 
 before her out of sheer spirits. Louie surveyed him with a flushed 
 and sparkling face. The nimbleness of David's wits had never 
 come home to her till now. 
 
 ' What uU I earn when I coom ? ' she demanded abruptly. 
 
 Dwvid stopped his cut and shuffle, and took critical stock of 
 his sister for a moment. 
 
 'Now, look here, Louie, yo're goin to stop where yo are, a 
 good bit yet,' he replied decidedly. ' Yo'll have to wait two year 
 or so — moor 'n one, onyways,' he went on hastily, warned by her 
 start and fierce expression. ' Yo know, they can ha th' law on 
 yo,' and he jerked his thumb over his shoulder towards the farm. 
 ' Boys is all reet, but gells can't do nothink till they're sixteen. 
 They mun stay \\d th' foak as browt 'em up, an if they run away 
 afore their sixteenth birthday — they gets put in prison.' 
 
 David poured out his legal fictions hastily, three parts con- 
 vinced of them at any rate, and watched eagerly for their effect 
 on Louie. 
 
 She tossed her head scornfully. 'Doan't b'lieve it. Yo're 
 jest tellin lees to get shut o' me. Nex summer if yo doan't send 
 for me. 111 run away, whativer yo may say. So yo know.' 
 
 ' Yo're a tormentin thing ! ' exclaimed David, exasperated, 
 and began savagely to kick stones down the hill. Then, recover- 
 ing himself, he came and sat down beside her again. 
 
 ' I doan't want to get shut on yo, Louie. But yo won't 
 understand nothin.' 
 
 He stopped, and began to bite at a stalk of heather, by way of 
 helping himself. His mind was full of vague and yet urgent 
 thoughts as to what became of girls in large towns with no one to 
 look after them, things he had heard said at the public-house, 
 things he had read. He had never dreamt of leaving Louie to 
 Aunt Hannah's tender mercies. Of course he must take her away 
 when he could. She was his charge, his belonging. But ail the 
 
88 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 same she was a 'limb'; in his opinion she always would be a 
 'limb.' How could he be sure of her getting work, and who on 
 earth was to look after her when he was away ? 
 Suddenly Louie broke in on his perplexities. 
 ' I'll go tailorin,' she cried triumphantly. ' Now I know— it wor 
 t' Wigsons' cousin Emly went to Manchester ; an she earned nine 
 shillin a week— nine shillin I tell yo, an found her own thread. 
 Yo'U be takin ten shillin, yo say, nex year ? an 111 be takin nine. 
 That's nineteen shillin fur th' two on us. Isn't it nineteen 
 shillin ? ' she said peremptorily, seizing his arm with her long 
 fingers. 
 
 ' Well, I dessay it is,' said David, reluctantly. ' An precious 
 tired yo'll be o' settin stitchin mornin, noon, an neet. Like to 
 see yo do 't. ' 
 
 ' I'd do it fur nine shillin,' she said doggedly, and sat looking 
 straight before her, with wide glittering eyes. She understood 
 from David's talk that, what with meal, apples, and greenstuff, 
 your ' eatin ' need cost you nothing. There would be shillings 
 and shillings to buy things with. The child who never had a 
 copper but what Uncle Reuben gave her, who passed her whole 
 existence in greedily coveting the unattainable and in chafing 
 under the rule of an iron and miserly thrift, felt suddenly intoxi- 
 cated by this golden prospect of illimitable 'buying.' And- what 
 could possibly prevent its coming true ? Any fool — such as 
 ' Wigson's Em'ly ' — could earn nine shillings a week at tailoring ; 
 and to make money at your stomach's expense seemed suddenly 
 to put 3^ou in possession of a bank on which the largest drawings 
 were possible. It all looked so ingenious, so feasible, so wholly 
 within the grip of that indomitable will the child felt tense within 
 her. 
 
 So the two sat gazing out over the moorland. It was the first 
 summer day, fresh and timid yet, as though the world and the 
 sun were still ill-acquainted. Down below, over the sparkling 
 brook, an old thorn was quivering in the warm breeze, its bright 
 thin green shining against the brown heather. The larches alone 
 had as yet any richness of leaf, but the sycamore-buds glittered in 
 the sun, and the hedges in the lower valley made wavy green 
 lines delightful to the eye. A warm soft air laden with moist 
 scents of earth and plant bathed the whole mountain-side, and 
 played with Louie's hair. Nature wooed them with her best, and 
 neither had a thought or a look for her. 
 Suddenly Louie sprang up. 
 
 ' Theer's Aunt Hannah shoutin. I mun goo an get t' coos.' 
 David ran down the hill with her. 
 
 ' What'll yo do if I tell ? ' she inquired maliciously at the 
 bottom. 
 
 ' If yo do I shall cut at yance, an yo'll ha all the longer time 
 to be by yoursen. ' 
 
 A darkness fell over the girl's hard shining gaze. She turned 
 away abruptly, then, when she had gone a few steps, turned and 
 
CHAP. VIII CHILDHOOD 89 
 
 came back to where David stood wJiistling and calling for the 
 dogs. She caught him suddenly from behind round the neck. 
 Naturally he thought she was up to some mischief, and struggled 
 ^way from her with an angry exclamation. But she held him 
 tight and thrust something hard and sweet against his lips. 
 Involuntarily his mouth opened and admitted an enticing cake of 
 butter-scotch. She rammed it in with her wiry little hand so 
 that he almost choked, and then with a shrill laugh she turned 
 and lied, leaping clow^n the heather between the boulders, across 
 the brook, over the wall, and out of sight. 
 
 David was left behind, sucking. The sweetness he was con« 
 scions of was not all in the mouth. Never that he could remem^ 
 ber had Louie shown him any such mark of favour. 
 
 Next day David was sent down with the donkey-cart to Clough 
 End to bring up some weekly stores for the family, Hannah 
 specially charging him to call at the post-office and inquire for 
 letters. He started about nine o'clock, and the twelve o'clock 
 dinner passed by without his reappearance. 
 
 When she had finished her supply of meat and suet-pudding, 
 after a meal during which no one of the three persons at table 
 had uttered a word, Louie abruptly pushed her plate back again 
 towards Hannah. 
 
 ' David ! ' was all she said. 
 
 ' Mind your manners, miss,' said Hannah, angrily. ' Them as 
 cooms late gets nowt.' And, getting up, she cleared the table 
 and put the food away with even greater rapidity than usual. 
 The kitchen was no sooner quite clear than the donkey-cart was 
 heard outside, and David appeared, crimsoned with heat, and 
 panting from the long tug uphill, through which he had just 
 dragged the donkey. 
 
 He carried a letter, which he put down on the table. Then he 
 looked round the kitchen. 
 
 ' Aunt's put t' dinner away,' said Louie, shortly, ' 'cos yo came 
 late.' 
 
 David's expression changed. ' Then nex time she wants owt, 
 she can fetch it fro Clough End hersel,' he said violently, and 
 went out. 
 
 Hannah came forward and laid eager hands on the letter, 
 which was from London, addressed in a clerk's hand. 
 
 ' Louie ! ' she called imperatively, ' tak un out soom bread-an- 
 drippin. ' 
 
 Louie put some on a plate, and went out with it to the cow- 
 house, where David sat on a stool, occupying himself in cutting 
 the pages of a number of the Vegetarian News, lent him in 
 Clough End, with trembling hands, while a fierce red spot burnt 
 in either cheek. 
 
 ' Tak it away ! ' he said, almost knocking the plate out of 
 Louie's hands ; ' it chokes me to eat a crumb o' hers. ' 
 
 As Louie was bearing the plate back through the yard, Uncle 
 
90 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 Reuben came by. ' What's— what's 'at ? ' he said, peering short- 
 sightedly at what she held. Every month of late Reuben's back 
 had seemed to grow rounder, his sight less, and his wits of less 
 practical use. 
 
 ' Summat for David,' said Louie, shortly, "cos Aunt Hannah 
 woan't gie him no dinner. But he woan't ha it.' 
 
 Reuben's sudden look of trouble was unmistakable. ' Whar is 
 he?' 
 
 ' I' th' coo-house.' 
 
 Reuben went his way, and found the dinnerless boy deep, or 
 apparently deep, in recipes for vegetable soups. 
 
 ' What made yo late, Davy ? ' he asked him, as he stood over 
 him. 
 
 David had more than half a mind not to answer, but at last 
 he jerked out fiercely, ' Waitin for th' second post, fust ; then t' 
 donkey fell down half a mile out o' t' town, an th' things were 
 spilt. There was nobody about, an' I had a job to get 'un up 
 at a'.' 
 
 Reuben nervously thrust his hands far into his coat-pockets. 
 
 'Coom wi me, Davy, an I'st mak yor aunt gie yer yor dinner.' 
 
 ' I wouldn't eat a morsel if she went down on her bended 
 knees to me,' the lad broke out, and, springing up, he strode 
 sombrely through the yard and into the fields. 
 
 Reuben went slowly back into the house. Hannah was in the 
 parlour— so he saw through the half-opened door. He went into 
 the room, which smelt musty and close from disuse. Hannah was 
 standing over the open drawer of an old-fashioned corner cup- 
 board, carefully scanning a letter and enclosure before she locked 
 them up. 
 
 ' Is 't Mr. Gurney's money ? ' Reuben said to her, in a queer 
 voice. 
 
 She was startled, not having heard him come in, but she put 
 what she held into the drawer all the more deliberately, and 
 turned the key. 
 
 'Ay, 'tis.' 
 
 Reuben sat himself down on one of the hard chairs beside the 
 table in the middle of the room. The light streaming through 
 the shutters Hannah had just opened streamed in on his grizzling 
 head and face working with emotion. 
 
 'It's stolen money,' he said hoarsely. ' Yo're stealin it fro 
 Davy. ' 
 
 Hannah smiled grimly, and withdrew the key. 
 
 ' I'm paying missel an yo, Reuben Grieve, for t' keep o' two 
 wuthless brats as cost moor nor they pays,' she said, with an 
 accent which somehow sent a shiver through Reuben. ' / don't 
 keep udder f oaks' childer fur nothin.' 
 
 ' Yo've had moor nor they cost for seven year,' said Reuben, 
 with the same thick tense utterance. ' Yo should let Davy ha it, 
 an gie him a trade. ' 
 
 Hannah walked up to the door and shut it. 
 
CHAP. VIII CHILDHOOD 91 
 
 ' I should, should I ? An wholl pay for Louie — for your 
 luvely hmb of a niece ? It 'ud tak about that,' and she pointed 
 grimly to the drawer, ' to coover what she wastes an spUes i' t' 
 yeer. ' 
 
 ' Yo get her work, Hannah. Her bit and sup cost yo most 
 nothin. I cud wark a bit moor — soa cud yo. Yo're hurtin me i' 
 mi conscience, Hannah — yo're coomin atwixt me an tli' Lord I ' 
 
 He brought a shaking hand down on the damask table-cloth 
 among the wool mats and the chapel hymn-books which adorned 
 it. His long, loose frame had drawn itself up with a certain 
 dignity. 
 
 ' Ha done wi your cantin ! ' said Hannah under her breath, 
 laying her two hands on the table, and stooping down so as to 
 face him with more effect. The phrase startled Reuben with a 
 kind of horror. Whatever words might have passed between 
 them, never yet that he could remember had his wife allowed 
 herself a sneer at his religion. It seemed to him suddenly as 
 though he and she were going fast downhill — slipping to perdi- 
 tion, because of Sandy's six hundred pounds. 
 
 But she cowed him — she always did. She stayed a moment in 
 the same bent and threatening position, coercing him with angry 
 eyes. Then she straightened herself, and moved away. 
 
 'Let t' lad tak hisself off if he wants to,' she said, an iron 
 resolution in her voice. ' I told yo so afore — I woan't cry for 'im. 
 But as long as Louie's here, an I ha to keep her, I'll want that 
 money, an every penny on't. If it bean't paid, she may go too ! ' 
 
 ' Yo'd not turn her out, Hannah ? ' cried Reuben, instinctively 
 putting out an arm to feel that the door was closed. 
 
 ^ /She'd not want for a livin,' replied Hannah, with a bitter 
 sneer ; ' she's her mither's child. ' 
 
 Reuben rose slowly, shaking all over. He opened the door 
 with difficulty, groped his way out of the front passage, then went 
 heavily through the yard and into the fields. There he wandered 
 by himself for a couple of hours, altogether forgetting some newly 
 dropped lambs to which he had been anxiously attending. For 
 months past, ever since his conscience had been roused on the 
 subject of his brother's children, the dull, incapable man had been 
 slowly reconceiving the woman with whom he had lived some five- 
 and-twenty years, and of late the process had been attended with 
 a kind of agony. The Hannah Martin he had married had been 
 a hard body indeed, but respectable, upright, with the same moral 
 instincts as himself. She had kept the farm together — he knew 
 that ; he could not have lived without her, and in all practical 
 respects she had been a good and industrious wife. He had 
 coveted her industry and her strong will ; and, having got the 
 use of them, he had learnt to put up with her contempt for him, 
 and to fit his softer nature to hers. Yet it seemed to him that 
 there had always been certain conditions implied in this subjection 
 of his, and that she was breaking them. He could not have been 
 fetching and carrying all these years for a woman who could 
 
92 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 go on wilfully appropriating money that did not belong to her,— 
 who could even speak with callous indifference of the prospect 
 of turning out her niece to a life of sin. 
 
 He thought of Sandy's money with loathing. It was like the 
 cursed stuff that Achan had brought into the camp— an evil 
 leaven fermenting in their common life, and raising monstrous 
 growths. 
 
 Reuben Grieve did not demand much of himself; a richer 
 and more spiritual nature would have thought his ideals lament- 
 ably poor. But, such as they were, the past year had proved 
 that he could not fall below them without a dumb anguish, with- 
 out a sense of shutting himself out from grace. He felt himself 
 —by his fear of his wife— made a partner in Hannah's covetous- 
 ness, in Hannah's cruelty towards Sandy's children. Already, it 
 seemed to him, the face of Christ was darkened, the fountain of 
 grace dried up. All those appalling texts of judgment and repro- 
 bation he had listened to so often in chapel, protected against 
 them by that warm inward certainty of ' election,' seemed to be 
 now pressing against a bared and jeopardised soul. 
 
 But if he wrote to Mr. Gurney, Hannah would never forgive 
 him till her dying day ; and the thought of making her his 
 enemy for good put him in a cold sweat. 
 
 After much pacing of the upper meadows he came heavily 
 down at last to see to his lambs. Davy was just jumping the 
 wall on to his uncle's land, having apparently come down the 
 Frimley path. When he saw his uncle he thrust his hands into 
 his pockets, began to whistle, and came on with a devil-may-care 
 swing of the figure. They met in a gateway between two fields. 
 
 'Whar yo been, Davy?' asked Reuben, looking at him 
 askance, and holding the gate so as to keep him. 
 ' To Dawson's,' said the boy, sharply. 
 
 Reuben's face brightened. Then the lad's empty stomach 
 must have been filled ; for he knew that ' Dawsons ' were kind to 
 him. He ventured to look at him more directly, and, as he did 
 so something in the attitude of the proud handsome stripling 
 reminded him of Sandy— Sandy, in the days of his youth, coming 
 down to show his prosperous self at the farm. He put his large 
 soil-stained hand on David's shoulder. 
 
 ' Goo yor ways in, Davy. I'll see yo ha your reets.' 
 David opened his eyes at him, astounded. There is nothing 
 more startling in human relations than the strong emotion of 
 
 • weak people. . ^ -u- v 
 
 Reuben would have liked to say something else, but his hps 
 opened and shut in vain. The boy, too, was hopelessly embar- 
 rassed. At last, Reuben let the gate fall and walked off, with 
 downcast head, to where, in the sheep-pen, he had a few hours 
 before bound an orphan lamb to a refractory foster-mother. 
 The foster-mother's resistance had broken down, she was lying 
 patiently and gently while the thin long-legged creature sucked ; 
 when it was frightened away by Reuben's approach she trotted 
 
CHAP. IX CHILDHOOD 93 
 
 bleating after it. In bis disturbed state of feeling the parallel, 
 or rather the 
 struck home. 
 
 or rather the contrast, between the dumb animal and the woman 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 But the crisis which had looked so near delayed ! 
 
 Poor Reuben ! The morning after his sudden show of spirit 
 to David he felt himself, to his own miserable surprise, no more 
 courageous, than he had been before it. Yet the impression 
 made had gone too deep to end in nothingness. He contracted a 
 habit of getting by himself in the fields and puzzling his brain 
 with figures — an occupation so unfamiliar and exhausting that it 
 wore him a good deal ; and Hannah, when he came in at night, 
 would wonder, with a start, whether he were beginning ' to break 
 up.' But it possessed him more and more. Hannah would not 
 give up the money, but David must have his rights. How could 
 it be done ? For the first time Reuben fell to calculation over his 
 money matters, which he did not ask Hannah to revise. But 
 meanwhile he lived in a state of perpetual inward excitement 
 which did not escape his wife. She could get no clue to it, how- 
 ever, and became all the more forbidding in the household the 
 more she was invaded by this wholly novel sense of difficulty in 
 managing her husband. 
 
 Yet she was not without a sense that if she could but contrive 
 to alter her ways with the children it would be well for her. Mr. 
 Gurney's checpie was safely put away in the Clough End bank, 
 and clearly her best policy would have been to make things toler- 
 able for the two persons on whose proceedings — if they did but 
 know it ! — the arrival of future checiues in some measure 
 depended. But Hannah had not the cleverness which makes 
 the successful hypocrite. And for some time past there had 
 been a strange unmanageable change in her feelings towards 
 Sandj^'s orphans. Since Reuben had made her conscious that she 
 was robbing them, she had gone nearer to an active hatred than 
 ever before. And, indeed, hatred in such a case is the most 
 natural outcome ; for it is little else than the souls perverse 
 attempt to justify to itself its own evil desire. 
 
 David, however, when once his rage over Hannah's latest 
 offence had cooled, behaved to his aunt much as he had done before 
 it. He was made placable by his secret hopes, and touched by 
 Reuben's advances — though of these last he took no practical 
 account whatever ; and he must wait for his letter. So he went 
 back ungraciously to his daily tasks. Meanwhile he and Louie, 
 on the strength of the great coh]i in prospect, were better friends 
 than they had ever been, and his consideration for her went up 
 as he noticed that, when she pleased, the reckless creature could 
 keep a secret ' as close as wax. ' 
 
 The weeks, however, passed away, and still no letter came for 
 
94 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 David. The shepherds' meetings— first at Clough End for the 
 Cheshire side of the Scout, and then at the ' Snake Inn ' for the 
 Sheffield side— when the strayed sheep of the year were restored 
 to their owners, came and went in due course ; sheep-washing and 
 sheep-shearing were over ; the summer was halfway through; and 
 still no word from Mr. Ancrum. 
 
 David, full of annoyance and disappointment, was seething 
 with fresh plans— he and Louie spent hours discussing them at 
 the smithy — when suddenly eji experience overtook him, which 
 for the moment effaced all his nascent ambitions, and entirely did 
 away with Louie's new respect for him. 
 
 It was on this wise. 
 
 Mr. Ancrum had left Clough End towards the end of June. 
 The congregation to wiiich he ministered, and to which Reuben 
 Grieve belonged, represented one of those curious and independent 
 developments of the religious spirit which are to be found 
 scattered through the teeming towns and districts of northern 
 England. They had no connection with any recognised religious 
 community, but the members of it had belonged to many— to the 
 Church, the Baptists, the Independents, the Methodists. They 
 were mostly mill-hands or small tradesmen, penetrated on the one 
 side with the fervour, the yearnings, the strong formless poetry 
 of English evangelical faith, and repelled on the. other by various 
 features in the different sects from which they came— by the 
 hierarchical strictness of the Wesleyan organisation, or the loose- 
 ness of the Congregationalists, or the coldness of the Church. 
 They had come together to seek the Lord in some way more 
 intimate, more moving, more effectual than any they had yet 
 found ; and in this pathetic search for the ' rainbow gold ' of faith 
 they were perpetually brought up against the old stumbling-blocks 
 of the unregenerate man, — the smallest egotisms, and the meanest 
 vanities. Mr. Ancrum, for instance, had come to the Clough 
 End ' Brethren ' full of an indescribable missionary zeal. He had 
 laboured for them night and day, taxing his sickly frame far 
 beyond its powers. But the most sordid conspiracy imaginable, 
 led by two or three of the prominent members who thought he 
 did not allow them enough share in the evening meetings, had 
 finally overthrown him, and he had gone back to Manchester a 
 bitterer and a sadder man. 
 
 After he left there was an interregnum, during which one or 
 two of the elder 'Brethren' taught Sunday school and led the 
 Sunday services. But at last, in August, it became known in 
 Clough End that a new minister for the ' Christian Brethren ' had 
 come down, and public curiosity in the Dissenting circles was keen 
 about him. After a few wrecks there began to be a buzz in the 
 little town on the subject of Mr. Dyson. The ' Christian Brethren ' 
 meeting-room, a long low upper chamber formerly occupied by 
 half a dozen hand-looms, was crowded on Sundays, morning and 
 evening, not only by the Brethren, but by migrants from other 
 denominations, and the Sunday school, which was held in a little 
 
CHAP. IX CHILDHOOD 95 
 
 rickety garret off the main room, also received a large increase of 
 members. It was rumoured that Mr. Dyson was specially 
 successful with boys, and that there was an ' awakening ' among 
 some of the lowest and roughest of the Clough End lads. 
 
 'He ha sich a way wi un,' said a much-stirred mother to 
 Reuben Grieve, meeting him one day in the street, ' he do seem 
 to melt your varra marrow.' 
 
 Eeuben went to hear the new man, was much moved, and 
 came home talking about him with a stammering unction, and 
 many furtive looks at David. He had tried to remonstrate several 
 times on the lad's desertion of chapel and Sunday school, but to 
 no purpose. There was something in David's half contemptuous, 
 half obstinate silence on these occasions which for a man like 
 Eeuben made argument impossible. To his morbid inner sense 
 the boy seemed to have entered irrevocably on the broad path 
 which leadeth to destruction. Perhaps in another year he would 
 be drinking and thieving. With a curious fatalisni Reuben felt 
 that for the present, and till he had made some tangible amends 
 to Sandy and the Unseen Powers for Hannah's sin, he himself 
 could do nothing. His hands were unclean. But some tremu- 
 lous passing hopes he allowed himself to build on this new 
 prophet. 
 
 Meanwhile, David heard the town -talk, and took small account 
 of it. He supposed he should see the new comer at Jerry's in 
 time. Then if folk spoke true there would be a shindy worth 
 joining in. Meanwhile, the pressure of his own affairs made the 
 excitement of the neighbourhood seem to him one more of those 
 storms in the Dissenting tea-cup, of which, boy as he was, he had 
 known a good many already. 
 
 One September evening he was walking down to Clough End, 
 bound to the reading-room. He had quite ceased to attend the 
 ' Crooked Cow. ' His pennies were precious to him now, and he 
 saved them jealously, wondering scornfully sometimes how he 
 could ever have demeaned himself so far as to find excitement in 
 the liquor or the company of the ' Cow. ' Half-way down to the 
 town, as he was passing the foundry, whence he had drawn the 
 pan which had for so long made the smithy enchanted ground to 
 him, the big slouching- appprentice who had been his quondam 
 friend and ally there, came out of the foundry yard just in front 
 of him. David quickened up a Httle, 
 
 ' Tom, whar are yo goin ? ' 
 
 The other looked round at him uneasily. 
 
 ' Niver yo mind. ' 
 
 The youth's uncouth clothes were carefully brushed, and his 
 fat face, which wore an incongruous expression of anxiety and 
 dejection, shone with washing. David studied him a moment in 
 silence, then he said abruptly — 
 
 ' Yo're goin prayer-meetin, that's what yo are.' 
 
 'An if I am, it's noa consarn o' yourn. Yo're yan o' th' 
 unregenerate ; an I'll ask yo, Davy, if happen yo're goin town 
 
96 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 way, not to talk ony o' your carnal talk to me. I'se got hin- 
 drances enough, t' Lord knows.' 
 
 And the lad went his way, morosely hanging his head, and 
 stepping more rapidly as though to get rid of his companion. 
 
 ' Well, I niver ! ' exclaimed David, in his astonishment. 
 'What's wrong wi yo, Tom? Yo've got no more spunk nor a 
 moultin hen. What's gotten hold o' yo ? ' 
 
 Tom hesitated a moment. ' Th' Lord I ' he burst out at last, 
 looking at Davy with that sudden unconscious dignity wliich 
 strong feeling can bestow for the moment on the meanest of 
 mortals. ' He's a harryin'*me ! I haven't slep this three neets for 
 shoutin an cryin ! It's th' conviction o' sin, T>qnj. Th' devil 
 seems a howdin me, an I conno pull away, not whativer. T' nevf 
 minister says, ' ' Dunnot yo pull. Let Jesus do 't all. He's Strang, 
 He is. Yo're nobbut a worm." But I've naw assurance, Davy, 
 theer's whar it is— I've naw assurance ! ' he repeated, forgetting 
 in his pain the unregenerate mind of his companion. 
 
 David walked on beside him wondering. When he had last 
 seen Tom he was lounging in a half-drunken condition outside 
 the door of the ' Crooked Cow,' cracking tipsy jokes with the 
 passers-by. 
 
 ' Where is the prayer-meetin ? ' he inquired presently. 
 ' In owd Simes's shed — an it's late too — I mun hurry.' 
 ' Why, theer'U be plenty o' room in old Simes's shed. It's a 
 fearfu big place.' 
 
 'An lasst time theer was na stannin ground for a corn- 
 boggart ; an I wudna miss ony o' Mr. Dyson's prayin, not for 
 nothin. Good neet to yo, Davy.' 
 
 And Tom broke into a run ; David, however, kept up with 
 him. 
 
 ' P'raps I'll coom too,' he said, with a kind of bravado, when 
 they had passed the bridge and the Kinder printing works, and 
 Clough End was in sight. 
 
 Tom said nothing till they had breasted a hill, at the top of 
 which he paused panting, and confronted David. 
 
 ' Noo yo'll not mak a rumpus, Davy,' he said mistrustfully. 
 ' An if I do, can't a hunderd or two o' yo kick me out ? ' asked 
 David, mockingly. ' I'll mak no rumpus. P'raps yor Mr. Dyson 
 '11 convert me.' 
 
 And he walked on laughing. 
 
 Tom looked darkly at him ; then, as he recovered his wind, 
 his countenance suddenly cleared. Satan laid a new snare for 
 him — poor Tom! — and into his tortured heart there fell a 
 poisonous drop of spiritual pride. Public reprobation applied to 
 a certain order of offences makes a very marketable kind of 
 fame, as the author of Manfred knew very well. David in his 
 small obscure way was supplying another illustration of the 
 principle. For the past year he had been something of a 
 personage in Clough End— having always his wits, his book- 
 learning, his looks, and his singular parentage to start from. 
 
CHAP. IX CHILDHOOD 97 
 
 Tom — the shambling butt of his comrades — began to like the 
 notion of going into prayer-meeting with Da\ad Grieve in tow ; 
 and even that bitter and very real cloud of spiritual misery lifted 
 a little. 
 
 So they marched in together, Tom in front, with his head much 
 higher than before ; and till the minister began there were many 
 curious glances thrown at David. It was a prayer-meeting for 
 boys only, and the place was crammed with them, of all ages up 
 to eighteen. 
 
 It was a carpenter's workshop. Tools and timber had been as 
 far as possible j^ushed to the side, and at the end a rough platform 
 of loose planks had been laid across some logs so as to raise the 
 preacher a little. 
 
 Soon there was a stir, and Mr. Dyson appeared. He was tall 
 and loosely built, with the stoop from the neck and the sallow 
 skin which the position of the cotton-spinner at work and the 
 close fluffy atmosphere in which he lives tend to develop. Up to 
 six months ago, he had been a mill-hand and a Wesleyan class- 
 leader. Now, in consequence partly of some inward crisis, partly 
 of revolt against an ' unspiritual ' superintendent, he had thrown 
 up mill and Methodism together, and come to live on the doles of 
 the Christian Brethren at Clough End. He had been preaching 
 on the moors already during the day, and was tired out ; but the 
 pallor of the harsh face only made the bright, commanding eye 
 more noticeable. It ran over the room, took note first of the 
 numbers, then of individuals, marked who had been there before, 
 who was a new-comer. The audience fell into order and quiet 
 before it as though a general had taken command. 
 
 He put his hands on his hips and began to speak without any 
 preface, somewhat to the boys' surprise, who had expected a 
 prayer. The voice, as generally happens with a successful 
 revivalist preacher, was of fine quality, and rich in good South 
 Lancashire intonations, and his manner was simplicity itself. 
 
 'Suppose we put off our prayer a little bit,' he said, in a 
 colloquial tone, his fixed look studying the crowded benches all 
 the while. ' Perhaps we'll have more to pray about by-and-by. 
 . . . Well, now, I haven't been long in Clough End, to be sure, 
 but I think I've been long enough to get some notion of how you 
 boys here live — whether you work on the land, or whether you 
 work in the mills or in shops — I've been watching yon a bit, 
 perhaps you didn't think it ; and what I'm going to do to-night is 
 to take your lives to pieces — take them to pieces, an look close into 
 them, as you've seen them do at the mill, perhaps, with a machine 
 that wants cleaning. I want to find out what's wrong wi them, 
 what they're good for, whose work they do — GocVs or the deviVs. 
 . . . First let me take the mill-hands. Perhaps I know most 
 about their life, for I went to work in a cotton-mill when I was 
 eight years old, and I only left it six months ago. I have seen 
 men and women saved in that mill, so that their whole life after- 
 wards was a kind of ecstasy : I have seen others lost there, so 
 
98 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book t 
 
 that they became true children of the devil, and made those about 
 them as vile and wretched as themselves. I have seen men grow 
 rich there, and I have seen men die there ; so if there is anything 
 I know in this world it i? how factory workers spend their time— 
 at least, I think I know. But judge for yourselves — shout to me 
 if I'm wrong. Isn't it somehow like this ? ' 
 
 And he fell into a description of the mill-hand's working day. 
 It was done with knowledge, sometimes with humour, and through 
 it all ran a curious undercurrent of half-ironical passion. The 
 audience enjoyed it, took the points, broke in now and then with 
 comments as the speaker touched on such burning matters as the 
 tyranny of overlookers, the temper of masters, the rubs between 
 the different classes of ' hands,' the behaviour of ' minders ' to the 
 ' piecers ' employed by them, and so on. The sermon at one time 
 was more like a dialogue between preacher and congregation. 
 David found himself joining in it involuntarily once or twice, so 
 stimulating was the whole atmosphere, and Mr. Dyson's eye was 
 caught perforce by the tall dark fellow with the defiant carriage 
 of the head who sat next to Tom MuUins, and whom he did not 
 remember to have seen before. 
 
 But suddenly the preacher stopped, and the room fell dead 
 silent, startled by the darkening of his look. 'Ay,' he said, with 
 stern sharpness. ' Ay, that's how you live — them's the things you 
 spend your time and your minds on. You laugh, and I laugh — 
 not a bad sort of life, you think — a good deal of pleasure, after 
 all, to be got out of it. If a man must work he might do worse. 
 you poor souls /^ 
 
 The speaker stopped, as though mastering himself. His face 
 worked with emotion ; his last words had been almost a cry of 
 pain. After the easy give and take of the opening, this change 
 was electrical. David felt his hand tremble on his knee. 
 
 ' Answer me this ! ' cried the preacher, his nervous cotton- 
 spinner's hand outstretched. ' Is there any soiil here among you 
 factory lads who, when he wakes in the morning, eve?- thinks of 
 saying a prayer f Not one of you, I'll be bound ! What with 
 shovelling on one's clothes, and gulping down one's breakfast, 
 and walking half a mile to the mill, who's got time to think about 
 prayers ? God must wait. He's always there above, you think, 
 sitting in glory. He can listen any time. Well, as you stand at 
 your work — all those hours ! — is there ever a moment then for 
 putting up a word in Jesus' ear— Jesus, AYho died for sinners ? 
 Why, no, how should there be indeed? If you don't keep a 
 sharp eye on your work the overlooker 'ull know the reason 
 why in double-quick time ! . . . But there comes a break, 
 perhaps, for one reason or another. Does the Lord get it ? What 
 a thing to ask, to be sure ! Why, there are other spinners close 
 by, waiting for rovings, or leaving off for " baggin," and a bit of 
 talk and a bad word or two are a deal more fun, and come easier 
 than praying. Half -past five o'clock at last — knocking-off time. 
 Then you begin to think of amusing yourselves. There's loafing 
 
CHAP. IX CHILDHOOD 99 
 
 about the streets, which never comes amiss, and there's smoking 
 and the public for you bigger ones, and there's betting on Man- 
 chester races, and there's a bout of swearing every now and then 
 to keep up your spirits, and there are other thoughts, and perhaps 
 actions, for some of you, of which the less said in any decent 
 Christian gathering the better ! And so bedtime comes round 
 again ; still not a moment to think of God in — of the Judgment 
 which has come a day closer — of your sins which have grown a 
 day heavier — of your soul which has sunk a day further from 
 heaven, a day nearer to hell ? Not one. You are dead tired, 
 and mill-work begins so early. Tumble in — God can wait. He 
 has waited fourteen, or eighteen, or twenty years already ! 
 
 ' But you're not all factory hands here. I see a good many 
 lads I know come from the country — from the farms up Kinder or 
 Edale way. Well, I don't know so much about your ways as I do 
 about mills ; but I know some, and I can guess some. You are 
 not shut up all day with the roar of the machines in your ears, 
 and the cotton-fluff choking your lungs. You have to live harder, 
 perhaps. You've less chances of getting on in the world ; but I 
 declare to you, if you're bad and godless — as some of you are — I 
 think there's a precious sight less excuse for you than there is for 
 the mill-hands ! ' 
 
 And with a startling vehemence, greater by far than he had 
 shown in the case of the mill-workers, he threw himself on the 
 vices and the callousness of the field-labourers. For were they 
 not, day by day, and hour by hour, face to face with the 
 Almighty in His marvellous world — with the rising of His sun, 
 with the flash of His lightning, with His clouds which dropped 
 fatness, and with the heavens which declare His glory ? Nothing 
 between them and the Most High, if they would open their dull 
 eyes and see ! And more than that. Not a bit of their life, but 
 had been dear to the Lord Jesus — but He had spoken of it, taught 
 from it, made it sacred. The shepherd herding the sheep — how 
 could he, of all men, forget and blaspheme the Good Shepherd ? 
 The sower scattering the seed — how could he, of all men, forget 
 and blaspheme the Heavenly Sower ? Oh, the crookedness of sin ! 
 Oh, the hardness of men's hearts ! 
 
 The secret of the denunciations which followed lay hidden 
 deep in the speaker's personal history. They were the utterances 
 of a man who had stood for years at the ' mules,' catching, when 
 he could, through the coarse panes of factory glass, the dim blue 
 outlines of distant moors. Here were noise, crowd, coarse jesting, 
 mean tyrannies, uncongenial company — everything which a ner- 
 vous, excitable nature, tuned to poetry in the English way 
 through religion, most loathed ; there was beauty, peace, leisure 
 for thought, for holiness, for emotion. 
 
 Meanwhile the mind of David Grieve rose once or twice in 
 angry protest. It was not fair — it was unjust — and why did Mr. 
 Dyson always seem to be looking at him ? — flinging at him all 
 these scathing words about farming people's sins and follies ? He 
 
100 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book I 
 
 was shaken and excited. Oratory, of any sort, never failed to 
 stir him extraordinarily. Once even he would have jumped up to 
 speak, but Tom Mullins's watchful hand closed on his arm. Davy 
 shook it off angrily, but was perforce reminded of his promise. 
 And Mr. Dyson was swift in all things. The pitiless sentences 
 dropped ; the speaker, exhausted, wiped his brow and pondered 
 a moment ; and the lads from the farms about, most of whom 
 David knew by sight, were left staring at the floor, some inchned 
 to laugh by reaction, others crimson and miserable. 
 
 Well ; so God was everywhere forgotten — in the fields and in 
 the mill. The greedy, vicious hours went by, and God still waited 
 —waited. Would he wait for ever ? 
 
 'Nay!' 
 
 The intense, low-spoken word sent a shiver through the room. 
 The revivahst passion had been mounting rapidly amongst the 
 listeners, and the revivalist sense divined what was coming. To 
 his dying day David, at least, never forgot the picture of a 
 sinner's death agony, a sinner's doom, which followed. As to the 
 first, it was very quiet and colloquial. The preacher dwelt on the 
 tortured body, the choking breath, the failing sight, the talk ot 
 relations and friends round the bed. 
 
 ' "Ay, poor fellow, he'll not lasst mich longer; t' doctor's 
 gien him up — and a good thing too, for his sufferins are terr'ble 
 to see." 
 
 ' And your poor dying ears will catch what they say. Then 
 will your fear come upon you as a storm, and your calamity as a 
 whirlwind. Such a fear ! 
 
 ' Once, my lads— long ago— I saw a poor girl caught by her 
 hair in one of the roving machines in the mill I used to work at. 
 Three minutes afterwards they tore away her body from the iron 
 teeth which had destroyed her. But I, a lad of twelve, had seen 
 her face just as the thing caught her, and if I live to be a hun- 
 dred I shall never forget that face— that horrible, horrible fear 
 convulsing it. 
 
 ' But that fear, my boys, was as nothing to the sinner's fear 
 at death ! Only a few more hours— a few more minutes, perhaps 
 —and then judgment ! All the pleasant loafing and lounging, 
 all the eating and drinking, the betting and swearing, the warm 
 sun, the kind light, the indulgent parents and friends left behind ; 
 nothing for ever and ever but the torments which belong to sin, 
 and which even the living God can no more spare you and me if 
 we die in sin than the mill-engine, once set going, can spare the 
 poor creature that meddles with it. 
 
 ' Well ; but perhaps in that awful last hour you try to pray- 
 to call on the Saviour. But, alas ! alas ! prayer and faith have to 
 be learnt, like cotton-spinning. Let no man count on learning 
 that lesson for the asking. While your body has been enjoying 
 itself in sin, your soul has been dying— dying ; and when at the 
 last you bid it rise and go to the Father, you will find it just as 
 helpless as your poor paralysed limbs. It cannot rise, it has no 
 
CHAP. IX CHILDHOOD 101 
 
 strength ; it cannot go, for it knows not the way. No hope ; no 
 hope. Down it sinks, and the black waters of hell close upon it 
 for ever ! ' 
 
 Then followed a sort of vision of the lost— delivered in short 
 abrupt sentences — the form of the speaker drawn rigidly up 
 meanwhile to its full height, the long arm outstretched. The 
 utterance had very Uttle of the lurid materiahsm, the grotesque 
 horror of the ordinary ranter's hell. But it stole upon the imagi- 
 nation little by little, and possessed it at last with an all-pervad- 
 ing terror. Into it, to begin with, had gone the whole life-blood 
 and passion of an agonised soul. The man speaking had himself 
 graven the terrors of it on his inmost nature through many a 
 week of demoniacal possession. But since that original experi- 
 ence of fire which gave it birth, there had come to its elaboration 
 a- strange artistic instinct. Day after day the preacher had 
 repeated it to hushed congregations, and with every repetition, 
 almost, there had come a greater sharpening of the light and 
 shade, a keener sense of what would tell and move. He had 
 given it on the moors that afternoon, but he gave it better to- 
 night, for on the wild walk across the plateau of the Peak some 
 fresh illustrations, drawn from its black and fissured solitude, had 
 suggested themselves, and he worked them out as he went, with 
 a kind of joy, watching their efi'ect. Yet the man was, in his way, 
 a saint, and altogether sincere — so subtle a thing is the life of the 
 spirit. 
 
 In the middle, Tom Mullins, David's apprentice-friend, sud- 
 denly broke out into loud groans, rocking himself to and fro on 
 the form. A little later, a small fair-haired boy of twelve sprang 
 up from the form where he had been sitting trembling, and 
 rushed into the space between the benches and the preacher, 
 quite unconscious of what he was doing. 
 
 ' Sir ! ' he said ; ' oh, sir I — please — I didn't want to say them 
 bad words this mornin ; I didn't, sir ; it wor t' big uns made me ; 
 they said they'd duck me — an it do hurt that bad. Oh, sir, 
 please ! ' 
 
 And the little fellow stood wringing his hands, the tears cours- 
 ing down his cheeks. 
 
 The minister stopped, frowning, and looked at him. Then a 
 smile broke on the set face, he stepped up to the lad, threw his 
 arm round him, and drew him up to his side fronting the room. 
 
 ' My boy,' he said, looking down at him tenderly, 'you and I, 
 thank God, are still in the land of the living ; there is still time 
 to-night — tliis very minute — to be saved ! Ay, saved, for ever 
 and ever, by the blood of the Lamb. Look away from yourselves 
 — away from sin — away from hell — to the blessed Lord, that 
 suffered and died and rose again ; just for what ? For this only 
 — that He might, with His o^ti pierced hands, draw every soul 
 here to-night, and every soul in the wide world that will but hear 
 His voice, out of the clutches of the devil, and out of the pains of 
 
102 '£R2> HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 There was a great sob from the whole room. Rough lads 
 from the upland farms, shop-boys, mill-hands, strained forward, 
 listening, thirsting, responding to every word. 
 
 Redemption — Salvation — the deliverance of the soul from 
 itself— thither all religion comes at last, whether for the ranter 
 or the philosopher. To the enriching of that conception, to the 
 gradual hewing it out in historical shape, have gone the noblest 
 poetry, the purest passion, the intensest spiritual vision of the 
 highest races, since the human mind began to work. And the 
 historical shape may crumble ; but the need will last and the 
 travail will go on ; for man's quest of redemption is but the 
 eternal yielding of the clay in the hands of the potter, the eternal 
 answer of the creature to the urging indwelling Creator. 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 Half an hour later, after the stormy praying and singing which 
 had succeeded Mr. Dyson's address, David found himself tramp- 
 ing up the rough and lonely road leading to the high Kinder 
 valley. The lights of Clough End had disappeared ; against the 
 night sky the dark woody side of Mardale Moor was still visible ; 
 beneath it sang the river ; a few stars were to be seen ; and every 
 now and then the windows of a farm shone out to guide the 
 wayfarer. But David stumbled on, noticing nothing. At the 
 foot of the steep hill leading to the farm he stopped a moment, 
 and leant over the gate. The little lad's cry was in his ears. 
 
 Presently he leapt the gate impatiently, and ran up whistling. 
 Supper was over, but Hannah ungraciously brought him out some 
 cold bacon and bread. Louie hung about him while he ate, 
 studying him with quick furtive eyes^ 
 
 ' Whar yo bin ? ' she said abruptly, when Hannah had gone to 
 the back kitchen for a moment. Reuben was dozing by the fire 
 over the local paper. 
 
 'Nowhere as concerns yo,' said David, shortly. He finished 
 his supper and went and sat on the steps. The dogs came and 
 put their noses on his knees. He pulled absently at their coats, 
 looking straight before him at the dark point of Kinder Low. 
 
 ' Whar yo bin ? ' said Louie's voice again in his ear. She had 
 squatted down on the step behind him. 
 
 'Be off wi yer,' said David, angrily, getting up in order to 
 escape her. 
 
 But she pursued him across the farmyard. 
 
 ' Have yo got a letter ? ' 
 
 'No, I haven't.' 
 
 ' Did yo ask at t' post-office ? ' 
 
 'No, I didn't.' 
 
 ' An why didn't yo ? ' 
 
 'Because I didn't want — soa there — get away.' And he 
 
CHAP. X CHILDHOOD 103 
 
 stalked off. Louie, left behind, chewed the cud of reflection in 
 the darkness. 
 
 Presently, to his great disgust, as he was sitting under a wall 
 of one of the pasture-fields, hidden, as he conceived, from all the 
 world by the night, he heard the rustle of a dress, the click of a 
 stone, and there was Louie dangling her legs above him, having 
 attacked him in the rear. 
 
 ' Uncle Reuben's talkin 'is stuff about Mr. Dyson. I seed 'im 
 gooin passt Wigsons' this afternoon. He's nowt — he's common, 
 he is.' 
 
 The thin scornful voice out of the dark grated on him intoler- 
 ably. He bent forward and shut his ears tight with both his 
 hands. To judge from the muffled sounds he heard, Louie went 
 on talking for a while ; but at last there had been silence for so 
 long, that he took his hands away, thinking she must have gone. 
 
 ' Yo've been at t' prayer-meetin, I tell yo, an yo're a great 
 stupid muffin-yed, soa theer.' 
 
 And a peremptory little kick on his shoulder from a substan- 
 tial shoe gave the words point. 
 
 He sprang up in a rage, ran down the hill, jumped over a 
 wall or two, and got rid of her. But he seemed to hear her 
 elfish laugh for some time after. As for himself, he could not 
 analyse what had come over him. But not even the attraction 
 of an unopened parcel of books he had carried home that after- 
 noon from Clough End — a loan from a young stationer he had 
 lately made acquaintance with — could draw him back to the 
 farm. He sat on and on in the dark. And when at last, roused 
 by the distant sounds of shutting up the house, he slunk in and 
 up to bed, he tossed about for a long time, and woke up often in 
 the night. The tyrannous power of another man's faith was 
 upon him. He could not get Mr. Dyson out of his head. How 
 on earth could anybody be so certain f It was monstrous that 
 any one should be. It was canting stuff. 
 
 Still, next. day, hearing by chance that the new comer was 
 going to preach at a hamlet the other side of Clough End, he 
 went, found a Iprge mixed meeting mostly of mill-hands, and the 
 tide of Revivalism rolling high. This time Mr. Dyson picked him 
 out at once — the face and head indeed were easily remembered. 
 After the sermon, when the congregation were filing out, leaving 
 behind those more particularly distressed in mind to be dealt 
 with more intimately in a small prayer-meeting by Mr. Dyson 
 and a prayer-leader, the minister suddenly stepped aside from a 
 group of people he was talking with, and touched David on the 
 arm as he was making for the door. 
 
 ' Won't you stay ? ' he said peremptorily. ' Don't trifle with 
 the Lord.' 
 
 And his feverish divining eyes seemed to look the boy through 
 and through. David flushed, and pushed past him with som*?- 
 inarticulate answer. When he found himself in the open air he 
 was half angry, half shaken with emotion. And afterwards a 
 
104 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 curious instinct, the sullen instinct of the wild creature shrinking 
 from a possible captor, made him keep himself as much as 
 possible out of Mr. Dyson's way. At the prayer-meetings and 
 addresses, which followed each other during the next fortnight in 
 quick succession, David was almost always present ; but he stood 
 at the back, and as soon as the general function was over he fled. 
 The preacher's strong will was piqued. He began to covet the 
 boy's submission disproportionately, and laid schemes for meet- 
 ing with him. But David evaded them all. 
 
 Other persons, however, succeeded better. "Whenever the 
 revivalist fever attacks a community, it excites in a certain num- 
 ber of individuals, especially women, an indescribable zeal for 
 proselytising. The signs of ' conviction ' in any hitherto unre- 
 generate soul are marked at once, and the ' saved ' make a prey 
 of it, showing a marvellous cunning and persistence in its pursuit. 
 
 One day a woman, tlie wife of a Clough End shoemaker, 
 slightly known to David, met him on the moors. 
 
 ' Will yo coom to-night ? ' she said, nodding to him. ' Theer'U 
 be prayin' at our house — about half a dozen. ' 
 
 Then, as the boy stopped, amazed and hesitating, she fixed 
 him with her shining ecstatic eyes. 
 
 'Awake, thou that sleepest,' she said under her breath, 'and 
 Christ shall give thee light. ' 
 
 She had been carrying a bundle to a distant farm. A child 
 was in her arms, and she looked dragged and worn. But all the 
 way down the moor as she came towards him David had heard 
 her singing hymns. 
 
 He hung his head and passed on. But in the evening he 
 went, found three or four other boj^s his own age or older, the 
 woman, and her husband. The woman sang some of the most 
 passionate Methodist hymns ; the husband, a young shoemaker, 
 already half dead of asthma and bronchitis, told his ' experi- 
 ences ' in a voice broken by incessant coughing ; one of the boys, 
 a rough specimen, known to David as a van-boy from some calico- 
 printing works in the neighbourhood, prayed aloud, breaking down 
 into sobs in the middle ; and David, at first obstinately silent, 
 found himself joining before the end in the groans and ' Amens,' 
 by force of a contagious excitement he half despised but could 
 not withstand. 
 
 The little prayer-meeting, however, broke up somewhat in 
 confusion. There was not much real difference of opinion at this 
 time in Clough End, which was, on the whole, a strongly reli- 
 gious town. Even the Churchmanship of it was decidedly evan- 
 gelical, ready at any moment to make common cause with Dissent 
 against Ritualism, if such a calamity should ever threaten the 
 little community, and very ready to join, more or less furtively, 
 in the excitements of Dissenting revivals. Jerry Timmins and 
 his set represented the only serious blot on what the pious 
 Clough Endian might reasonably regard as a fair picture. But 
 this set contained some sharj^ fellows — provided outlet for a con- 
 
CHAP. X 
 
 CHILDHOOD 105 
 
 siderable amount of energy of a raw and roving sort, and, no 
 doubt, did more to maintain tlie mental equilibrium of the small 
 factory -town than any enthusiast on the other side would for- a 
 moment have allowed. The excitement which followed in the 
 train of a man like Mr. Dyson roused, of course, an answering 
 hubbub among the Timminsites. The whole of Jerry's circle was 
 stirred up, in fact, like a hive of wasps ; their ribaldry grew with 
 what it fed on ; and every day some new and exquisite method 
 of harrying the devout occurred to the more ingenious among 
 them. 
 
 David had hitherto escaped notice. But on this evenmg, while 
 he and his half-dozen companions were still on their knees, they 
 were first disturbed by loud drummings on the shoemaker's 
 door, which opened directly into the little room where they were 
 congregated ; and then, when they emerged into the street, they 
 found a mock prayer-meeting going on outside, with all the usual 
 'manifestations' of revivalist fervour— sighs, groans, shouts, and 
 the rest of it— in full flow. At the sight of David Grieve there 
 were first stares and then shrieks of laughter. 
 
 ' I say, Davy,' cried a drunken young weaver, sidling up to 
 him on his knees and embracing him from behind, ' my heart's 
 real touched. Gie me yor coat, Davy; it's better nor mine, 
 Davy ; and I'm yor Christian brother, Davy.' 
 
 The emotion of this appeal drew uproarious merriment from 
 the knot of Secularists. David, in a frenzy, kicked out, so that his 
 assailant dropped him with a howl. The weaver's friends closed 
 upon the ' Ranters,' who had to fight their way through. It was not 
 till they had gained the outskirts of the town that the shower of 
 stones ceased, and that they could pause to take stock of their 
 losses. Then it appeared that, though all were bruised, torn, and 
 furious, some were inclined to take a mystical joy in persecution, 
 and to find compensation in certain plain and definite predictions 
 as to the eternal fate in store for ' Jerry Timmins's divils. ' David, 
 on the other hand, was much more inclined to vent his wrath on 
 his own side than on the Timminsites. 
 
 'Why can't yo keep what yo're doin to yorsels?' he called 
 out fiercely to the knot of panting boys, as he faced round upon 
 them at the gate leading to the Kinder road. ' Yo're a parcel o' 
 fools — always chatterin and clatterin.' 
 
 The others defended themselves warmly. 'Them Timmins 
 lot' were always spying about. They daren't attack the large 
 meetings, but they had a diabolical way of scenting out the small 
 ones. The meetings at the shoemaker \s had been undisturbed for 
 some few nights, then a Timminsite passing by had heard hymns, 
 probably listened at the keyhole, and of course informed the main 
 body of the enemy. 
 
 'They're like them nassty earwigs,' said one boy in disgust, 
 ' they'll wriggle in onywheres.' 
 
 ' Howd yor noise ! ' said David, peremptorily. ' If yo wanted 
 to keep out o' their way, yo could do 't fasst enough. ' 
 
106 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book I 
 
 ' How ! ' they inquired, with equal curtness. 
 
 ' Yo needn't meet in th' town at aw^ Theer's plenty o' places 
 up on t' moor/ and he waved his hand towards the hills behind 
 him, lying clear in the autumn moonlight. ' Theer's th' owd 
 smithy — who'd find yo there ?.' 
 
 The mention of the smithy was received as an inspiration. 
 There is a great deal of pure romantic temper roused by these 
 revivalistic outbreaks in provincial England. The idea of the 
 moors and the old ruin as setting for a secret prayer-meeting 
 struck the group of excited lads as singularly attractive. They 
 parted cheerfully upon it, in spite of their bruises. 
 
 David, however, walked home fuming. The self-abandonment 
 of the revival had been all along wellnigh intolerable to him — 
 and now, that he should have allowed the Timminsites to know 
 anything about his prayers ! He very nearly broke off from it 
 altogether in his proud disgust. 
 
 However he did ultimately nothing of the sort. As ^oon as 
 he grew cool again, he was as much tormented as before by 
 what was at bottom more an intellectual curiosity than a moral 
 anguish. There was some moral awakening in it ; he had some 
 real qualms about sin, some real aspirations after holiness, and, 
 so far, the self-consciousness which had first stirred at Haworth 
 was deepened and fertilised. But the thirst for emotion and sen- 
 sation was the main force at work. He could not make out what 
 these religious people meant by their ' experiences,' and for the 
 first time he wanted to make out. So when it was proposed to 
 him to meet at the smithy on a certain Saturday evening, he 
 agreed. 
 
 Meanwhile, Louie was sitting up in bed every night, with her 
 hands round her sharp knees, and her black brows knit over 
 David's follies. It seemed to her he no longer cared ' a haporth ' 
 about getting a letter from Mr. Ancrum, about going to Manches- 
 ter, about all those entrancing anti-meat schemes which were to 
 lead so easily to a paradise of free 'buying' for both of them. 
 Whenever she tried to call him back to these things lie shook her 
 off impatiently, and their new-born congeniality to each other 
 had been all swamped in this craze for ' shoutin hollerin ' people 
 she despised with all her heart. When she flew out at him, he 
 just avoided her. Indeed, he avoided her now at all times, 
 whether she flew out or not. There was an invincible heathenism 
 about Louie, which made her the natural enemy of any ' awakened ' 
 person. 
 
 The relation of the elders in the farm to the new development 
 in David was a curious one. Hannah viewed it with a secret 
 satisfaction. Christians have less time than other people — such, 
 at least, had been her experience with Reuben — to spend in 
 thirsting for the goods of this world. The more David went to 
 prayer-meetings, the less likely was he to make inadmissible 
 demands on what belonged to him. As for poor Reuben, he 
 seemed to have got his wish ; while he and Hannah had been 
 
CHAP. X CHILDHOOD 107 
 
 doing their best to drive Sandy's son to perdition througli a 
 downward course of ' loafing, ' God had sent Mr. Dyson to put 
 Davy back on the right road. But he was ill at ease ; he watched 
 the excitement, which all the lad's prickly reticence could not 
 hide from those about him, with strange and variable feelings. 
 As a Christian, he should have rejoiced ; instead, the uncle and 
 nephew shunned each other more than ever, and shunned 
 especially all talk of the revival. Perhaps the whole situation — 
 the influence of the new man, of the local talk, of the quickened 
 spiritual life around him, did but aggravate the inner strain in 
 Reuben. Perhaps his wife's satisfaction, which his sharpened 
 conscience perceived and understood, troubled him intolerably. 
 At any rate, his silence and disquiet grew, and his only pleasure 
 lay, niore than ever, in those solitary cogitations we have already 
 spoken of. 
 
 The 15th of October approached — as it happened, the Friday 
 before the smithy prayer-meeting. On that day of the year, 
 according to ancient and invariable custom, the Yorkshire stock 
 — steers, heifers, young horses — which are transferred to the 
 Derbyshire farms on the 15th of May, are driven back to their 
 Yorkshire owners, with all the fatness of Derbyshire pastures 
 showing on their sleek sides. Breeders and farmers meet again 
 at Woodhead, just within the Yorkshire border.' Tiie animals are 
 handed over to their owners, paid for at so much a head, and any 
 preventible damage or loss occurring among them is reckoned 
 against the farmer returning them, according to certain local 
 rules. 
 
 As the middle of the month came nearer, Reuben began to 
 talk despondently to Hannah of his probable gains from his 
 Yorkshire 'boarders.' It had been a cold wet summer ; he was 
 ' feart ' the owners would think he might have taken more care 
 of some of the animals, especially of the young horses, and he 
 mentioned certain ailments springing from damp and exposure 
 for which he might be held responsible. Hannah grew irritated 
 and anxious. The receipts from this source were the largest they 
 could reckon upon in the year. But the fields on which the 
 Yorkshire animals pastured were at some distance from the 
 house ; this department of the farm business was always left 
 wholly to Reuben ; and, with much grumbling and scolding, she 
 took his word for it as to the probable lowness of the sum he 
 should bring back. 
 
 David, meanwhile, was sometimes a good deal puzzled by 
 Reuben's behaviour. It seemed to him that his uncle told some 
 queer tales at home about their summer stock. And when Reuben 
 announced his intention of going by himself to Woodhead, and 
 leaving David at home, the boy was still more astonished. 
 
 However, he was glad enough to be spared the tramp with a 
 set of people whose ways and talk were more and more uncongenial 
 to him ; and after his uncle's departure he lay for hours hidden 
 from Louie among the heather, sometimes arguing out imaginary 
 
108 THE HISTORY OP DAVID GRIEVE book l 
 
 arguments with Mr, Dyson, sometimes going througk passing 
 thrills- of emotion and fear. What was meant, he wanted to 
 know, by ' the sense of pardon ' ? Person after person at the 
 prayer-meetings he had been frequenting h^.d spoken of attaining 
 it with ecstasy, or of being still shut out from it with anguish. 
 But how, after all, did it differ from pardoning yourself ? You 
 had only, it seemed to him, to think very hard that you were 
 pardoned, and the feeling came. How could anybody tell it v."as 
 more than that ? David racked his brain endlessly over the same 
 subject. Who could be sure that ' experience ' was not all moon- 
 shine ? But he was as yet much too touched and shaken by what 
 he had been going through to draw any trenchant conclusions. 
 He asked the question, however, and therein lay the great differ- 
 ence between him and the true stuff of ]\fethodism. 
 
 Meanwhile, in his excitement, he, for the first time, ceased to 
 go to the Dawsons' as usual. To begin with, they dropped out 
 of a mind which was preoccupied with one of the first strong 
 emotions of adolescence. ■ Then, some one told him casually that 
 'Lias was more ailing than usual, and that Margaret was in much 
 trouble. He was pricked with remorse, but just because Margaret 
 would be sure to question him, a raw shyness came in and held 
 him back from the effort of going. 
 
 On the Saturday evening David, having ingeniously given 
 Louie the slip, sped across the fields to the smithy. It was past 
 five o'clock, and the light was fading. But the waning gold of 
 the sunset as he jumped the wall on to the moor made the whole 
 autumnal earth about him, and the whole side of the Scout, one 
 splendour. Such browns and pinks among the withering ling ; 
 such gleaming greens among the bilberry leaf ; such reds among 
 the turning ferns ; such fiery touches on the mountain ashes 
 overhangmg the Red Brook ! The western light struck in great 
 shafts into the bosom of the Scout ; and over its grand encom- 
 passing mass hung some hovering clouds just kindling into rosy 
 flame. As the boy walked along he saw and thrilled to the beauty 
 which lay spread about him. His mood was simple, and sweeter 
 than usual. He felt a passionate need of expression, of emotion. 
 There was a true disquiet, a genuine disgust with self at the 
 bottom of him, and God seemed more than imaginatively near. 
 Psrhaps, on this day of his youth, of all days, he w^as closest to 
 the Kingdom of Heaven. 
 
 At the smithy he found about a dozen persons, mostly youths, 
 just come out from the two or three mills which give employment 
 to Clough End, and one rather older than the rest, a favourite 
 prayer-leader in Sunday meetings. At first, everything felt 
 strange ; the boys eyed one another ; even David as he stepped 
 in among them had a momentary reaction, and was more conscious 
 of the presence of a red-haired fellow tliere with whom he had 
 fought a mighty tight on the Huddersfield expedition, than of any 
 spiritual needs. 
 
CHAP. X CHILDHOOD ' 109 
 
 However, the prayer-leader knew his work. He was slow and 
 pompous ; his tone with the Almighty might easily have roused a 
 hostile sense of humour ; but Dissent in its active and emotional 
 forms kills the sense of humour ; and, besides, there was a real, 
 ungainly power in the man. Every phrase of his opening prayer 
 was hackneyed ; every gesture uncouth. But his heart was in it, 
 and religious conviction is the most infectious thing in the world. 
 He warmed, and his congregation warmed with him. The wild 
 scene, too, did its part — the world of darkening moors spread out 
 before them ; the mountain wall behind them ; the October wind 
 sighing round the ruined walls ; the lonely unaccustomed sounds 
 of birds and water. When he ceased, boy after boy broke out 
 into more or less incoherent praying. Soon in the dusk they could 
 no longer see each other's faces ; and then it was still easier to 
 break through reserve. 
 
 At last David found himself speaking. What he said was at 
 first almost inaudible, for he was kneeling between the wall and 
 the pan which had been his childish joy, with his face and arms 
 crushed against the stones. But when he began the boys about 
 pricked up their ears, and David was conscious suddenly of a 
 deepened silence. There were warm tears on his hidden cheeks ; 
 but it pleased him keenly they should listen so, and he prayed 
 more audibly and freely. Then, when his voice dropped at last, 
 the prayer-leader gave out the familiar hymn, ' Come, O thou 
 Traveller unknown : ' — 
 
 Come, thou Traveller unknown, 
 Whom still I hold, but cannot see ! 
 
 My company before is gone. 
 And I am left alone with Thee ; 
 
 With Thee all night I mean to stay. 
 
 And wrestle till the break of day. 
 
 Wilt thou not yet to me reveal 
 
 Thy new unutterable name ? 
 Tell me, I still beseech thee, tell — 
 
 To know it now resolved I am. 
 Wrestling, I will not let thee go, 
 Till I thy name, thy nature know. 
 
 * •X' * * 
 
 'Tis Love ! 'tis Love — thou lovest me ! 
 
 I hear thy whisper in my heart ; 
 The morning breaks, the shadows flee. 
 
 Pure universal Love thou art ; 
 To me, to all, thy mercies move. 
 Thy nature and thy name is Love. 
 
 Again and again the lines rose on the autumn air ; each time 
 the hymn came to an end it was started afresh, the sound of it 
 spreading far and wide into the purple breast of Kinder Scout. 
 At last the painful sobbing of poor Tom Mullins almost drowned 
 
no THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE uook t 
 
 the singing. The prayer-leader, himself much moved, bent over 
 and seized him by the arm. 
 
 ' Look to Jesus, Tom. Lay hold on the Saviour. Don't think 
 of your sins ; they're done away i' th' blood o' the Lamb. Howd 
 Him fast. Say, " I believe," and the Lord ull deliver yo.' 
 
 With a cry, the great hulking lad sprang to his feet, and 
 clasped his arms above his head — 
 
 ' I do believe — I will believe. Help me, Lord Jesus. Oh, I'm 
 saved ! I'm saved ! ' And he remained standing in an ecstasy, 
 looking to the sky above the Scout, where the red sunset glow 
 still lingered. 
 
 ' Hallelujah ! hallelujah ! Thanks be to God ! ' cried the 
 prayer-leader, and the smithy resounded in the gro\^ing darkness 
 with similar shouts. David was almost choking with excitement. 
 He would have given worlds to spring to Tom Mullins's side and 
 proclaim the same faith. But the inmost heart of him, his real 
 self, seemed to him at this testing moment something dead and 
 cold. No heavenly voice spoke to Mm, David Grieve. A genuine 
 pang of religious despair seized him. He looked out over the 
 moor through a gap in the stones. There was a dim path below ; 
 the fancy struck him that Christ, the 'Traveller unknown,' was 
 passing along it. He had already stretched out His hand of 
 blessing to Tom Mullins. 
 
 ' To me ! to me, too ! ' David cried under his breath, carried 
 away by the haunting imagination, and straining his eyes into 
 the dusk. Had the night opened to his sight there and then in a 
 vision of glory, he would have been no whit surprised. 
 
 Hark 1 — what was that sound ? 
 
 A weird scream rose on the ^ind. The startled congregation 
 in the smithy scrambled to their feet. Another scream, nearer 
 apparently than the first, and then a loud wailing, broken every 
 few seconds by a strange slight laugh, of which the distance 
 seemed quite indefinite. Was it close by, or beyond the Red 
 Brook ? 
 
 The prayer-leader turned white, the boys stood huddled round 
 him in every attitude of terror. Again the scream, and the little 
 ghostly laugh ! Looking at each other wildly, the whole congre- 
 gation broke from the smithy down the hill. But the leader 
 stopped himself. 
 
 ' It's mebbe soom one in trouble,' he said manfully, every limb 
 trembling. ' We mun go and see, my lads. ' And he rushed off 
 in the direction whence the first sound had seemed to come — 
 towards the Red Brook — half a dozen of the bolder spirits follow- 
 ing. The rest stood cowering on the slope under the smithy. 
 David meanwhile had climbed the ruined wall, and stood with 
 head strained forward, his eyes sweeping the moor. But every 
 outline was sinking fast into the gulf of the night ; only a few 
 indistinct masses — a cluster of gorse-bushes, a clump of mountain 
 ash — still showed here and there. 
 
 The leader made for one of these darker patches on the 
 
CHAP. XI CHILDHOOD 111 
 
 mountain-side, led on always by the recurrent screams. He 
 reached it ; it was a patch of juniper overhanging the Red Brook 
 — when suddenly from behind it there shot up a white thing, 
 taller than the tallest man, with nodding head and outspread 
 arms, and such laughter — so faint, so shrill, so evil, breaking 
 midway into a hoarse angry yell. 
 
 ' Jeunij Cram! Jenny Cnim !' cried the whole band with one 
 voice, and, wheeling round, they ran down the Scout, joined by 
 the contingent from the smithy, some of them falling headlong 
 among the heatlier in their agony of flight, others ruthlessly 
 knocking over those in front of them who seemed to be in their 
 way. In a few seconds, as it seemed, the whole Scout was left to 
 itself and the night. Footsteps, voices, all were gone— save for 
 one long peal of most human, but still elfish, mirth, which came 
 from the Red Brook. 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 A DARK figure sprang down from the wall of the smithy, leapt 
 along the heather, and plunged into the bushes along the brook. 
 A cry in another key was heard. 
 
 David emerged, dragging something behind him. 
 
 ' Yo limb, yo ! How dare yo, yo little beast ? Yo impident 
 little toad ! ' And in a perfect frenzy of rage he shook what he 
 held. But Louie— for naturally it was Louie— wrenched herself 
 away, and stood confronting him, panting, but exultant. 
 
 ' I freetened 'em ! just didn't I ? Cantin humbugs ! ''Jenny 
 Crum! Jenny Criun!''' And, mimicking the voice of the 
 leader, she broke again into an hysterical shout of laughter. 
 
 David, beside himself, hit out and struck her. It was a heavy 
 blow which knocked her down, and for a moment seemed to stun 
 her. Then she recovered her senses, and flew at him in a mad 
 passion, weeping wildly with the smart and excitement. 
 
 He held her off, ashamed of himself, till she flung away, 
 shrieking out — 
 
 'Go and say its prayers, do— good little boy— poor little 
 babby. Ugh, yo coward ! hittin gells, that's all yo're good for.' 
 
 And she ran off so fast that all sight of her was lost in a few 
 seconds. Only two or three loud sobs seemed to come back from 
 the dark hollow below. As for the boy, he stopped a second to 
 disentangle his feet from the mop and the tattered sheet where- 
 with Louie had worked her transformation scene. Then he 
 dashed up the hill again, past the smithy, and into a track leading 
 out on to the high road between Castleton and Clough End. He 
 did not care where he went. Five minutes ago he had been 
 almost in heaven ; now he was in hell. He hated Louie, he hated 
 the boys who had cut and run, he loathed himself. No !— religion 
 was not for such as he. No more canting — no more praying — 
 away with it ! He seemed to shake aU the emotion of the last 
 
113 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 few weeks from him with scorn and haste, as he ran on, his 
 strong young limbs battling with the wind. 
 
 Presently he emerged on the high road. To the left, a hun- 
 dred yards away, were the lights of a wayside inn ; a farm 
 waggon and a pair of horses standing with drooped and patient 
 heads were drawn up on the cobbles in front of it. David felt in 
 his pockets. There was eighteenpence in them, the remains of 
 half-a-crown a strange gentleman had given him in Clough End 
 the week before for stopping a runaway horse. In he stalked. 
 
 ' Two penn'orth of gin — hot ! ' he commanded. 
 
 The girl serving the bar brought it and stared at him curi- 
 ously. The glaring paraffin lamp above his head threw the 
 frowning brows and wild eyes, the crimson cheeks, heaving chest, 
 and tumbled hair, into strong light and shade. ' That's a quare 
 un ! ' she thought, but she found him handsome all the same, and, 
 retreating behind the beer-taps, she eyed him surreptitiously. 
 She was a raw country lass, not yet stript of all her natural shy- 
 ness, or she would have begun to ' chaff ' him. 
 
 ' Another ! ' said David, pushing forward his glass. This time 
 he looked at her. His reckless gaze travelled over her coarse and 
 comely face, her full figure, her bare arms. He drank the glass 
 she gave him, and yet another. She began to feel half afraid 
 of him, and moved away. The hot stimulant ran through his 
 veins. Suddenly he felt his head whirling from the effects of it, 
 but that horrible clutch of despair w«s no longer on him. He 
 raised himself defiantly and turned to go, staggering along the 
 floor. He was near the entrance when an inner door opened, and 
 the carter, who had been gossiping in a room behind with the 
 landlord, emerged. He started with astonishment when he saw 
 David. 
 
 ' Hullo, Davy, what are yo af tor ? ' 
 
 David turned, nearly losing his balance as he did so, and 
 clutching at the bar for support. He found himself confronted 
 with Jim Wigson — his old enemy — who had been to Castleton 
 with a load of hay and some calves, and was on his way back to 
 Kinder again. When he saw who it was clinging to the bar 
 counter, Jim first stared and then burst into a hoarse roar of 
 laughter. 
 
 ' Coom here ! coom here ! ' he shouted to the party in the back 
 parlour. ' Here's a rum start ! I do declare this beats cock- 
 fighting ! — this do. Damn my eyes iv it doesn't ! Look at that 
 yoong limb. Why they towd me down at Clough End this mornin 
 he'd been took "serious" — took wi a prayin turn — they did. 
 Look at un ! It ull tak 'im till to-morrow mornin to know his 
 yed from his heels. He ! he ! he ! Yo're a deep un, Davj — yo 
 are. But yo'll get a bastin when Hannah sees yo — prayin or no 
 prayin.' 
 
 And Jim went off into another guffaw, pointing his whip the 
 while at Davy. Some persons from the parlour crowded in, 
 enjoying the fun. David did not see them. He reached out his 
 
CHAP. XI CHILDHOOD 113 
 
 hand for the glass he had just emptied, and steadying himself by 
 a mighty effort, flung it swift and straight in Jim Wigson's face. 
 There was a crash of fragments, a line of blood appeared on the 
 young carter's chin, and a chorus of wrath and alarm rose from 
 the group behind him. With a furious oath Jim placed a hand 
 on the bar, vaulted it, and fell upon the lad. David defended 
 himself blindly, but he was dazed ^ith drink, and his blows and 
 kicks rained aimlessly on Wigson's iron frame. In a second or 
 two Jim had tripped him up, and stood over him, his face ablaze 
 with vengeance and conquest. 
 
 ' Yo yoong varmint — yo cantin yoong hypocrite ! I'll teach yo 
 to show imperence to your betters. Yo bin alius badly i' want o' 
 soombody to tak yo down a peg or two. Now I'll show yo. I'll 
 not fight yo, but I'll flog yo— flog yo—& yo hear ? ' 
 
 And raising his carter's Avhip he brought it down on the boy's 
 back and legs. David tried desperately to rise — in vain — Jim had 
 him by the collar ; and four or five times more the heavy whip 
 came clown, avenging with each lash many a slumbering grudge 
 in the victor's soul. 
 
 Then Jim felt his arm firmly caught. ' Now, Mister Wigson,' 
 cried the landlord — a little man, but a wiry — ' yo'll not get me 
 into trooble. Let th' yoong ripstitch go. Yo've gien him a taste 
 he'll not forget in a week o' Sundays. Let him go. ' 
 
 Jim, with more oaths, struggled to get free, but the landlord 
 had quelled many rows in his time, and his wrists were worthy of 
 his calling. Meanwhile his wife helped up the boy. David was 
 no sooner on his feet than he made another mad rush for AVigson, 
 and it needed the combined eft'orts of landlord, landlady, and 
 servant-girl to part the two again. Then the landlord, seizing 
 David from behind by ' the scuft of the neck,' ran him out to the 
 door in a twinkling. 
 
 ' Go 'long wi yo ! An if yo coom raisin th' divil here again, 
 see iv I don't gie yo a souse on th' yed mysel.' And he shoved 
 his charge out adroitly and locked the door. 
 
 David staggered across the road as though still under the 
 impetus given by the landlord's shove. 
 
 The servant-girl took advantage of the loud cross-fire of talk 
 which immediately rose at the bar round Jim Wigson to run to a 
 corner window and lift the blind. The boy was sitting on a heap 
 of stones for mending the road, looking at the inn. Other passers- 
 by had come in, attracted by the row, and the girl slipped out 
 unperceived, opened the side door, and ran across the road. It 
 had begun to rain, and the drops splashed in her face. 
 
 David was sitting leaning forward, his eyes fixed on the lighted 
 windows of the house opposite. The rays which came from them 
 showed her that his nose and forehead were bleeding, and that 
 the blood was dripping unheeded on the boy's clothes. He was 
 utterly powerless, and trembling all over, but his look ' gave her 
 a turn.' 
 
 ' Now, luke here,' she said, bending down to him. ' Yo jes go 
 
114 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book I 
 
 whoam. Wigson, he'll be out direckly, an he'll do yo a hurt iv he 
 finds yo. Coom, I'll put yo i' the way for Kinder. ' 
 
 And before he could gather his will to resist, she had dragged 
 him up with her strong countrywoman's arms and was leading 
 him along the road to the entrance of the lane he had come 
 
 by. 
 
 ' Lor, yo are bleedin,' she said compassionately ; ' he shud ha 
 thowt as how yo wor nobbut a lad— an it wor he begun aggin fust. 
 He's a big bully is Wigson.' And impulsively raising her apron 
 she applied it to the blood, David quite passive all the while. 
 The great clumsy lass nearly kissed him for pity. 
 
 'Now then,' she said at last, turning him into the lane, ' yo 
 know your way, an I mun goo, or they'll be raisin the parish 
 arter me. Gude neet to yo, an keep out o' Wigson's sect. Rest 
 yursel a bit theer — agen th' wall.' 
 
 And leaving him leaning against the wall, she reluctantly 
 departed, stopping to look back at him two or three times in spite 
 of the rain, till the angle of the wall hid him from view. 
 
 The rain poured down and the wind whistled through the 
 rough lane. David presently slipped down upon a rock jutting 
 from the wall, and a fevered, intermittent sleep seized him— the 
 result of the spirits he had been drinking. His will could oppose 
 no resistance ; he slept on hour after hour, sheltered a little by an 
 angle of the wall, but still soaked by rain and buffeted by the 
 wind. 
 
 When he awoke he staggered suddenly to his feet. The smart 
 of his back and legs recalled him, after a few moments of be- 
 wilderment, to a mental torture he had scarcely yet had time to 
 feel. He— David Grieve— had been beaten— thrashed like a dog 
 —by Jim Wigson ! The remembered fact brought with it a 
 degradation of mind and body— a complete unstringing of the 
 moral fibres, which made even revenge seem an impossible output 
 of energy. A nature of this sort, with such capacities and 
 ambitions, carries about with it a sense of supremacy, a natural, 
 indispensable self-conceit which acts as the sheath to the bud, and 
 is the condition of healthy development. Break it down and you 
 bruise and jeopardise the flower of life. 
 
 Jim Wigson !— the coarse, ignorant lout with whom he had 
 been, more or less, at feud since his first day in Kinder, whom he 
 had despised with all the strength of his young vanity. By 
 to-morrow all Kinder would know, and all Kinder would laugh. 
 ' What ! yo whopped Reuben Grieve's nevvy, Jim ? Wal, an a 
 good thing, too ! A lick now an again ud do Mm noa harm— a 
 cantankerous yoong rascot^pert an proud, like t' passon's pig, 
 I say.' David could hear the talk to be as though it were actually 
 beside him. It burnt into his ear. 
 
 He groped his way through the lane and on to the moor- 
 trembling with physical exhaustion, the morbid frenzy within him 
 choking his breath, the storm beating in his face. What was that 
 black mass to his right ?— the smithy ? A hard sob rose in his 
 
CHAP. XI CHILDHOOD 115 
 
 throat. Oh, he had been so near to an ideal world of sweetness, 
 purity, holiness ! Was it a year ago ? 
 
 With great difficulty he found the crossing-place in the brook, 
 and then the gap in the wall which led him into the farm fields. 
 When he was still a couple of fields off the house he heard the 
 dogs beginning. But he heard them as though in a dream. 
 
 At last he stood at the door and fumbled for the handle. 
 Locked ! Why, what time could it be ? He tried to remember 
 what time he had left home, but failed. At last he knocked, and 
 Just as he did so he perceived through a chink of the kitchen 
 shutter a light on the scrubbed deal table inside, and Hannah's 
 figure beside it. At the sound of the knocker Hannah rose, put 
 away her work with deliberation, snuffed the candle, and then 
 moved with it to the door of the kitchen. The boy watched her 
 with a quickly beating heart and whirling brain. She opened the 
 door. 
 
 ' Whar yo bin ? ' she demanded sternly. ' I'd like to know 
 what business yo have to coom in this time o' neet, an your uncle 
 fro whoam. Yo've bin in mischief, I'll be bound. Theer's Louie 
 coom back wi a black eye, an jes because she woan't say nowt 
 about it, I know as it's yo are at t' bottom o' 't. I'm reg'lar sick 
 o' sich doins in a decent house. Whar yo bin, I say ? ' 
 
 And this time she held the candle up so as to see him. She 
 had been sitting fuming by herself, and was in one of her blackest 
 tempers. David's misdemeanour was like food to a hungry 
 instinct. 
 
 ' I went to prayer-meetin,' the lad said thickly. It seemed to 
 him as though the words came all in the wrong order. 
 
 Hannah bent forward and gave a sudden cry. 
 
 ' Why, yo bin fightin ! Yo're all ower blood ! Yo bin fightin, 
 and I'll bet a thousand pund yo draw'd in Louie too. And 
 sperrits ! Why, yo smell o' sperrits ! Yo're jes reekin wi 'em ! 
 Wal, upon my word ! '—and Hannah drew herself back, flinging 
 every slow word in his face like a blow. ' Yo feature your mither, 
 yo do, boath on you, pretty close. I alius said it ud coom out i' 
 yo too. Prayer-meetin ! Yo yoong hypocrite ! Gang your ways ! 
 Yo may sleep i' th' stable ; it's good enough liggin for yo this neet. ' 
 
 And before he had taken in her words she had slammed the 
 door in his face, and locked it. He made a feeble rush for it in 
 vain. Hannah marched back into the kitchen, listening instinc- 
 tively first to him left outside, and then for any sound there might 
 be from upstairs. In a minute or two she heard uneven steps 
 going away ; but there was no movement in the room overhead. 
 Louie was sleeping heavily. As for Hannah, she sat down again 
 with a fierce decision of gesture, which seemed to vibrate through 
 the kitchen and all it held. Who could find fault with her ? It 
 would be a lesson to him. It was not a cold night, and there was 
 straw in the stable — a deal better lying than such a boy deserved. 
 As she thought of his ' religious ' turn she shrugged her shoulders 
 with a bitter scorn. 
 
116 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 The night wore on in the high Kinder valley. The stormy 
 wind and rain beat in great waves of sound and flood against the 
 breast of the mountain ; the Kinder stream and the Red Brook 
 danced under the heavy drops. The grouse lay close and silent 
 in the sheltering heather ; even the owls in the lower woods made 
 no sound. Still, the night was not perfectly dark, for towards 
 midnight a watery moon rose, and showed itself at intervals 
 between the pelting showers. 
 
 In the Dawsons' little cottage on Frimley Moor there were still 
 lights showing when that pale moon appeared. Margaret was 
 watching late. She and another woman sat by the fire talking 
 under their breaths. A kettle was beside her with a long spout, 
 which sent the steam far into the room, keeping the air of it 
 moist and warm for the poor bronchitic old man who lay close- 
 curtained from the draughts on the wooden bed in the corner. 
 
 The kettle sang, the fire crackled, and the wind shook the 
 windows and doors. But suddenly, through the other sounds, 
 Margaret was aware of an intermittent knocking— a low, hesi- 
 tating sound, as of some one outside afraid, and yet eager, to 
 make himself heard. 
 
 She started up, and her companion — a homely neighbour, one 
 of those persons whose goodness had, perhaps, helped to shape 
 poor Margaret's philosophy of life— looked round with a scared 
 expression. 
 
 ' Whoiver can it be, this time o' neet ? ' said Margaret— and 
 she looked at the old clock—' why, it's close on middle-neet ! ' 
 
 She hesitated a moment, then she went to the door, and bent 
 her mouth to the chink — 
 
 ' Who are yo ? What d' yo want ? ' she asked, in a distinct 
 but low voice, so as not to disturb 'Lias. 
 
 No answer for a minute. Then her ear caught some worda 
 from outside. With an exclamation she unlocked the door and 
 threw it open. 
 
 ' Davy ! Davy ! ' she cried, almost forgetting her patient. 
 
 The boy clung to the lintel without a word. 
 
 ' Coom your ways in ! ' she said peremptorily, catching him by 
 the sleeve. ' We conno ha no draughts on th' owd man. ' 
 
 And she drew him into the light, and shut the door. Then as 
 the shaded candle and firelight fell on the tall lad, wavering now 
 to this side, now to that, as though unable to support himself, his 
 clothes dripping on the flags, his face deadly white, save for the 
 smears of blood upon it, the two women fell back in terror. 
 
 ' Will yo gie me shelter ? ' said the boy, hoarsely ; ' I bin lying 
 hours i' th' wet. Aunt Hannah turned me out.' 
 
 Margaret came close to him and looked him all over. 
 
 ' What for did she turn yo out, Davy ? ' 
 
 ' I wor late. I'd been fightin Jim Wigson, an she smelt me o' 
 drink.' 
 
 And suddenly the lad sank down on a stool near, and laid his 
 head in his hands, as though he could hold it up no longer. 
 
CHAP. XI CHILDHOOD 117 
 
 Margaret's blanched old face melted all in a minute. 
 
 ' Howd 'un up quick ! ' she said to her companion, still in a 
 whisper. ' He hanno got a dry thread on — and luke at that cut 
 on his yed — why, he'll be laid up for weeks, maybe, for this. 
 Get his cloos off, an we'll put him on my bed then.' 
 
 And between them they dragged him up, and Margaret began 
 to strip off his jacket. As they held him— David surrendering 
 himself passively — the curtain of the bed was drawn back, and 
 'Lias, raising himself on an elbow, looked out into the room. As 
 he caught sight of the group of the boy and the two women, 
 arrested in their task by the movement of the curtain, the old 
 man's face expressed, first a weak and agitated bewilderment, 
 and then in an instant it cleared. 
 
 His dream wove the sight into itself, and 'Lias knew all about 
 it. His thin long features, with the white hair hanging about 
 them, took an indulgent amused look. 
 
 ' Bony — eh. Bony, is that ?/o, man ? Eh, but yo're cold an 
 pinched, loike ! A gude glass o' English grog ud not come amiss 
 to yo. An your coat, an your boots — what is 't drippin ? 8naw f 
 Yo make a man's backbane freeze t' see yo. An there's hot wark 
 behind yo, too. Moscow might ha warmed yo, I'm thinkin, 
 an — ' 
 
 But the weak husky voice gave way, and 'Lias fell back, still 
 holding the curtain, though, in his emaciated hand, and straining 
 his dim eyes on David. Margaret, with tears, ran to him, tried 
 to quiet him and to shut out the light from him again. But he 
 pushed her irritably aside. 
 
 ' No, Margaret, — doan't intrude. What d' yo know about it ? 
 Yo know nowt, Margaret. When did yo iver heer o' the Moscow 
 campaign ? Let me be, woan't yo ? ' 
 
 But perceiving that he would not be quieted, she turned him 
 on his pillows, so that he could see the boy at his ease. 
 
 ' He's bin out i' th' wet, 'Lias dear, has Davy,' she said ; ' and 
 it's nobbut a clashy night. We mun gie him summat hot, and a 
 place to sleep in.' 
 
 But the old man did not listen to her. He lay looking at 
 David, his pale blue eyes weirdly visible in his haggard face, mut- 
 tering to himself. He was still tramping in the snow with the 
 French army. 
 
 Then, suddenly, for the first time, he seemed troubled. He 
 stared up at the pale miserable boy who stood looking at him 
 with trembling lips. His own face began to work painfully, his 
 dream struggled with recognition. 
 
 Margaret drew David quickly away. She hurried him into 
 the further corner of the cottage, where he was out of sight of 
 the bed. There she quickly stripped him of his wet garments, as 
 any mother might have done, found an old flannel shirt of 'Lias's 
 for him, and, wrapping him close in a blanket, she made him lie 
 down on her own bed, he being now much too weak to realise 
 what was done with him. Then she got an ^mpty bottle, filled it 
 
118 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 from the kettle, and put it to his feet ; and finally she brought a 
 bowlful of warm water and a bit of towel, and, sitting down by 
 him, she washed the blood and dirt away from his face and hand, 
 and smoothed down the tangled black hair. She, too, noticed 
 the smell of spirits, and shook her head over it ; but her mother- 
 liness grew with every act of service, and when she had made 
 him warm and comfortable, and he was dropping into the dead 
 sleep of exhaustion, she drew her old hand tenderly across his 
 brow. 
 
 'He do feature yan o' my own lads so as he lies theer,' she 
 said tremulously to her friend at the fire, as though explaining 
 herself. ' When they'd coom home late fro wark, I'd use to hull 
 'em up so mony a time. Ay, I'd been woonderin what had coom 
 to th' boy. I thowt he'd been goin wrang soomhow, or he'd ha 
 coom aw these weeks to see 'Lias an me. It's a poor sort o' 
 family he's got. That Hannah Grieve's a hard un, I'll uphowd 
 yo. Theer's a deal o' her fault in 't, yo may mak sure. ' 
 
 Then she went to give 'Lias some brandy — he lived on little 
 else now. He dropped asleep again, and, coming back to the 
 hearth, she consented to lie down before it while her friend 
 watched. Her failing frame was worn out with nursing and 
 want of rest, and she was soon asleep. 
 
 When Davy awoke the room was full of a chill daylight. As 
 he moved he felt himself stitf all over. The sensation brought 
 back memory, and the boy's whole being seemed to shrink 
 together. He burrowed first under his coverings out of the light,, 
 then suddenly he sat up in bed, in the shadow of the little stair- 
 case — or rather ladder — which led to the upper story, and looked 
 about him. 
 
 The good woman who had shared Margaret's watch was gone 
 back to her own home and children. Margaret had made up the 
 fire, tidied the room, and, at 'Lias's request, drawn up the blinds. 
 She had just given him some beef -tea and brandy, sponged his 
 face, and lifted him on his pillows. There seemed to be a revival 
 of life in the old man, death was for the moment driven back ; 
 and Margaret hung over him in an ecstasy, the two crooning 
 together. David could see her thin bent figure — the sharpened 
 delicacy of the emaciated face set in the rusty black net cap 
 which was tied under the chin, and fell in soft frills on the still 
 brown and silky hair. He saw her weaver's hand folded round 
 'Lias's, and he could hear 'Lias speaking in a weak thread of a 
 voice, but still sanely and rationally. It gave him a start to 
 catch some of the words — he had been so long accustomed to the 
 visionary 'Lias. 
 
 ' Have yo rested, Margaret ? ' 
 
 ' Ay, dear love, three hours an moor. Betsy James M^or here ; 
 she saw yo wanted for nowt. She's a gude creetur, ain't she, 
 'Lias ? ' 
 
 'Ay, but noan so good as my Margaret,' said the old man, 
 looking at her wistfully; ' But yo'll wear yorsel down, Margaret ,• 
 
CHAP. XI CHILDHOOD 119 
 
 'yo've had no rest for neets. Yo're alius toilin' and moilin', an 
 I'm no worth it, Margaret. ' 
 
 The tears gushed to the wife's eyes. It was only with the 
 nearness of death that 'Lias seemed to have found out his debt to 
 her. To both, her lifelong service had been the natural offering 
 of the lower to the higher ; she had not been "used to gratitude, 
 and she could not bear it. 
 
 ' Dear heart ! dear love ! ' David heard her say ; and then 
 there came to his half-reluctant ear caresses such as a mother 
 gives her child. He laid his head on his knees, trying to shut 
 them out. He wished with a passionate and bitter regret that he 
 had not been so many weeks without coming near these two 
 people ; and now 'Lias was going fast, and after to-day he would 
 see them both no more — for ever ? 
 
 Margaret heard him moving, and nodded back to him over her 
 shoulder. 
 
 ' Yo've slept well, Davy, — better nor I thowt yo would. Your 
 cloos are by yo — atwixt yo an t' stairs. ' 
 
 And there he found them, dry and brushed. He dressed 
 hastily and came forward to the fire. 'Lias recognised him 
 feebly, Margaret watching anxiously to see whether his fancies 
 would take him again. In this tension of death and parting his 
 visions had become almost more than she could bear. But 'Lias 
 lay quiet. 
 
 'Davy wor caught i' th' rain, and I gave him a bed,' she 
 explained again, and the old man nodded without a word. 
 
 Then as she prepared him a bowl of oatmeal she stood by the 
 fire giving the boy motherly advice. He must go back home, of 
 course, and never mind Hannah ; there would come a time when 
 he would get his chance like other people ; and he mustn't drink, 
 for, ' i' th' first place, drink wor a sad waste o' good wits,' and 
 David's were ' better'n most ; ' and in the second, ' it wor a sin 
 agen the Lord.' 
 
 David sat with his head drooped in his hand apparently lis- 
 tening. In reality, her gentle babble passed over him almost 
 unheeded. He was aching in mind and body ; his strong youth, 
 indeed, had but just saved him from complete physical collapse ; 
 for he had lain an indefinite time on the soaking moor, till misery 
 and despair had driven him to Margaret's door. But his moral 
 equilibrium was beginning to return, in virtue of a certain resolu- 
 tion, the one thing which now stood between him and the black 
 gulf of the night. He ate his porridge and then he got up. 
 
 ' I mun goo, Margaret.' 
 
 He would fain have thanked her, but the words choked in his 
 throat. 
 
 'Ay, soa yo mun, Davy,' said the little body briskly. 'If 
 theer's an onpleasant thing to do it's best doon quickly — yo mun 
 go back and do your duty. Coom and see us when yo're passin 
 again. An say good-bye to 'Lias. He's that wick this moritiii— - 
 ain't yo, 'Lias ? ' 
 
120 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i 
 
 And with a tender cheerfulness she ran across to 'Lias and 
 told him Davy was going. 
 
 'Good-bye, Davy, my lad, good-bye,' murmured the old man, 
 as he felt the boy's' strong fingers touching his. ' Have yo been 
 readin owt, Davy, since we saw yo? It's a long time, 
 Davy.' 
 
 ' No, nowt of ony account,' said David, looking away. 
 
 ' Ay, but yo mun keep it up. Coom when yo like ; I've not 
 mony books, but yo know yo can have 'em aw. I want noan o' 
 them now, do I, Marg'ret ? But I want for nowt— nowt. Dyin 's 
 long, but it's varra— varra peaceful. Margaret ! ' 
 
 And withdrawing his hand from Davy, 'Lias laid it in his 
 wife's with a long, long sigh. David left them so. He stole out 
 unperceived by either of them. 
 
 When he got outside he stood for a moment under the 
 sheltering sycamores and laid his cheek against the door. The 
 action contained all he could not say. 
 
 Then he sped along towards the farm. The sun was rising 
 through the autumn mists, striking on the gold of the chestnuts, 
 the red of tlie cherry trees. There were spaces of intense blue 
 among the rolling clouds, and between the storm past and the 
 storm' to come the whole moorland world was lavishly, garishly 
 bright. 
 
 He paused at the top of the pasture-fields to look at the farm. 
 Smoke was already rising from the chimney. Then Aunt Hannah 
 was up, and he must mind himself. He crept on under walls, 
 till he got to the back of the farmyard. Then he slipped in, ran 
 into the stable, and got an old coat of his left there the day 
 before. There was a copy of a Methodist paper lying near it. He 
 took it up and tore it across with passion. But his rage was 
 not so much with the paper. It was his own worthless, unstable, 
 miserable self he would have rent if he could. The wreck of 
 ideal hopes, the defacement of that fair image of itself which 
 every healthy youth bears about with it, could not have been 
 more pitifully expressed. 
 
 Then he looked round to see if there was anything else that 
 he could honestly take. Yes — an ash stick he had cut himself 
 a week or two ago. Nothing else — and there was Tibby moving 
 and beginning to bark in the cowhouse. 
 
 He ran across the road, and from a safe shelter in the fields on 
 the farther side he again looked back to the farm. There was 
 Louie's room, the blind still down. He thought of his blow of the 
 night before— of his promises to her. Aye, she would fret over 
 his going— he knew that — in her own wild -way. She would think 
 he had been a beast to her. So he had— so he had ! There surged 
 up in his mind inarticulate phrases of remorse, of self -excuse, as 
 though he were talking to her. 
 
 Some day he would come back and claim her. But when? 
 His buoyant self-dependence was all gone. It had nothing to do 
 with his present departure. That came simply from the fact that 
 
CHAP. XI CHILDHOOD 121 
 
 it was impossible for him to go on living in Kinder any longer — 
 he did not stop to analyse the whys and wherefores. 
 
 But suddenly a nervous horror of seeing anyone he knew, 
 now that the morning was advancing, startled him from his 
 hiding-place. He ran up towards the Scout again, so as to 
 make a long circuit round the Wigsons' farm. As he dis- 
 tinguished the walls of it a shiver of passion ran through the 
 young body. Then he struck off straight across the moors 
 towards Glossop. 
 
 One moment he stood on the top of Mardale Moor. On one 
 side of him was the Kinder valley, Needham Farm still showing 
 among its trees ; the white cataract of the Downfall cleaving the 
 dark wall of the Scout, and calling to the runaway in that voice 
 of storm he knew so well ; the Mermaid's Pool gleaming like an 
 eye in the moorland. On the other side were hollow after hollow, 
 town beyond town, each with its cap of morning smoke. There 
 was New Mills, there was Stockport, there in the far distance was 
 Manchester. 
 
 The boy stood a moment poised between the two worlds, his 
 ash-stick in his hand, the old coat wound round his arm. Then 
 at a bound he cleared a low stone wall beside him and ran down 
 the Glossop road. 
 
 Twelve hours later Keuben Grieve climbed the long hill to the 
 farm. His wrinkled face was happier than it had been for 
 months, and his thoughts were so pleasantly occupied that he 
 entirely failed to perceive, for instance, the behaviour of an 
 acquaintance, who stopped and started as he met him at the 
 entrance of the Kinder lane, made as though he would have spoken, 
 and, thinking better of it, walked on. Reuben — the mendacious 
 Reuben — had done very well with his summer stock — very well 
 indeed. And part of his earnings was now safely housed in the 
 hands of an old chapel friend, to whom he had confided them 
 under pledge of secrecy. But he took a curious, excited pleasure 
 in the thought of the ' poor mouth ' he was going to make to 
 Hannah. He was growing reckless in his passion for restitution 
 — always provided, however, that he was not called upon to brave 
 his wife openly. A few more such irregular savings, and, if an 
 opening turned up for David, he could pay the money and pack 
 off the lad before Hannah could look round. He could never do it 
 under her opposition, but he thought he could do it and take the 
 consequences — he thought he could. 
 
 He opened his own gate. There on the house doorstep stood 
 Hannah, whiter and grimmer than ever. 
 
 'Reuben Grieve,' she said quickly, 'your nevvy's run away. 
 An if yo doan't coom and keep your good-for-nothin niece in her 
 place, and make udder foak keep a civil tongue i' their head to 
 your wife, I'll leave your house this neet, as sure as I wor born a 
 Martin ! ' 
 
 Reuben stumbled into the house. There was a wild rush 
 
123 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE bk. i, ch. xi 
 
 downstairs, and Louie feU upon him, David's blow showing 
 ffhastly plain in her white quivering face. 
 
 ' Whar's Davy ? ' she said. ' Yo've got him !— he's hid soom- 
 ^here— yo know whar he is ! I'll not stay here if yo conno find 
 him ! It wor her fault '—and she threw out a shaking hand 
 towards her aunt—' she druv him out last neet— an Dawsons 
 took him in— an iverybody's cryin shame on her ! And if yo 
 doan't mak her find him— she knows where he is— I'll not stay in 
 this hole !— I'll kill her !— I'll burn th' house !— I'll— ' 
 
 The child stopped— panting, choked— beside herself. 
 
 Hannah made a threatening step, but at her gesture Reuben 
 sprang up, and seizing her by both wrists he looked at her from a 
 height, as a judge looks. Never had those dull ey^s met her so 
 before. 
 
 ' Woman ! ' he cried fiercely. ' Woman ! what ha yo doon wi 
 Sandy's son ? ' 
 
BOOK 11 
 
 YOUTH 
 
 & 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 A TALL youth carrying a parcel of books under his arm was hur- 
 rying along Market Place, Manchester. Beside him were covered 
 flower stalls bordering the pavement, in front of him the domed 
 mass of the Manchester Exchange, and on all sides he had to 
 push his way through a crowd of talking, chatfering, hurrying 
 hamanity. Presently he stopped at the door of a restaurant 
 bearing the idyllic and altogether remarkable name — there it 
 was in gilt letters over the door — of the ' Fruit and Flowers Par- 
 lour.' On the side post of the door a bill of fare was posted, 
 which the young man looked up and down with careful eyes. It 
 contained a strange medley of items in all tongues — 
 
 Marrow pie 
 
 Haricots a la Lune de Miel 
 
 Vol-au- Vent a la bonne Sante 
 
 Tomato fritters 
 
 Cheese 'Ticements 
 
 Salad saladorum 
 
 And at the bottom of the menu was printed in bold red cha- 
 racters, ' No meat, no disease. Ergo, no meat, no sin. Fellow- 
 citizens, leave your carnal foods, and try a more excellent way. 
 I.E Push the door and walk in. The Fruit and Flowers Parlour 
 invites everybody and overcharges nobody.' 
 
 The youth did not trouble, however, to read the notice. He 
 knew it and the ' Parlour ' behind it by heart. But he moved 
 away, pondering the menu with a smile. 
 
 In his amused abstraction — at the root of which lay the appe- 
 tite of eighteen — he suddenly ran into a passer-by, who stumbled 
 against a shop window with an exclamation of pain. The youth's 
 attention was attracted and he stopped awkwardly. 
 
 ' People of your height, young man, should look before them,' 
 said the victim, rubbing what seemed to be a deformed leg, while 
 his lips paled a little. 
 
 '.Mr. Ancrum,' cried the other, amazed. 
 
 ' Davy ! ' 
 
 The two looked at each other. Then Mr. Ancrum gripped 
 the lad's arm. 
 
 'Help me along, Davy. It's only a bruise. It'll go off. 
 Where are you going ? ' 
 
 ' Up Piccadilly way with a parcel,' said Davy, looking askance 
 
126 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 at his companion's nether man. 'Did I knock your bad leg, 
 sir?' 
 
 ' Oh no, nothing — never mind. Well now, Davy, this is queer 
 — decidedly queer. Four years ! — and we run against each other 
 in Market Street at last. Tell me the truth, Davy — have you 
 long ago given me up as a man who could make promises to a 
 lad in difficulties and forget 'em as soon as he was out of sight? 
 Say it out, my boy.' 
 
 David flushed and looked down at his companion with some 
 embarrassment. Their old relation of minister and pupil had 
 left a deep mark behind it. Moreover, in the presence of that 
 face of Mr. Ancrum's, a long, thin, slightly twisted face, with the 
 stamp somehow of a tragic sincerity on the eyes and mouth, it 
 was difficult to think as slightingly of his old friend as he had 
 done for a good while past, apparently with excellent reason. 
 
 ' 1 supposed there was something the matter, ' he blurted out 
 at last. 
 
 ' Well, never mind, Davy,' said the other, smiling sadly. ' We 
 can't talk here in this din. But now I've got you, I keep you. 
 Where are you ? ' 
 
 'I'm in Half Street, sir — Purcell's, the bookseller.' 
 
 ' Don't know him. I never go into a shop. I have no money. 
 Are you apprentice there ? ^ 
 
 ' Well, there was no binding. I'm assistant. I do a lot of 
 business one way and another, buying and selling both.' 
 
 ' How long have you been in Manchester ? ' 
 
 'Four years, sir.' 
 
 The minister looked amazed. 
 
 ' And I have been here, off and on, for the last three. How 
 have we missed each other all that time ? I made inquiries at 
 Clough End, when — ah, well, no matter ; but it was too late. 
 You had decamped, no one could tell me anything.' 
 
 David walked on beside his companion, silent and awkward. 
 The explanation seemed a lame one. Mr. Ancrum had left 
 Clough End in May, promising to look out for a place for the lad 
 at once, and to let him know. Six whole months elapsed betv/een 
 that promise and David's own departure. Yes, it was lame; but 
 it was so long ago, and so many things had happened since, that 
 it did not signify. Only he did not somehow feel much effusion 
 in meeting his old friend and playfellow again. 
 
 ' Getting on, Davy ? ' said Ancrum presently, looking the lad 
 up and down. 
 
 David made a movement of the shoulders which the minister 
 noticed. It was both more free and more graceful than ordinary 
 English gesture. It reawakened in Ancrum at once that im- 
 pression of something alien and unusual which both David and 
 his sister had often produced in him while they were still chil- 
 dren. 
 
 'I don't know,' said the boy slowly ; and then, after a hesita- 
 tion or two, fell silent. 
 
 1 
 
CHAP. I YOUTH 127 
 
 'Well, look here,' said Ancrum, stopping short; 'this won't 
 do for talk, as I said before ; but I must know all about you, and 
 I must tell you what I can about myself. I lodge in Mortimer 
 Road, you know, up Fallowfield way. You can get there by 
 tram in twenty minutes ; when will you come and see me ? To- 
 night ? ' 
 
 The lad thought a moment. 
 
 ' Would Wednesday night do, sir ? I — I believe I'm going to 
 the music to-night.' 
 
 'What, to the "Elijah," in the Free Trade Hall? Appoint 
 me a place to meet — we'll go together — and you shall come home 
 to supper with me afterwards.' 
 
 David flushed and looked straight before him. 
 
 'I promised to take two young ladies,' he said, after a 
 moment, abruptly. 
 
 ' Oh ! ' said Mr. Ancrum, laughing. ' I apologise. Well, 
 Wednesday night, then. — Don't you forget, Davy— half-past 
 seven? Done, i^om-^^ee/i, Mortimer Road. Good-bye.' 
 
 And the minister turned and retraced his steps towards Mar- 
 ket Place. He walked slowly, like one much preoccupied, and 
 might have run into fresh risks but for the instinctive perception 
 of most passers-by that he was not a person to be hustled. Sud- 
 denly he laughed out — thinking of David and his ' young ladies,' 
 and comparing the lad's admission with his former attitude 
 towards 'gells.' Well, time had but wrought its natural work. 
 What a brilliant noticeable creature altogether — how unlike the 
 ordinary run of north-country lads ! But that he had been from 
 the beginning — the strain of some nimbler blood had always 
 shown itself. 
 
 Meanwhile, David made his way up Piccadilly — did some 
 humourist divert himself, in days gone by, with dropping a 
 shower of London names on Manchester streets ? — and deposited 
 his parcel. Then the great clock of the Exchange struck twelve, 
 and the Cathedral followed close upon it, the sounds swaying 
 and vibrating above the crowds hurrying through Market Street. 
 It was a damp October day. Above, the sky was hidden by a 
 dark canopy of cloud and smoke ; the Cathedral on its hill rose 
 iron-black above the black streets and river ; black mud en- 
 crusted all the streets, and bespattered those that walked in them. 
 Nothing more dreary than the smoke-grimed buildings on either 
 hand, than the hideous railway station across the bridge, or the 
 mud-sprinkled hoardings covered with flaring advertisements, 
 which led up to the bridge, could be well imagined. Manchester 
 was at its darkest and grimmest. 
 
 But as David Grieve walked back along Market Street his 
 heart danced within him. Neither mud nor darkness, neither 
 the squalor of the streets, nor the penetrating damp of the air, 
 affected him at all. The crowd, the rush of life about him, the 
 gas in the shops, the wares on which it shone, the endless faces 
 passing him, the sense of hurry, of business, of quick living — 
 
 ■^ 
 
128 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 he saw and felt notlaing else ; and to these his youth was all 
 atune. 
 
 Arrived in Market Place again he made his way with alacrity 
 to the 'Parlour,' For it was dinner time; he had a free half- 
 hour, and nine times out of ten he spent it at the ' Parlour.' 
 
 He walked in, put his hat on its accustomed peg, took his 
 seat at a table near the door, and looked round for some one. 
 The low widespreading room was well filled, mostly with clerks 
 and shopmen ; the gas was lit because of the darkness outside, 
 and showed off the gay panels on the walls filled with fruit and 
 flower subjects, for which Adrian O'Connor Lomax, commonly 
 called 'Daddy,' the owner of the restaurant, had given a com- 
 mission to some students at the Mechanics' Institute, and whereof 
 he was inordinately proud. At the end of the room near the 
 counter was a table occupied by about half a dozen young men, 
 all laughing and talking noisily, and beside them — shouting, 
 gesticulating, making dashes, now for one, now for another — 
 was a figure, which David at once set himself to watch, his chin 
 balanced on his hand, his eyes dancing. It was the thin tall 
 figure of an oldish man in a long frock-coat, which opened in 
 front over a gaily flowered silk waistcoat. On the bald crown 
 of his head he wore a black skull-cap, below which certain gro- 
 tesque and scanty tails of fair hair, carefully brushed, fell to his 
 shoulders. His face was long and sharply pointed, and the 
 surface of it bronzed and wrinkled by long exposure, out of all 
 likeness to human skin. The eyes were weirdly prominent and 
 blue ; the gestures had the deliberate extravagance of an actor ; 
 and the whole man recalled a wizard of pantomime. 
 
 David had hardly time to amuse himself with the 'chaflBng' 
 of Daddy, which was going on, and which went on habitually at 
 the Parlour from morning till night, when Daddy perceived a 
 new-comer. 
 
 He turned round sharp upon his heels, survej'Cd the room 
 with the frown of a general. 
 
 ' Ah ! ' he said with a theatrical air, as he made out the lad at 
 the further table. ' Gentlemen, I let you off for the present,' 
 and waving his hand to them with an indulgent self-importance, 
 which provoked a roar of laughter, he tarned and walked down 
 the restaurant, with a quick swaying gait, to where David 
 sat. 
 
 David made room for him in a smiling silence. Lomax sat 
 down, and the two looked at each other. 
 
 ' Davy,' said Daddy severely, ' why weren't you here yester- 
 day?' 
 
 ' When did you begin opening on Sundays, Daddy ? ' said 
 the youth, attacking a portion of marrow pie, which had just 
 been laid before him, his gay curious eyes still wandering over 
 Daddy's costume, which was to-day completed by a large dahlia 
 in the buttonhole, as grotesque as the rest. 
 
 ' Ah bedad, but I'm losing my memory entirely ; — and you 
 
CHAP. I YOUTH 139 
 
 know it, you varmint. Well then, it was Saturday you weren't 
 here.' 
 
 'You're about right there. I was let off early, and got a 
 walk out Kamsbottom way with a fellow. I hadn't stretched 
 my legs for two months, and— I'll confess to you. Daddy— that 
 when we got down from the moor, I was — overtaken— as the 
 [>ioiLs people say— by a mutton chop.' 
 
 The lad looked up at him laughing. Daddy surveyed him 
 with chagrin. 
 
 ' I knew you were a worthless lukewarm sort of a creature. 
 Flesh-eating 's as bad as drink for them that have got it in 'em. 
 It'll come out. Well, go your ways ! You'll never be Prime 
 Minister.' 
 
 ' Don't distress yourself. Daddy. As long as marrow pies are 
 good, I shall eat *'em — you may count on that. What's that 
 cheese affair down there ? ' and he pointed towards the last item 
 but one in the bill of fare. Instead of answering, the old man 
 turned on his seat, and called to one of the waitresses near. In 
 a second David had a ' Cheese 'Ticement' before him, at which he 
 peered curiously. Daddy watched him, not without some signs 
 of nervousness. 
 
 ' Daddy,' said David, calmly looking up, ' when I last saw this 
 article it was called " Welsh rabbit." ' 
 
 'Davy, you've no soul for fine distinctions,' said the other 
 hastily. ' Change the subject. How have my dear brother-in- 
 law and you been hitting it off lately ? ' 
 
 David went on with his ' 'Ticement,' the corners of his mouth 
 twitching, for a minute or so, then he raised his head and slowly 
 shook it, looking Daddy in the face. 
 
 ' We shall boar up when we say good-bye. Daddy, and I don't 
 think that crisis is far off. It would have come long ago, only I 
 do happen to know a provoking deal more about books than any 
 assistant he ever had before. Last week I picked him up a copy 
 of "Bells and Pomegranates" for one and nine, and he sold it 
 next day for two pound sixteen. There's business for you, 
 Daddy. That put off our breach at least a fortnight, but unless 
 I discover a first folio of Shakespeare for sixpence between now 
 and then, I don't see what's to postpone the agony after that — 
 and if I did I should probably speculate in it myself. No, 
 Daddy, it's coming to the point, as the tiger said when he 
 reached the last joint of the cow's tail. And it's your fault.' 
 
 ' My fault, Davy,' said Lomax, half tremulous, half delighted, 
 drawing a chair close up to the table that he might lose nothing 
 of the youth's confidences. ' What d'ye mean by that, ye spal- 
 peen ? ' 
 
 ' Well, wasn't it you took me to the Hall of Science, Daddy, 
 and couldn't keep a quiet tongue in your head about it after- 
 wards ? Wasn't it you lent me the " Secularist," which got me 
 into the worst rumpus of the season ? Oh, Daddy, you're a bad 
 unl' 
 
130 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 And the handsome lad leant back in his chair, stretching his 
 long legs and studying Daddy with twinkling eyes. As for 
 Lomax, he received the onslaught with a curious mixture of 
 expressions, in which a certain malicious pleasure, crossed by an 
 uneasy sense of responsibility, was the most prominent. He sat 
 drumming on the table, his straggling beard falling forward on 
 to his chest, his mouth pursing itself up. At last he threw back 
 his head with energy. 
 
 ' I'll not excuse myself, Davy ; you're well out of it. You'll 
 be a great man yet — always provided you can manage yourself in 
 the matter of flesh meat. It was to come one way or the other — 
 you couldn't put up much longer with such a puke-stocking as 
 my precious brother-in-law. (That's one of the great points of 
 Shakespeare, Davy, my lad— perhaps you haven't noticed it — 
 you get such a ruck of bad names out of him for the asking ! 
 Puke-stocking is good — real good. If it wasn't made for a 
 sanctimonious hypocrite of a Baptist like Purcell it ought to 
 have been.) And " Spanish-pouch " too ! Oh, I love " Spanish- 
 pouch " ! When I've called a man "Spanish-pouch," I'm the 
 better for it, Davy — the bile's relieved.' 
 
 ' Thank you. Daddy ; I'll remember the receipt. I say, were 
 you ever in Purcell's shop ? ' 
 
 ' Purceirs shop ? Why, of course I was, you varmint ! Wasn't 
 it there I met my Isabella, his sister ? Ah, the poor thing ! He 
 led her a life; and when I was his assistant I took sides with her 
 — that was the beginning of it all. At first we hadn't got on so 
 badly — I had a pious fit on myself in those days — but one day at 
 tea, I had been making free— taking Isabella's part. There had 
 been a neighbour there, and the laugh had been against him. 
 Well, after tea, we marched back to the shop, and says he to me, 
 as black as thunder, "I'm quite willing, Lomax, to be your 
 Christian brother in here : when we're in society I'd have you 
 remember it's different. You should know your place." "Oh, 
 should I ? " says I. (Isabella had been squeezing my hand under 
 the table and I didn't care what I said.) " Well, you'd better find 
 
 some one as will, and be d d to your Christian brotherhood." 
 
 And I took my cap up and marched out, leaving him struck a 
 pillar of salt with surprise, and that mad ! — for we were in the 
 middle of issuing the New Year's catalogue, and he'd left most 
 of it to me. And three weeks after — ' 
 
 Daddy rose quivering with excitement, pui his thumbs into 
 his waistcoat pocket, ancl bent over the back of his chair towards 
 David. As he stood there, on tip-toe, the flaps of the long coat 
 falling back from him like wings, his skull-cap slightly awry, two 
 red spots on either v/rinkled cheek, and every feature of the 
 sharp brown face alive with the joy of his long-past vengeance, 
 he was like some strange perching l)ird. 
 
 ' — Three weeks after, Davy, I married my Isabella under his 
 puritanical nose, at the chapel across the way ; and the bit of 
 spite in it — bedad !— it was like mustard to beef. (Pish 1 what am 
 
CHAP. I YOUTH 131 
 
 I about !) And I set up shop almost next door to the chapel, and 
 took the trade out of his mouth, and enjoyed myself finely for 
 six months. At the end of that time lie gave out that the neigh- 
 bourhood was too "low " for him, and he moved up town. And 
 though I've been half over the world since, I've never ceased to 
 keep an eye on him, I've had a finger in more pies of his than 
 he thinks for ! ' 
 
 And Daddy drew himself up, pressing his hands against his 
 sides, his long frame swelling out, as it seemed, with sudden 
 passion. David watched him with a look half sympathetic, half 
 satirical. 
 
 ' I don't see that he did you much harm. Daddy.' 
 
 ' Harm ! ' said the little man, irascibly. ' Harm ! I must say 
 you're uncommon slow at gripping a situation, Davy. I'd my 
 wife's score to settle, too, I tell you, as well as my own. He'd 
 sat on his poor easy-going sister till she hadn't a feature left. I 
 knew he had. He's made up of all the mean vices — and at the 
 same time, if you were to hear him at a prayer meeting, you'd 
 think that since Enoch went up to heaven the wrong way, the 
 world didn't happen to have been blessed with another saint to 
 match Tom Purcell.' And, stirred by his own eloquence. Daddy 
 looked down frowning on the youth before him. 
 
 'What made you give up the book-trade, Daddy?' asked 
 David, with a smile. 
 
 It was like the pricking of a bladder. Daddy collapsed in a 
 moment. Sitting down again, he began to arrange his coat 
 elaborately over his knees, as though to gain time. 
 
 'David, you're an inquisitive varmint,' he said at last, looking 
 up askance at his companion, ' Some one's been telling you tales, 
 by the look of you. Look here — if Tom Purcell's a blathering 
 hypocrite, that is not the same thing precisely as saying that 
 Adrian O'Connor Lomax is a perfect specimen of the domestic 
 virtues. Never you mind, my boy, what made me give up book- 
 selling. I've chucked so many things overboard since, that its 
 hardly worth inquiring. Try any trade you like and Daddy '11 
 be able to give you some advice in it— that's the only thing that 
 concerns you. Well now, tell me — ' and he turned round and 
 put his elbows on the table, leaning over to David — ^ When are 
 you coming away, and what are your prospects ? ' 
 
 ' I told you about a fortnight would see it out, Daddy. And 
 there's a little shop in — But it's no good. Daddy. You can't 
 keep secrets.' 
 
 The old man turned purple, drew himself up, and looked 
 fiercely at David from behind his spectacles. But in a second 
 his mood changed and he stretched his hand slowly out across 
 the table. 
 
 ' On the honour of a Lomax,' he said solemnly. 
 
 There was a real dignity about the absurd action which melted 
 David, He shook the hand and repented him. Leaning over he 
 whispered some information in Daddy's ear. Daddy beamed. 
 
132 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 And in the midst of the superfluity of nods and winks that fol- 
 lowed David called for his bill. 
 
 The action recalled Daddy to his own affairs, and he looked 
 on complacently while David paid, 
 
 ' Ton my word, Davy, I can hardly yet believe in my own 
 genius. Where else, my boy, in this cotton-spinning hole, would 
 you find a dinner like that for sixpence ? Am I a benefactor to 
 the species, sir, or am I not ? " 
 ■ ' Looks like it. Daddy, by the help of Miss Dora.' 
 
 'Aye, aye,' said the old man testily, — 'Til not deny that 
 Dora's useful to the business. But the inspiration, Davy, 's all 
 mine. You want genius, my boy, to make a tomfool of yourself 
 like this,' and he looked himself proudly up and down. ' Twenty 
 customers a week come here for nothing in the world but to see 
 what new rigs Daddy may be up to. The invention — the happy 
 ideas, man, I throw into one day of this place would stock twenty 
 ordinary businesses.' 
 
 ' All the same. Daddy, I've tasted Welsh rabbit before,' said 
 David drily, putting on his hat. 
 
 ' I scorn your remark, sir. It argues a poorly furnished 
 mind. Show me anything new in this used-up world, eh ? but 
 for the name and the dishing up — Well; good-bye, Davy, and 
 good luck to you ! ' 
 
 David made his way across Hanging Ditch to a little row of 
 houses bearing the baldly appropriate name of Half Street. It 
 ran along the eastern side of the Cathedral close. First came 
 the houses, small, irregular, with old beams and projections here 
 and there, then a paved footway, then the railings round the 
 close. In full view of the windows of the street rose the six- 
 teenth-century church which plays as best it can the part of 
 Cathedral to Manchester. Round it stretched a black and desolate 
 space paved with tombstones. Not a blade of grass broke the 
 melancholy of those begrimed and time-worn slabs. The rain 
 lay among them in pools, squalid buildings overlooked them, and 
 the church, with its manifest inadequacy to a fine site and a great 
 city, did but little towards overcoming the mean and harsh im- 
 pression made — on such a day especially — by its surroundings. 
 
 David opened the door of a shop about halfway up the row. 
 A bell rang sharply, and as he shut the outer door behind him, 
 another at the back of the shop opened hastily, and a young girl 
 came in. 
 
 ' Mr, Grieve, father's gone out to Eccles to see some books a 
 gentleman wants him to buy. If Mr. Stephens comes, you're to 
 tell him father's found him two or three more out of the list he 
 sent. You know where all his books are put together, if he wants 
 to see them, father says.' 
 
 'Yes, thank you. Miss Purcell, I do. No other message?' 
 
 ' No.' The speaker lingered. ' What time do we start for the 
 music to-night ? But you'll be down to tea ? ' 
 
CHAP. I YOUTH 133 
 
 ' Certainly, if you and Miss Dora don't want it to yourselves.' 
 The speaker smiled. He was leaning on the counter, while the 
 girl stood behind it. 
 
 ' Oh dear, no ! ' said Miss Purcell with a half-pettish gesture. 
 ' I don't know what to talk to Dora about now. She thinks of 
 nothing but St. Damian's and her work. It's worse than father. 
 And, of course, T know she hasn't much opinion of me. Indeed, 
 she's always telling me so — well, not exactly — but she lets me 
 guess fast enough.' » 
 
 The speaker put up two small hands to straighten some of 
 the elaborate curls and twists with which her pretty head was 
 crowned. There was a little consciousness in the action. The 
 thought of her cousin had evidently brought with it the 
 thought of some of those things of which the stern Dora dis- 
 approved. 
 
 David looked at the brown hair and the slim fingers as he was 
 meant to look at them. Yet in his smiling good humour there 
 ivas not a trace of bashfulness or diflfidence. He was perfectly at 
 rlis ease, with something of a proud self-reliant consciousness in 
 every movement ; nothing in his manner could have reminded a 
 spectator of the traditional apprentice making timid love to his 
 master's daughter. 
 
 'I've seen you stand up to her though,' he said laughing. 
 ' It's like all pious people. Doesn't it strike you as odd that they 
 should never be content with being pious for themselves ? ' 
 
 He looked at her with bright sarcastic eyes. 
 
 ' Oh, I know what you mean ! ' she said with an instant change 
 of tone ; ' I didn't mean anything of the sort. I think it's 
 shocking of you to go to that place on Sundays— so there, Mr. 
 Grieve.' 
 
 She threw herself back defiantly against the books which 
 walled the shop, her arms folded before her. The attitude 
 showed the long throat, the rounded bust, and the slender waist 
 compressed witli some evident rigour into a close-fitting brown 
 dress. That Miss Purcell thought a great deal of the fashion of 
 her hair, the style of her bodices, and the size of her waist was 
 clear ; that she was conscious of thinking about them to good 
 purpose was also plain. But on the whole the impression of 
 artificiality, of something over-studied and over-done which the 
 first sight of her genei-ally awakened, was soon, as a rule, lost in 
 anotlier more attractive— iu one of light, tripping youth, per- 
 fectly satisfied with itself and with the world. 
 
 'I don't think you know much about the place,' he said 
 quietly, still smiling. 
 
 She flushed, her foolish little sense of natural superiority to 
 ' the assistant ' outraged again, as it had been outraged already 
 a hundred times since she and David Grieve had met. 
 
 ' I know quite as much as anybody need know— any respect- 
 able person — ' she maintained angrily. ' It's a low, disgraceful 
 place — and they talk wicked nonsense. Everyone says so. It 
 
134 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 doesn't matter a bit where Uncle Lomax goes — he's mad — but it 
 is a shame he should lead other people astray.' 
 
 She was much pleased with her own harangue, and stood 
 there frowning on him, her sharp little chin in the air, one foot 
 beating the ground. 
 
 'Well, yes, really,' said David in a reflective tone; 'one 
 would think Miss Dora had her hands full at home, without — ' 
 
 He looked up, significantly, smiling. Lucy Purcell was enraged 
 with him— with his hypocritical sympathy as to her uncle's mis- 
 doings — his avoidance of his own crime. 
 
 ' It's not uncle at all, it's you ! ' she cried, with more logic 
 than appeared. ' I tell you, Mr. Grieve, father won't stand it.' 
 The young man drew himself up from the counter. 
 ' No,' he said with great equanimity, ' I suppose not.' 
 And taking up a parcel of books from the counter he turned 
 away. Lucy, flurried and pouting, called after him. 
 ' Mr. Grieve ! ' 
 'Yes.' 
 
 ' I— I didn't mean it. I hope you won't go. I know father's 
 hard. He's hard enough with me.' 
 
 And she raised her hands to her flushed face. David was 
 terribly afraid she was going to cry. Several times since the 
 orphan girl of seventeen had arrived from school three months 
 before to take her place in her father's house, had she been on 
 the point of confiding her domestic woes to David Grieve. But 
 though under the terms of his agreement with her father, which 
 included one meal in the back parlour, the assistant and she 
 were often thrown together, he had till now instinctively held 
 her aloof. His extraordinary good looks and masterful energetic 
 ways had made an impression on her schoolgirl mind from the 
 beginning. But for him she had no magnetism whatever. The 
 little self-conceited creature knew it, or partially knew it, and 
 smarted under it. 
 
 Now, he was just beginning an awkward sentence, when there 
 was a sound at the outer door. With another look at him, half 
 shy, half appealing, Lucy fled. Conscious of a distinct feeling 
 of relief, David went to attend to the customer. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 The customer was soon content and went out again into the 
 rain. David mounted a winding iron stair which connected the 
 downstairs shop with an upper room in which a large proportion 
 of the books were stored. It was a long, low, rambling place 
 made by throwing together all the little bits of rooms on the 
 first floor of the old house. One corner of it had a special 
 attraction for David. It was the corner where, ranged partly on 
 the floor, partly on the shelves which ran under the windows, 
 
CHAP. II YOUTH 135 
 
 lay the collection of books that Purcell had been making for his 
 customer, Mr. Stephens. 
 
 Out of that collection Purcell's assistant had extracted a very- 
 varied entertainment. In the first place it had amused him to 
 watch the laborious pains and 'anxiety with which his pious 
 employer had gathered together the very sceptical works of 
 which Mr. Stephens was in want, showing a knowledge of con- 
 tents, and editions, and out-of-the-way profanities, under the 
 stimulus of a paying customer, which drew many a sudden laugh 
 from David when he was left to think of it in private. 
 
 In the next place the books themselves had been a perpetual 
 feast to him for weeks, enjoyed all the more keenly because of 
 the secrecy in which it had to be devoured. The little gathering 
 represented with fair completeness the chief books of the French 
 ' philosophers,' both in the original French, and in those English 
 translations of which so plentiful a crop made its appearance 
 during the fifty years before and after 1800. There, for instance, 
 lay the seventy volumes of Voltaire. Close by was an imperfect 
 copy of the Encyclopaedia, which Mr. Stephens was getting cheap ; 
 on the other si.de a motley gathering of Diderot and Rousseau ; 
 while Holbach's 'System of Nature,' and Helvetius 'On the 
 Mind,' held their rightful place among the rest. 
 
 Through these books, then, which had now been on the pre- 
 mises for some time— Mr. Stephens being a person of uncertain 
 domicile, and unable as yet to find them a home — David had been 
 freely ranging. Whenever Purcell was out of the way and cus- 
 tomers were slack, he invariably found his way to this spot in the 
 upper room. There, with his elbows on the top of the bookcase 
 which ran under the window, and a book in front of him — or 
 generally two, the original French and a translation—he had 
 read Voltaire's tales, a great deal of the Encyclopaedia, a certain 
 amount of Diderot, for whom he cherished a passionate admira- 
 tion, and a much smaller smattering of Rousseau. At the present 
 moment he was grappling with the ' Dictionnaire Philosophique,' 
 and the ' Systeme de la Nature,' fortified in both cases oy English 
 versions. 
 
 The gloom of the afternoon deepened, and the increasing rain 
 had thinned the streets so much that during a couple of hours 
 David had but three summonses from below to attend to. For 
 the rest of the time he was buried in the second volume of the 
 'Dictionnaire Philosophique,' now skipping freely, now chewing 
 and digesting, his eyes fixed vacantly on the darkening church 
 outside. Above all, the article on Contradictions had absorbed 
 and delighted him. There are few tones in themselves so fasci- 
 nating to the nascent literary sense as this mock humility tone of 
 Voltaire's. And in David's case all that passionate sense of a 
 broken bubble and a scattered dream, which had haunted him so 
 long after he left Kinder, had entered into and helped forward 
 his infatuation with his new masters. They brought him an 
 indescribable sense of freedom — omniscience almost. 
 
136 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 For instance :- 
 
 * We must carefully distinguisli in all writings, and especially in 
 the sacred books, between real and apparent contradictions. Ventur 
 ous critics have supposed a contradiction existed in that passage of 
 Scripture which narrates how Moses changed all the waters of Egypt 
 into blood, and how immediately after\wirds the magicians of Pharaoh 
 did the same thing, the book of Exodus allowing no interval at all 
 between the miracle of Moses and the magical operation of the en 
 chanters. Certainly it seems at first sight impossible that these 
 magicians should change into blood what was already blood ; but 
 this difficulty may be avoided by supposing that Moses had allowed* 
 the waters to reassume their proper nature, in order to give time to 
 Pharaoh to recover himself. This supposition is all the more plan 
 sible, seeing that the text, if it does not favour it expressly, is not 
 opposed to it. 
 
 ' The same sceptics ask how when all the horses had been killed 
 by the hail in the sixth plague Pharaoh could pursue the Jews with 
 cavalry. But this contradiction is not even apparent, because the 
 hail, which killed all the horses in the fields, could not fall upon 
 those which were in the stables. ' 
 
 And so on through a long series of paragraphs, leading at 
 last to matters specially dear to the wit of Voltaire, the contra- 
 dictions between St. Luke and St. Matthew— in the story of the 
 census of Quirinus, of the Magi, of the massacre of the Innocents, 
 and what not — and culminating in this innocent conclusion: — 
 
 * After all it is enough that God should have deigned to reveal 
 to us the principal mysteries of the faith, and that He should 
 have instituted a Church in the course of time to explain them. All 
 these contradictions, so often and so bitterly brought up against the 
 Gospels, are amply noticed by the vvisost commentators ; far from 
 harming each other, one explains another ; they lend each other a 
 mutual support, both in the concordance and in the harmony of the 
 four Gospels ' 
 
 David threw back his head with a laugh which came from the 
 very depths of him. Then, suddenly, he was conscious of the 
 church standing sombrely without, spectator as it seemed of his 
 thoughts and of his mirth. Instantly his youth met the challenge 
 by a rise of passionate scorn ! What! a hundred years since 
 Voltaire, and mankind still went on believing in all these follies 
 and fables, in the ten plagues, in Balaam's ass, m the walls of 
 Jericho, in miraculous births, and Magi, and prophetic stars !— 
 in everything that tlie mockery of the eighteenth century had 
 slain a thousand times over. Ah, well !— Voltaire knew as well 
 as anybody that superstition is perennial, insatiable— a disease 
 and weakness of the human mind which seems to be inherent 
 and ineradicable. And there rose in the boy's memory lines he 
 had oj)ened upon that morning in a small Elizabethan folio he 
 
CHAP. IT YOUTH 137 
 
 had been cataloguing with much pains as a rarity— lines which 
 had stuck in his mind — 
 
 Vast superstition ! glorious style of weakness. 
 Sprung from the deep disquiet of man's passion 
 To dissolution and despair of Nature ! — 
 
 He flung them out at the dark mass of building opposite, as 
 though he were his namesake flinging at Goliath. Only a few 
 months before that great church had changed masters — had 
 passed from the hands of an aristocratic and inaccessible bishop 
 of the old school into those of a man rich in all modern ideas and 
 capacities, full of energy and enthusiasm, a scholar and adminis- 
 trator both. And he believed all those absurdities, David wanted 
 to know? Impossible! No honest man could, thought the lad 
 defiantly, with the rising colour of crude and vehement feeling, 
 when his attention had been once challenged, and he had deve- 
 loped mind enough to know what the challenge meant. 
 
 Except, perhaps. Uncle Eeuben and Dora Lomax, and people 
 like that. He stood thinking and staring out of window, one 
 idea leading to another. The thought of Reuben brought with it 
 a certain softening of mood — the softening of memory and old 
 association. Yes, he would like to see Uncle Reuben again — ex- 
 plain to him, perhaps, that old story — so old, so distant ! — of his 
 running away. Well, he would see him again, as soon as he got 
 a place of his own, which couldn't be long now, whether Purcell 
 gave him the sack or not. Instinctively, he felt for that inner 
 pocket, which held his purse and his savings-bank book. Yes, he 
 was near freedom now, whatever happened ! 
 
 Then it occurred to him that it was unlucky he should have 
 stumbled across Mr. Ancrum just at this particular juncture. 
 The minister, of course, had friends at Clough End still. And 
 he, David, didn't want Louie down upon him just yet — not just 
 yet— for a month or two. 
 
 Tlien the smile which had begun to play about the mouth sud- 
 denly broadened into a merry triumph. When Louie knew all 
 about him and his contrivances these last four j^ears, w^ouldn't 
 she be mad ! If she were to appear at this moment, he could tell 
 her that she wore a pink dress at the ' wake ' last week, — when 
 she was at chapel last, — what young men were supposed to be 
 courting her since the summer, and a number of other interest- 
 ing particulars — 
 
 ' Mr. Grieve ! Tea ! ' 
 
 His face changed. Reluctantly shutting his book and putting 
 it into its place, he took his way to the staircase. 
 
 As David opened the swing door leading to the Purcells' par- 
 lour at the back of the shop he heard Miss Purcell saying in a 
 mournful voice, ' It's no good, Dora ; not a haporth of good. 
 Father won't let me. I might as well have gone to prison as 
 come home.' 
 
138 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 The assistant emerged into the bright gaslight of the little 
 room as she spoke. There was another girl sitting beside Lucy, 
 who got up with a shy manner and shook hands with him. 
 
 'Will you take your tea, Mr. Grieve?' said Lucy, with a pet- 
 tish sigh, handing it to him, and then throwing herself vehe- 
 mently back in her hostess's chair, behind the tea tray. She let 
 her hands hang over the arms of it — the picture of discontent. 
 The gaslight showed her the possessor of bright brown eyes, 
 under fine brows slenderly but clearly marked, of a pink and 
 white skin slightly freckled, of a small nose quite passable, but 
 no ways remarkable, of a dainty little chin, and a thin-lipped 
 mouth, slightly raised at one corner, and opening readily over 
 some irregular but very white teeth. Except for tlie eyes and 
 eyebrows the features could claim nothing much in the way of 
 beauty. Yet at this moment of seventeen — thanks to her clear 
 colours, her small thinness, and the beautiful hair so richly piled 
 about her delicate head — Lucy Purcell was undeniably a pretty 
 girl, and since her arrival in Manchester she had been much 
 more blissfully certain of the fact than she had ever succeeded in 
 being while she was still under the repressive roof of Miss Pym's 
 boarding-school for young ladies, Pestalozzi House, Blackburn. 
 
 David sat down, perceiving that something had gone very 
 wrong, but not caring to inquire into it. His whole interest in 
 the Purcell household was, in fact, dying out. He would not be 
 concerned with it much longer. 
 
 So that, instead of investigating Miss Purcell's griefs, he 
 asked her cousin whether it had not come on to rain. The girl 
 opposite replied in a quiet, musical voice. She was plainly 
 dressed in a black hat and jacket ; but the hat had a little bunch 
 of cowslips to light it up, and the jacket was of an ordinary 
 fashionable cut. There was nothing particularly noticeable about 
 the face at first sight, except its soft fairness and the gentle 
 steadfastness of the ^eyes. The movements were timid, the 
 speech often hesitating. Yet the impression which, on a first 
 meeting, this timidity was apt to leave on a spectator was very 
 seldom a lasting one. David's idea of Miss Lomax, for instance, 
 had radically changed during the three months since he had 
 made acquaintance with her. 
 
 Rain, it appeared, had begun, and there must be umbrellas 
 and waterproofs for the evening's excursion. As the two others 
 were settling at what time David Grieve and Lucy should call for 
 Dora in Market Place, Lucy woke up from a dream, and broke 
 in upon them, 
 
 ' And, Dora, you know, I could have worn that dress with the 
 narrow ribbons I showed you last week. It's all there— upstairs 
 — in the cupboard — not a crease in it ! ' 
 
 Dora could not help laughing, and the laugh sent a charming 
 light into her grey, veiled eyes. The tone was so inexpressibly 
 doleful, the manner so childish. David smiled too, and his eyes 
 and Dora's met in a sort of friendly understanding— the first 
 
CHAP. II YOCTTH 139 
 
 time, perhaps, they had so met. Then they both turned tl^em- 
 selves to the task of consolation. The assistant inquired what 
 was the matter. 
 
 ' I wanted her to go with me to the dance at the Mechanics' 
 Institute next week, 'said Dora. 'Mrs. Alderman Head would 
 have taken us both. It's very nice and respectable. I didn't 
 think uncle would mind. But Lucy's sure he will' 
 
 ' Sure ! Of course I'm sure,' said Lucy sharply. ' I've heard 
 him talk about dancing in a way to make anybody sick. If he 
 only knew all the dancing we had at Pestalozzi House ! ' 
 
 ' Does he think all dancing wrong ? ' inquired David. 
 
 « Yes— unless it's David dancing before the Ark, or some such 
 nonsense,' replied Lucy, with the same petulant gloom. 
 
 David laughed out. Then he fell into a brown study, one 
 hand playing with his tea-cup, an irrepressible smile still curving 
 about his mouth. Dora, observing him across the table, could 
 not but remember other assistants of Uncle Purcell whom she 
 had seen sitting in that same place, and the airs which Miss Pur- 
 cell in her rare holidays had given herself towards those earlier 
 young men. And now, this young man, whenever Purcell him- 
 self was out of the way, was master of the place. Anyone could 
 see that, so long as he was there, Lucy was sensitively conscious 
 of him in all that she said or did. 
 
 She did not long endure his half-mocking silence now. 
 
 'You see, Dora,' she began again, with an angry glance 
 towards him, ' father's v/orse than ever just now. He's been so 
 aggravated. ' 
 
 'Yes,' said Dora timidly. She perfectly understood what 
 was meant, but she shrank from pursuing the subject. But 
 David looked up. 
 
 ' I should be very sorry, I'm sure, Miss Purcell, to get in your 
 way at all, or cause you any unpleasantness, if tliat's what you 
 mean. I don't think you'll be annoyed with me long.' 
 
 He spoke with a boyish exaggerated dignity. It became him, 
 however, for his fine and subtle physique somehow supported 
 and endorsed it. 
 
 Both the girls started. Lucy looked suddenly as miserable 
 as she had before looked angry. But in her confused state of 
 feeling she renewed her attack. 
 
 ' I don't understand anything about it,' she said, with plain- 
 tive incoherence. ' Only I can't think why people should always 
 be making disturbances. Dora ! Doesn't everybody you know 
 think it wicked to go to the Hall of Science ? ' 
 
 She drew herself up peremptorily. David resumed the half 
 smiling, half meditative attitude which had provoked her before. 
 Dora looked from one to the other, a pure bright colour rising 
 in her cheek. 
 
 ' I don't know anything about that,' she said in a low voice. 
 ' I don't think that would matter, Lucy. But, oh, I do wish 
 father wouldn't go — and Mr. Grieve wouldn't go.' 
 
140 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 Her voice and hand shook. Lucy looked trium}Dhantly at 
 David. Instinctively she realised that, especially of late, David 
 had come to feel more respectfully towards Dora than she had 
 ever succeeded in making him 'feel towards herself. In the 
 beginning of their acquaintance he had often launched into 
 argument with Dora about religious matters, especially about 
 the Ritualistic practices in which she delighted. The lad, over- 
 flowing with his Voltaire and d'Holbach, had not been able to 
 forbear, and had apparently taken a mischievous pleasure in 
 shocking a bigot — as he had originally conceived Lucy PurcelPs 
 cousin to be. The discussion, indeed, had not gone very far. 
 The girl's horror and his own sense of his position and its diffi- 
 culties had checked them in the germ. Moreover, as has been 
 said, his conception of Dora had gradually changed on further 
 acquaintance. As for her, she had now for a long time avoided 
 arguing with him, which made her outburst on the present 
 occasion the more noticeable. 
 
 He looked up quickly. 
 
 ' Miss Lomax, how do you suppose one makes up one's mind 
 — either about religion or anything else ? Isn't it by hearing 
 both sides ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, no — no ! ' she said, shrinking. ' Religion isn't like 
 anything else. It's by— by growing up into it — by thinking 
 about it — and doing what the Church tells you. You come to 
 kiioiv it's true.' 
 
 That the Magi and Balaam's ass are true ! What folly ! But 
 somehow even his youthful ardour could not say it, so full of 
 pure and tremulous pain was the gaze fixed upon him. And, 
 indeed, he had no time for any answer, for she had just spoken 
 when the bell of the outer door sounded, and a step came rapidly 
 through the shop. 
 
 ' Father ! ' said Lucy, lifting the lid of the teapot in a great 
 hurry. ' Oh, I wonder if the tea's good enough.' 
 
 She was stirring it anxiously with a spoon, when Purcell 
 entered, a tall heavily built man, with black hair, a look of 
 command, and a step which shook the little back room as he 
 descended into it. He touched Dora's hand with a pompous 
 politeness, and then subsided into his chair opposite Lucy, com- 
 plaining about the weather, and demanding tea, which his 
 daughter gave him with a timid haste, looking to see whether he 
 were satisfied as he raised the first spoonful to his lips. 
 
 ' Anything worth buying?' said David to his employer. He 
 was leaning back in his chair, with his arm round the back of 
 another. Again Dora was reminded by contrast of some of the 
 nervous lads she had seen in that room before, scarcely daring 
 to eat their tea under Purcell's eye, flying to cut him bread, or 
 pass him the sugar. 
 
 ' No,' said Purcell curtly. 
 
 ' And a great price, I suppose ?' 
 
 Purcell looked up. Apparently the ease of the young man's 
 
CHAP. 11 YOUTH 141 
 
 tone and attitude put the finishing stroke to an inward process 
 already far advanced. 
 
 'The price, I conceive, is 77^?/ business,' he said, in his most 
 overbearing manner. ' When yon have to pay, it will be yours.' 
 
 David flushed, without, however, changing his position, and 
 Lucy made a sudden commotion among the teacups. 
 
 ' Father,' she said, with a hurried agitation which hardly 
 allowed her to pick up the cup she had thrown over, ' Dora and 
 I w^ant to speak to you. You mustn't talk business at tea. Oh, 
 I know you won't let me go ; but I should like it, and Dora's 
 come to ask. I shouldn't want a new dress, and it will be 7nost 
 respectable, everyone says ; and I did learn dancing at school, 
 though you didn't know it. Miss Georgina said it was stuff and 
 nonsense, and I must — ' 
 
 ' What is she talking about ? ' said Purcell to Dora, with an 
 angry glance at Lucy. 
 
 'I want to take her to a dance,' said Dora quietly, 'if you 
 would let her come. There's one at the Mechanics' Institute next 
 week, given by the Unicorn benefit society. Mrs. Alderman Head 
 said I might go with her, and Lucy too if you'll let her come. 
 I've got a ticket.' 
 
 'I'm much obliged to Mrs. Alderman Head,' said Purcell 
 sarcastically. ' Lucy knows very well what I think of an un- 
 christian and immodest amusement. Other people must decide 
 according to their conscience, /judge nobody.' 
 
 At this point David got up, and disappeared into the shop. 
 
 'Oh yes, you do judge, uncle,' cried Dora, roused at last, 
 and colouring. ' Y^ou're always judging. Y^ou call everything 
 unchristian you don't like, whether its dancing, or— or — early 
 celebration, or organ music, or altar-cloths. But you can't be 
 alw^ays right — nobody can.' 
 
 Purcell surveyed her with a grim composure. 
 
 ' If you suppose I make any pretence to be infallible, you are 
 quite mistaken,' he said, with slow solemnity — no one in dis- 
 claiming Papistry could have been more the Pope — ' I leave that 
 to your priests at St. Damian's, Dora. But there is an infallible 
 guide, both for you and for me, and that's the Holy Scriptures. 
 If you can show me any place where the Bible approves of pro- 
 miscuous dancing between young Christian men and women, or 
 of a woman exposing her person for admiration's sake, or of such 
 vain and idle talking as is produced by these entertainments, I 
 will let Lucy go. But you can't. "Whose adorning let it not 
 be—"' 
 
 And he quoted the Petrine admonition with a harsh triumph- 
 ant emphasis on every syllable, looking hard all the time at Dora, 
 who had risen, and stood confronting him in a tremor of impa- 
 tience and disagreement. 
 
 ' Father Russell — ' she began quickly, then changed her form 
 of expression — 'Mr. Russell says you can't settle things by just 
 quoting a text. The Bible has to be explained, he says. ' 
 
143 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 Purcell's eyes flamed. He launched into a sarcastic harangue, 
 delivered in a strong thick voice, on the subject of ' Sacerdotalism,' 
 ' priestly arrogance,' 'lying traditions,' ' making the command of 
 God of no effect,' and so forth. While his sermon rolled along, 
 Dora stood nervously tying her bonnet strings, or buttoning her 
 gloves. Her heart was full of a passionate scorn. Beside the 
 bookseller's muscular figure and pugnacious head she saw with 
 her mind's eye the spare forms and careworn faces of the young 
 priests at St. Damian's. Outraged by this loud-voiced assurance, 
 she called to mind the gentleness, the suavity, the delicate con- 
 sideration for women wiiich obtained among her friends. 
 
 'There's not a pin to choose,' Purcell wound up, brutally, 
 ' between you and that young infidel in there,' and he jerked his 
 thumb towards the shoj^. ' It all comes of pride. He's bursting 
 with his own wisdom, — you w'ill have the "Church" and won't 
 have the Bible. What's the Church ! — a pack of sinners, and a 
 million sinners are no better than one.' 
 
 ' Good-bye, Lucy,' said Dora, stooping to kiss her cousin, and 
 not trusting herself to speak. ' Call for me at the quarter,' 
 
 Lucy hardly noticed her kiss, she sat with her elbows on the 
 table, holding her little chin disconsolately, something very like 
 tears in her eyes. In the first place, she was reflecting dolefully 
 that it was all true — she was never to have any amusement like 
 other girls — never to have any good of her life ; she might as well 
 be a nun at once. In the second, she w\is certain her father 
 meant to send young Grieve away, and the prospect drew a still 
 darker pall over a prospect dark enough in all conscience before. 
 
 Purcell opened the door for Dora more punctiliously than 
 usual, and came back to the hearthrug still inflated as it were 
 with his own eloquence. Meanwhile Lucy was washing up the 
 tea things. The little servant had brought her a bowl of w^ater 
 and an apron, and Lucy w^as going gingerly through an operation 
 she detested. Why shouldn't Mary Ann do it? What was the 
 good of going to school and coming back with Claribel's songs 
 and Blumenthal's Deux Anges lying on the top of your box, — 
 with a social education, moreover, so advanced that the dancing- 
 mistress had invariably made you waltz alone round the room for 
 the edification and instruction of the assembled company, — if all 
 you had to do at home was to dust and wash up, and die with 
 envy of girls with reprobate fathers ? As she pondered the 
 question, Lucy began to handle the cups with a more and more 
 unfriendly energy. 
 
 'You'll break some of that china, Lucy !' said Purcell, at last 
 disturbed in his thoughts. ' What's the matter with you ? ' 
 
 ' Nothing ! ' said Lucy, taking, however, a saucer from the 
 line as she spoke so viciously that the rest of them slipped with a 
 clatter and only just escaped destruction. 
 
 'Mind what you're about,' cried Purcell angrily, fearing for 
 the household stuff that had been in the establishment so much 
 longer and was so much more at home there than Lucy. 
 
CHAP. II YOUTH 143 
 
 ' I know what it is,' he said, looking at her severely, while his 
 great black presence seemed to fill the little room. ' You've lost 
 your temper because I refused to let you go to the dance. ' 
 
 Lucy was silent for a moment, trying to contain herself; then 
 she broke out like a child, throwing down her apron, and feeling 
 for her handkerchief. 
 
 ' It's too bad — it's too bad — I'd rather be Mary Ann — she's got 
 friends, and evenings out — and — and parties sometimes ; and I 
 see nobody, and go nowhere. What did you have me home for 
 at all ? ' 
 
 And she sat down and dried her eyes piteously. She was in 
 real distress, but she liked a scene, and Purcell knew her peculi- 
 arities. He surveyed her with a sort of sombre indulgence. 
 
 ' You're a vain child of this world, Lucy. If I didn't keep a 
 look-out on you, you'd soon go rejoicing down the broad way. 
 What do you mean about amusements ? There's the missionary 
 tea to-morrow night, and the magic-lantern at the schools on 
 Saturday.' 
 
 Lucy gave a little hysterical laugh. 
 
 'Well,' said Purcell loudly, 'there'll be plenty of young 
 people there. What have you got to say against them ? ' 
 
 ' A set of frights and gawks, ' said Lucy, sitting bolt upright 
 in a state of fiat mutiny, and crushing her handkerchief on her 
 knee between a pair of trembling hands. ' The way they do their 
 hair, and the way they tie their ties, and the way Ihey put a 
 chair for you — it's enough to make one faint. At the Christmas 
 treat there was one young man asked me to trim his shirt-cufifs 
 for him with scissors he took out of his pocket. I told him / 
 wasn't his nurse, and people who weren't dressed ought to stay 
 at home. You should have seen how he and his sister glared at 
 me afterwards. I don't care ! None of the chapel people like 
 me — I know they don't, and I don't want them to, and I 
 wouldn't marry one of them. ' 
 
 The gesture of Lucy's curly head was superb. 
 
 'It seems to me,' said Purcell sarcastically, ' that what you 
 mostly learnt at Blackburn was envy, malice, and all unchari- 
 tableness. As to marrying, child, the less you think of it for 
 the present the better, till you get more sense.' 
 
 But the eyes which studied her were not unkindly. Purcell 
 liked this slim red and white creature who belonged to him, 
 whose education had cost him hard money which it gave him 
 pleasure to reckon up, and who promised now to provide him 
 with a fresh field for the management and the coarse moral 
 experiment which he loved. She would 'be restive at first, but 
 he would soon break her in. The idea that under her folly and 
 childishness she might possibly inherit some of his own tenacity 
 never occurred to him. 
 
 ' I can't imagine,' said Lucy inconsequently, with eyes once 
 more swimming, ' why you can't let me do what Dora does ! 
 She's much better than I am. She's a saint, she is. Sb^'s 
 
144 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 always going to church ; she's always doing things for poor 
 people ; she never thinks about herself, or whether she's pretty, 
 or — Why shouldn't I dance if she does ? ' 
 
 Purcell laughed. 
 
 ' Aye ! ' he said grimly, ' that's the Papistical way all over. So 
 many services, so much fasting, so much money, so much 
 knocking under to your priest, so much "church work" — and 
 who cares a brass farthing what you do with the rest of your 
 time ? Do as I tell you, and dance away ! But I tell you, 
 Christianity wants a new heart ! ' 
 
 And the bookseller looked at his daughter with a frowning 
 severity. Conversation of this kind was his recreation, his 
 accomplishment, so to speak. He had been conducting a difficult 
 negotiation all day of the diamond-cut-diamond order, and was 
 tired out and disgusted by the amount of knowledge of books 
 which even a gentleman may possess. But here was compensa- 
 tion. A warm hearthrug, an unwilling listener, and this sense 
 of an incomparable soundness of view, — he wanted nothing 
 more to revive him, unless, indeed, it were a larger audience. 
 
 As for Lucy, as she looked up at her father, even her childish 
 intelligence rose to a sense of absurdity. As if Dora hadn't a 
 new heart ; as if Dora thought it was enough to go to church 
 and give sixpences in the offertory ! 
 
 . But her father overawed her. She had been left motherless 
 at ten years old, and brought up since away from home, except 
 for holidays. At the bottom of her she was quite conscious that 
 she knew nothing at all about this big contemptuous person, who 
 ordered her about and preached to her, and never let himself be 
 kissed and played with and coaxed as other girls' fathers did. 
 
 So she went on with her washing up in a crushed silence, very 
 sorry for herself in a vague passionate way, the corners of her 
 mouth drooping. Purcell too fell into a reverie, the lower jaw 
 pushed forward, one hand playing with the watch-chain which 
 adorned his black suit. 
 
 ' Did you give Grieve that message ? ' he asked at last. 
 
 Lucy, still sulky, nodded in reply. 
 
 ' What time did he come in from dinner ?' 
 
 ' On the stroke of the half-hour,' said Lucy quickly. ' I think 
 he keeps time better than anybody you ever had, father.' 
 
 ' Insolent young whelp ! ' said Purcell in a slow, deliberate 
 voice. ' He was at that place again yesterday.' 
 
 ' Yes, I know he was,' said Lucy, with evident agitation. ' I 
 told him he ought to have been ashamed.' 
 
 ' Oh, you talked to him, did you ? What business had you to 
 do that, I wonder ? Well, what did he say V 
 
 ' He said — well, I don't know what he said. He don't seem to 
 think it matters to anybody where he goes on Sunday ! ' 
 
 ' Oh", indeed — don't he ? I'll show him some cause to doubt 
 the truth of that proposition,' said Purcell ponderously ; ' or I'll 
 know the reason why.' 
 
CHAT. II YOUTH 145 
 
 Lucy looked unhappy, and said nothing for a minute or two. 
 Then she began insistently, ' Well, does it matter to you V 
 
 This deplorable question — viewed from the standpoint of a 
 Baptist elder — passed unnoticed, for with the last words the 
 shop-bell rang, and Purcell went off, transformed on the instant 
 into the sharp, attentive tradesman. 
 
 Lucy sat wiping her cups mechanically for a little while. 
 Then, when they were all done, and Mary Ann had been loftily 
 commanded to put them away, she slipped upstairs to her own 
 room, a little attic at the top of the house. Here she went to a 
 deal press, which had been her mother's, opened it, and took out 
 a dress which hung in a compartment by itself, enveloped in a 
 hoUand wrapper, lest Manchester smuts should harm it. Slie 
 undid the wrapper, and laid it on the bed. It was an embroi- 
 dered white muslin, adorned with lace and full knots of narrow 
 pink ribbon. 
 
 ' What a trouble I had to get the ribbon just that width,' she 
 thought to herself ruefully, 'and everybody said it was so un- 
 common. I might as well give it Dora. I don't believe I shall 
 ever wear it. I don't know wdiat'll become of me. I don't get 
 any chances.' 
 
 And shaking her head mournfully from side to side, she sat 
 on beside the dress, in the light of her solitary candle, her hands 
 clasped round her knee, the picture of girlish despair, so far 
 as anything so daintily gowned, and sliced, and curled, could 
 achieve it. She was thinking drearily of some people who were 
 coming to supper, one of her father's brother elders at the 
 chapel, Mr. Baruch Barton, and his daughter. Mr. Barton had 
 a specialty for the prophet Zephaniah, and had been several 
 times shocked because Lucy could not help him out with his 
 quotations from that source. His daughter, a little pinched 
 asthmatic creature, in a dress w^hereof every gore and seam was 
 an affront to the art of dressmakhig, was certainly thirty, pro- 
 bably more. And between thirty and the Psalmist's limit of 
 existence, there is the very smallest appreciable difference, in 
 the opinion of seventeen. What could she have to say to Emmy 
 Barton ? Lucy asked herself. She began yawning from sheer 
 dulness, as she thought of her. If it were only time to go to 
 bed! 
 
 Suddenly she heard a sound of raised voices in the upper shop 
 on the floor below. What could it be ? She started up. ' Mr. 
 Grieve and father quarrelling ! ' She knew it must come to that ! 
 
 She crept down the stairs with every precaution possible till 
 she came to the door behind which the loud talk which had 
 startled her was going on. Here she listened with all her ears, 
 but at first to very little purpose. David was speaking, but so 
 rapidly, and apparently so near to the other end of the room, 
 that she could bear nothing. Then her father broke in, and by 
 dint of straining very hard, she caught most of what he said be- 
 fore the whole colloquy came abruptly to an end. She heard 
 
146 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE BOOK ii 
 
 Purceirs heavy tread descending the Uttle iron spiral staircase 
 leading from the lower shop to the upper. She heard David 
 moving about, as though he were gathering up books and papers, 
 and then, with a loud childish sob which burst from her un- 
 awares, she ran upstairs again to her owai room. 
 
 ' Oh, he's going, he's going ! ' she cried under her breath, as 
 she stood before the glass winking to keep the tears back, and 
 biting her handkerchief hard between her little white teeth. 
 ' Oh, w'hat shall I do ? what shall I do ? It'll be always the same ; 
 just when anyone might like me, it all stops. And he won't care 
 one little, little bit. He'll never think of me again. Oh, I do 
 think somebody might care about me — might be sorry for me ! ' 
 
 And she locked her hands tight before her, and stared at the 
 glass, while the tears forced their way. But all the time she 
 was noticing how prettily she stood, how slim she w^as. And 
 though she smarted, she would not for the w^orld have been with- 
 out her smart, her excitement, her foolish secret, wdiieh, for 
 sheer lack of something to do and think about, had suddenly 
 grown to such magnitude in her eyes. It was hard to cherish a 
 hopeless passion for a handsome youth, without a lialfpenny, 
 w^ho despised j^ou, but it was infinitely better than to have no- 
 thing in your mind but Emmy Barton and the prophet Zephaniah. 
 Nay, as she washed her hands and smoothed her dress and hair 
 with trembling fingers, she became quite friendly with her pain 
 — in a sense, even proud of it, and jealous for it. It was a sign 
 of mature life — of something more than mere school-girlishness. 
 Like the lover in the Elizabethan sonnet, ' She had been vexed, if 
 vexed she had not been ! ' 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 ' Come in, David,' said Mr. Ancrum, opening the door of his little 
 sitting-room in Mortimer Street. ' You're rather late, but I 
 don't wonder. Such a wind ! I could hardly stand against it 
 myself. But, then, I'm an atomy. What, no top-coat in such 
 weather ! What do you mean by that, sir ? You're wet through. 
 There, dry yourself.' 
 
 David, with a grin at Mr. Ancruni's unnecessary concern 
 for him, deposited himself in the carpet chair which formed the 
 minister's only lounge, and held out his legs and arms to the 
 blaze. He was wet indeed, and bespattered with the blackest mud 
 in the three kingdoms. But the battle with wind and rain had 
 so brought into play all the physical force of him, had so bright- 
 ened eye and cheek, and tossed the black hair into such a fine 
 confusion, that, as he sat there bending over the glow of the fire, 
 the crippled man opposite, sickly with long confinement and 
 over-thinking, could not take his eyes from him. The storm 
 with all its freshness, youth with all its reckless joy in itself, 
 
CHAP. Ill YOUTH 147 
 
 seemed to have come in with the lad and transformed the little 
 dingy room. 
 
 ' What do you wear trash like that for in a temperature like 
 this ? ' said the minister, touching his guest's thin and much-worn 
 coat. 'Don't you know, David, that your health is money? 
 Suppose you get lung trouble, who's to look after you ? ' 
 
 ' It don't do me no harm, sir. I can't get into my last year's 
 coat, and I couldn't afford a new one this winter.' 
 
 'What wages do you earn?' asked Ancrum. His manner 
 was a curious mixture of melancholy gentleness and of that terse 
 sharpness in practical things which the south country resents 
 and the north country takes for granted. 
 
 'Eighteen shillings a week, since last November, sir.' 
 
 ' That ought to be enough for a top-coat, you rascal, with only 
 yourself to feed,' said Mr. Ancrum, stretching himself in his 
 hard armchair, so as to let his lame leg with its heavy boot rest 
 comfortably on the fender. David had noticed at first sight of 
 him that his old playfellow had grown to look much older than 
 in the Clough End days. His hair was nearly white, and lay 
 in a large smooth wave across the broad brow. And in that 
 brow there were deep furrows, and many a new and premature 
 line in the hollow cheeks. Something withering and blighting 
 seemed to have passed over the whole man since those Sunday 
 school lessons in the Christian Brethren's upper room, which 
 David still remembered so well. But the eyes with their irre- 
 sistible intensity and force were the same. In them the minister's 
 youth— he was not yet thirty-five— still spoke, as from a last 
 stronghold in a failing realm. They had a strange look too, the 
 look as of a secret life, not for the passer-by. 
 
 David smiled at Ancrum's last remark, and for a moment or 
 two looked into the fire without speaking. 
 
 ' Well, if I'd bought clothes or anything else this winter, I 
 should be in a precious worse hole than I am,' he said reflectively. 
 
 ' Hole ? What's wrong, Davy ? ' 
 
 ' My master gave me the sack Monday.' 
 
 ' Humph ! ' said Ancrum, surveying him. ' Well, you don't 
 look much cast down about it, I must say.' 
 
 'Well, you see, I'd laid my plans,' said the young man, an 
 irrepressible gaiety and audacity in every feature. ' It isn't as 
 though I were taken by surprise.' 
 
 ' Plans for a new place, I suppose ? ' 
 
 ' No ; I have done with that. I am going to set up for my- 
 self. I know the trade, and I've got some money.' 
 
 ' How old are you, Davy ?' 
 
 'Just upon twenty,' said the lad, quietly. 
 
 The minister pursed up his lips and whistled a little. 
 
 ' Well, that's bold,' he said. ' Somehow I like it, though by 
 all the laws of prudence I ought to jump down your throat for 
 announcing such a thing. But how did you get your money? 
 and what have you been doing these four years ? Come, I'm an 
 
148 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 old friend, — though I dare say you don't think me much of a 
 fellow. Out with it ! Pay me anyway for all those shifts I made 
 j^ou long ago.' 
 
 And he held out his blanched hand, little more now than skin 
 and bone. David put his own into it awkwardly enough. At 
 this period of his life he was not demonstrative. 
 
 The story he had to tell was, to A^nerum's thinking, a remark- 
 able one. He had come into Manchester on an October evening 
 with five shillings and threepence in his pocket. From a point 
 on the south-western border of the city he took a 'bus for Deans- 
 gate and Victoria Street. As he was sitting on the top, feeding 
 his eyes on the lights and the crowd of the streets, but wholly 
 ignorant where to go and what first step to take, he fell into talk 
 with a decent working-man and his wife sitting beside him. 
 The result of the talk was that they offered him shelter at four- 
 pence a night. He dismounted with them at Blackfriars Bridge, 
 and they made their way across the river to a street in Salford, 
 where he lodged with them for a week. During that week he 
 ^ived on oatmeal and an occasional baked porato, paying his 
 hostess eighteenpence additional for the use of her fire, and the 
 right to sit in her kitchen when he was not tramping about in 
 search of work. By the end of the week he had found a post as 
 errand-boy at a large cheap bookseller's and stationer's in Deans- 
 gate, at eight shillings a week, his good looks, manner, and 
 education evidently helping him largely, as Mr. Ancrum could 
 perceive through the boy's very matter-of-fact account of himself. 
 He then made an agreement for bed, use of fire, and kitchen, 
 with his new friends at four shillings a week, and by the end of 
 six months he was receiving a wage of fourteen shillings as 
 salesman and had saved close on five pounds. 
 
 ' Well, now, come, how did you manage that, Davy ? ' said 
 Mr. Ancrum, interrupting. ' Don't run on in that fashion. 
 Details are the only interesting things in life, and details I'll 
 have. You must have found it a precious tight fit to save that 
 five pounds.' 
 
 Whereupon David, his eye kindling, ran out Benjamin Frank- 
 lin and the ' Vegetarian News,' his constant friends from the 
 first day of his acquaintance with the famous autobiography till 
 now, in spite of such occasional lapses into carnal feeding as he 
 had confessed to Daddy. In a few minutes Ancrum found him- 
 self buried in ' details ' as to ' flesh-forming ' and ' bone-formiiig' 
 foods, as to nitrogen and albumen, as to the saving qualities of 
 fruit, and Heaven knows what besides. Long before the enthu- 
 siast had spent his breath or his details, the minister cried 
 ' Enough ! ' 
 
 ' Young materialist,' he said growling, ' what do you mean at 
 your age by thinking so much about your body?' 
 
 'It wasn't my body, sir,' said David, simply, 'it was just 
 business. If I had got ill, I couldn't have worked ; if I had lived 
 like other chaps, I couldn't have saved. So I had to know 
 
CHAP. Ill YOUTH 14ft 
 
 something about it, and it wasn't bad fun. After a bit I got the 
 people I lodged with to eat a lot of the things I eat — and that 
 was cheaper for me of course. The odd thing about vegetarian 
 ism is tiiat you come not to care a rap what you eat. Your taste 
 goes somehow. So long as you're nourished and can do your 
 work, that's all you want.' 
 
 The minister sat studying his visitor a minute or two in 
 silence, though the eyes under the care-worn brow were bright 
 and restless. Any defiance of the miserable body was in itself 
 delightful to a man who had all but slain himself many times 
 over in the soul's service. He, too, had been living on a crust 
 for months, denying himself first this, then that ingredient of 
 what should have been an invalid's diet. But it had been for 
 cause — for the poor — for self-mortification. There was some- 
 thing just a little jarring to the ascetic in this contact with a self- 
 denial of the purely rationalistic type, so easy — so cheerful — 
 put forward without the smallest suspicion of merit, as a mere 
 business measure. 
 
 David resumed his story. By the end of another six months 
 it appeared that he had grown tired of his original shop, with its 
 vast masses of school stationery and cheap new books. As might 
 have been expected from his childish antecedents, he had been 
 soon laid hold of by the old bookstalls, had read Jiit them on his 
 way from work, had spent on them all that he could persuade 
 himself to spare from his hoard, and in a year from the time he 
 entered Manchester, thanks to wits, reading, and chance friend- 
 ships, was already a budding bibliophile. Slates and primers 
 became suddenly odious to a person aware of the existence of 
 Aldines and Elzevirs, and bitten with the passion, then just let 
 loose on the book-buying world, for first editions of the famous 
 books of the century. Whenever that sum in the savings bank 
 should have reached a certain height, he would become a second- 
 hand bookseller with a stall. Till then he must save more and 
 learn his trade. So at the end of his first year he left his em- 
 ployers, and by the help of excellent recommendations from them 
 got the post of assistant in Purcell's shop in Half Street, at a rise 
 of two shillings, afterwards converted into four shillings a week. 
 
 'And I've been there three years — very near,' said David, 
 straightening himself with a little nervous gesture peculiar to 
 him. ' If you'd been anywhere about, sir, you'd have wondered 
 how I could have stayed so long. But I wanted to learn the 
 trade and I've learnt it — no thanks to old Purcell.' 
 
 'What was wrong with him ?' 
 
 ' Mostly brains ! ' said the lad, with a scornful but not unat- 
 tractive conceit. ' He was a hard master to live with — that don't 
 matter. But he is a fool ! I don't mean to say he don't know^ a 
 lot about some things — but he thinks he knows everything — and 
 he don't. And he'll not let anyone tell him — not he ! Once, if 
 you'll believe it, he got the Aldine Virgil of 1501, for tw^enty-flve 
 shillings — came from a gentleman out Eccles way — a fellow sell- 
 
150 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book n 
 
 ing his father's library and didn't know bad from good, — real 
 fine tall copy, — binding poor, — but ?^ stunner take it altogether — 
 worth twenty pounds to Quaritch or Ellis, any day. Well, all 
 I could do, he let a man have it for five shillings profit next day, 
 just to spite me, I believe, because I told him it was a good 
 thing. Then he got sick about that, I believe, though he never 
 let out, and the next time he found anything that looked good, — 
 giminy ! — but he put it on. Now you know, sir ' — Mr. Ancrum 
 smiled at the confidential eagerness of the expert — ' you know, sir, 
 it's not many of those Venice or Florence Dantes that are worth 
 anything. If you get the first edition of Landino's ' Conjmen- 
 tary,' or the other man's, Imola's, isn't it — ' 
 
 The minister lifted his eyebrows — the Italian came out pat, 
 and, so far as he knew, right— ^ 
 
 'Well, of course, they'' re worth money— always fetch their 
 price. But the later editions are no good at all — nobody but a 
 gentleman-collector, very green, you know, sir'— the twinkle in 
 the boy's eye showed how much his subject was setting him at 
 his ease — ' would be bothered with them. W^ell, if he didn't get 
 hold of an edition of 1540 or so— worth about eight shillings, 
 and dear at that — and send it up to one of the London men as a 
 good thing. He makes me pack it and send it and register it — 
 you might have thought it was the Mazarin Bible, bar size. 
 And then, of course, next day, down comes the book again 
 flying, double quick. I kept out of his way, post-time ! But I'd 
 have given something to see the letter he got.' 
 
 And David, rising, put his hands in his pockets, and stood 
 before the fire chuckling with irrepressible amusement. 
 
 ' Well, then you know there's the first editions of Rousseau — 
 not a bit rare, as rare goes— lucky if you get thirty shillings for 
 the " Contrat Social," or the "Nouvelle Heloise," even good 
 copies — ' 
 
 Again the host's eyebrows lifted. The French names ran 
 remarkably ; there was not the least boggling over them. But 
 he said nothing, and David rattled on, describing, with a gusto 
 which never failed, one of Purcell's book-selling enormities after 
 another. It was evident that he despised his master with a 
 passionate contempt. It was evident also that Purcell- had 
 shown a mean and unreasoning jealousy of his assistant. The 
 English tradesman inherits a domineering tradition towards his 
 subordinates, and in Purcell's case, as we know, the instincts of 
 an egotistical piety had reinforced those of the employer. Yet 
 Mr. Ancrum felt some sympathy with Purcell. 
 
 ' Well, Davy,' he said at last, 'so you were too 'cute for your 
 man, that's plain. But I don't suppose he put it on that 
 ground when he gave you the sack ? ' 
 
 And he looked up, with a little dry smile. 
 
 ' No ! ' cried David, abruptly. ' No ! not he. If you go and 
 ask him he'll tell you lie sent me off because I would go to the 
 Secularist meetings at the Hall of Science, and air myself as an 
 
CHAP, in YOUTH 151 
 
 atheist > that's his way of putting it. And it was doing him 
 harm with his religious customers ! As if I was going to let 
 him dictate where I went on Sundays ! ' 
 
 'Of course not,' said Ancrum, with a twist of his oddly 
 shaped mouth. 'Even the very youngest of us might some- 
 times be the better for advice ; but, hang it, let's be free — free 
 to "make fools of ourselves," as a wise man hath it. Well, 
 Davy, no offence,' for his guest had flushed suddenly. ' So you 
 go to the Hall of Science? Did you hear Holyoake and Brad 
 laugh there the other night ? You like that kind of thing?' 
 
 ' I like to hear it,' said the lad, stoutly, meeting his old 
 teacher's look, half nervously, half defiantly. ' It's a great deal 
 more lively than what you hear at most churches, sir. And 
 why shouldn't one hear everything?' 
 
 This was not precisely the tone which the same culprit had 
 adopted towards Dora Lomax. The Voltairean suddenly felt 
 himself to be making excuses — shabby excuses — in the presence 
 of somebody connected, however distantly, with Vinfdme. He 
 drew himself up with an angry shake of his whole powerful 
 frame. 
 
 ' Oh, why not ? ' said Ancrum, with a shrug, ' if life's long 
 enough ' — and he absently lifted and let fall a book which lay on 
 the table beside him ; it was Newman's 'Dream of Gerontius' — 
 ' if life's long enough, and — happy enough ! Well, so you've 
 been learning French, I can hear, teaching yourself ? ' 
 
 ' No ; there's an old Frenchman, old Barbier — do you know 
 him, sir? He gives lessons at a shilling an hour. Very few 
 people go to him now ; they want younger men. And there's 
 lot's of "them about. But old Barbier knows more about books 
 than any of them, I'll be bound.' 
 
 ' Has he introduced you to French novels ? I never read any ; 
 but they're bad, of course — must be. In all those things I'm a 
 Br|itisher and believe what the Britishers say.' 
 
 'We're just at the end of " Manon Lescaut,'' ' said David, 
 doggedly. ' And partly with him, partly by myself, I've read a 
 bit of Rousseau — and a good lot of Diderot, — and Voltaire.' 
 
 David threw an emphasis into the last name, which was 
 meant to atone to himself for the cowardice of a few minutes 
 before. The old boyish feeling towards Mr. Ancrum, which had 
 revived in him when he entered the room, had gradually disap- 
 peared again. He bore the minister no real grudge for having 
 forgotten him, but he wished it to be clearly understood that the 
 last fragments of the Christian Brethren yoke had dropped from 
 his neck. 
 
 'Ah! don't know anything about them,' said Ancrum, 
 slowly; 'but then, as you know, I'm a very ignorant person. 
 Well, now, was it Voltaire took you to the secularists, or the 
 secularists to Voltaire ? ' 
 
 David laughed, but did not give a reply immediately. 
 
 said the minister. ' All Christians are 
 
153 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 fools, of course — that's understood. — Is that all you have been 
 learning these four years V 
 
 'I work at Latin every morning,' said David, very red, and 
 on his dignity. ' I've begun Greek, and I go to the science 
 classes, mathematics and chemistry, at the Mechanics' Institute.' 
 
 Mr. Ancrum's face softened. 
 
 ' Why, I'll be bound you have to go to work pretty early, Davy ? ' 
 
 ' Seven o'clock, sir, I take the shutters down. But I get an 
 hour and a half first, and three hours in the evening. This win- 
 ter I've got through the "^neid,'' and Horace's " Epistles" and 
 " Ars Poetica." Do you remember, sir?' — and the lad's voice 
 grew^ sharp once more, tightening as it were under the pressure 
 of eagerness and ambition from beneath — ' do you remember that 
 Scaliger read the "Iliad" in twenty days, and was a finished 
 Greek^scholar in two years ? Why can't one do that now ? ' 
 
 ' Why shouldn't you ? ' said Mr. Ancrum, looking up at him. 
 ' Who helps you in your Greek ? ' 
 
 'No one ; I get translations.' 
 
 ' Well, now, look here, Davy. I'm an ignorant person, as I 
 told you, but I learnt some Latin and Greek at Manchester New 
 College. Come to me in the evenings, and I'll help you with your 
 Greek, unless you've got beyond me. Where are you ? ' 
 
 The budding Scaliger reported himself. He had read the 
 ' Anabasis,' some Herodotus, three plays of Euripides, and was 
 now making some desperate efforts on '^schylus and So})hocles. 
 Any Plaio ? David made a face. He had rerid two or three dia- 
 logues in English ; didn't want to go on, didn't care about him. 
 Ah ! Ancrum supposed not. 
 
 'Twelve hours' shop,' said the minister reflecting, 'more or 
 less, — two hours' work before shop, — three hours or so after shop ; 
 that's what you may call driving it hard. You couldn't do it, 
 Richard Ancrum,' and he shook his head with a whimsical melan- 
 choly. ' But you were always a poor starveling. Youth that 
 is youth 's tough. Don't tell me, sir,' and he looked up sharply, 
 ' that you don't amuse yourself. I wouldn't believe it. There 
 never was a man built like you yet that didn't amuse himself.' 
 
 David smiled, but said nothing. 
 
 ' Billiards ? ' 
 
 'No, sir.' 
 
 'Betting?' 
 
 ' No, sir. They cost money.' 
 
 'Niggardly dog ! Drink ? — no, I'll answer that for myself.' 
 
 The minister dropped his catechism, and sat nursing his lame 
 leg and thinking. Suddenly he broke out with, 'How many 
 young w^omen are you in love with, David?' 
 
 David showed his white teeth. 
 
 'I only know two, sir. One's my master's daughter—she's 
 rather a ]n'etty girl, I think — ' 
 
 ' That'll do. You^re not in love with her. Who's the other ?' 
 
 'The other's Mr. Lomax's daughter, — Lomax of the Parlour, 
 
CHAP. Ill YOUTH 153 
 
 that queer restaurant, sir, in Market Place. She— well, I don't 
 know how to describe her. She's not good-looking— at least, I 
 don't think so,' he added dubiouslj\ ' She's very High Church, 
 and fasts all Lent. I think she does Church embroidery.' 
 
 ' And doesn't think any the better of you for attending the 
 Hall of Science ? Sensible girl ! Still, when people mean to fall 
 in love, they don't think twice of that sort of thing. I make a 
 note of Lomax's daughter. Ah ! enter supper. David, if you let 
 any 'ism stand between you and that veal pie, I despair of your 
 future.' 
 
 David, however, in the course of the meal, showed himself a? 
 superior to narrowness of view in the matter of food-stuffs as in 
 other matters. The meal went merrily. Mr. Ancrum dropped 
 his half-sarcastic tone, and food, warmth, ?nd talk loosened the 
 lad's fibres, and made him more and more human, handsome, 
 and attractive. Soon his old friend knew all that he wanted to 
 know,— the sum David had saved— thirty pounds in the savings- 
 bank— the sort of stock he meant to set up, the shop he had taken 
 —with a stall, of course— no beginner need hope to prosper with- 
 out a stall. Customers must be delicately angled for at a safe 
 distance— show yourself too much, and, like trout, they flashed 
 away. See everything, force nothing. Let a book be turned 
 over for nineteen days, the chances were that on the twentieth 
 you would turn over the price. As to expecting the class of 
 cheap customers to commit themselves by walking into a shop, 
 it w^as simple madness. Of course, when you were ' established,' 
 that was another matter. 
 
 By the help of a certain wealthy Unitarian, one Mr. Doyle, 
 with whom he had made friends in Purcell's shop, and whom he 
 had boldly asked for the use of his name as a reference, the lad 
 had taken— so it appeared— a small house in Potter Street, a nar- 
 row but frequented street in the neighbourhood of Deansgate and 
 all the great banks and insurance offices in King Street. His 
 shop took up the ground floor. The two floors above were let, 
 and the tenants would remain. But into the attics and the 
 parlour kitchen behind the shop, he meant, ultimately, when he 
 could afford it, to put himself and his sister. He could only get 
 the house on a yearly tenancy, as it and the others near it weie 
 old, and would probably be rebuilt before long. But meanwhile 
 the rent was all the lower because of the insecurity of tenure. 
 
 At the mention of the boy's sister, Ancrum looked up with a 
 start 
 
 ' Ah, to be sure ! What became of that poor child after you 
 left ? The Clough End friends who wrote to me of your disap- 
 pearance had more pity for her, Davy, than they had for you.' 
 
 A sudden repulsion and reserve darkened the black eyes 
 opposite. 
 
 ' There was no helping it,' he said with hasty defiance. There 
 was a moment's silence. Then a wish to explain himself rose in 
 David. 
 
154 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book n 
 
 'I couldn't have stayed, sir,' lie said, with a curious half- 
 reproachful accent. 'I told you about how it was before you 
 left. And there were other tilings. I should have cut my own 
 throat or some one else's if it had gone on. But I haven't 
 forgotten Louie. You remember Tom MuUins at the foundry. 
 He's written me every month. I paid him for it. I know all 
 about Louie, and they don't know anything about me. They 
 think I'm in America.' 
 
 His eyes lit again with the joy of contrivance. 
 
 ' Is that kind, Davy ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, sir—' and for the first time the minister heard in the 
 boy's voice the tone of a man's judgment. ' I couldn't have 
 Louie on me just yet. I was going to ask you, sir, not to tell 
 the people at Clough End you've seen me. It would make it 
 very hard. You know what Louie is — and she's all right. She's 
 learnt a trade.' 
 
 ' What trade ? ' 
 
 ' Silk-weaving — from Margaret Dawson.' 
 
 ' Poor soul — poor saint ! There'd be more things than her 
 trade to be learnt from Margaret Dawson if anyone had a mind 
 to learn them. What of 'Lias ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, he died, sir, a week after I left.' The lad's voice dropped. 
 Then he added slowly, looking away, ' Tom said he was very 
 quiet— he didn't suffer much — not at the end.' 
 
 'Aye, the clouds lift at sunset,' said Mr. Aucrum in an 
 altered tone ; ' the air clears before the night ! ' 
 
 His head fell forward on his breast, and he sat drumming on 
 the table. They had finished supper, the little, bustling land- 
 lady had cleared away, and Davy was thinking of going. Sud- 
 denly the minister sprang up and stood before the fire, looking 
 down at his guest. 
 
 ' Davy, do you want to know why I didn't write to you ? I 
 was ill first — very ill ; then— J?^.'<25 in liell !^ 
 
 David started. Into the thin, crooked face, with the seeking 
 eyes, there had flashed an expression — sinister, indescribable, a 
 sort of dumb rage. It changed the man altogether. 
 
 ' I was in hell ! ' he repeated slowly. ' I know no more about 
 it. Other people may tell you, perhaps, if you come across 
 them— I can't. There were days at Clough End— always a cer- 
 tain number in the year— when this earth slipped away from me, 
 and the fiends came about me, but this was months. They say 
 I was overdone in the cotton famine years ago just before I came 
 to Clough End. I got pneumonia after I left you that May — 
 it doesn't matter. When I knew there was a sun again, I wrote 
 to ask about you. You had left Kinder and gone— no one knew 
 where.' 
 
 David sat nervously silent, not knowing what to say, his mind 
 gradually filling with the sense of something tragic, irreparable. 
 Mr. Ancrum, too, stood straight before him, as though turned to 
 stone. 
 
CHAP. Ill YOUTH 155 
 
 At last David got up and approached him. Had Ancrum been 
 looking he must have been touched by the change in the lad's 
 expression. The hard self-reliant force of the face had melted 
 into feeling. 
 
 ' Are you better now, sir? I knew you must have been ill,' 
 he stammered. 
 
 Ancrum started as though just wakened. 
 
 ' HI ? Yes, I was pretty bad,' he said briskly, and in his most 
 ordinary tone, though with a long breath. ' But I'm as fit as 
 anything now. Good night, Davy, good night. Come a walk 
 with me some day ? Sunday afternoon ? Done. Here, write 
 me your new address.' 
 
 The tall form and curly black head disappeared, the little 
 lodging-house room, with its round rosewood table, its horsehair 
 sofa, its chiffonnier, and its prints of ' Sport at Balmoral ' and 
 ' The Mother's Kiss,' had resumed the dingy formality of every 
 day. 
 
 The minister sank into his seat and held his hands out over 
 the blaze. He was in pain. All life was to him more or less a 
 struggle with physical ill. But it was not so primarily that he 
 conceived it. The physical ill was nothing except as representing 
 a philosophical necessity. 
 
 That lad, with all his raw certainties — of himself, his know- 
 ledge, his Voltaire — the poor minister felt once or twice a piteous 
 envy of him, as he sat on through the night hours. Life was ill- 
 apportioned. The poor, the lonely, the feeble— it is they who 
 want certainty, want hope most. And because they are lonely 
 and feeble, because their brain tissues are diseased, and their 
 life from no fault of their own unnatural, nature who has made 
 them dooms them to despair and doubt. Is there any ' soul,' 
 any ' personality ' for the man who is afflicted and weakened 
 with intermittent melancholia? Where is his identity, where 
 his responsibility ? And if there is none for him, how does the 
 accident of health bestow them on his neighbour ? 
 
 Questions of this sort had beset Richard Ancrum for years. 
 On the little book-table to his right lay papers of Huxley's, of 
 Clifford's, and several worn volumes of mental pathology. The 
 brooding intellect was for ever raising the same problem, the 
 same spectre world of universal doubt, in which God, conscience, 
 faith, were words without a meaning. 
 
 But side by side with the restlessness of the intellect there had 
 always gone the imperious and prevailing claim of temperament. 
 Beside Huxley and Clifford, lay Newman's ' Sermons ' and 
 ' Apologia, ' and a little High Church manual of self-examination. 
 And on the wall above the book-table hung a memorandum-slate 
 on which were a number of addresses and dates — the addresses 
 of some forty boys whom the minister taught on Sunday in one 
 of the Unitarian Sunday schools of Manchester, and visited in 
 the week. The care and training of street arabs had been his 
 
156 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book u 
 
 passion when he was still a student at Manchester New College. 
 Then had come his moment of utterance — a thirst for preaching, 
 for religious influence ; though he could not bring himself to 
 accept any particular shibboleth or take any kind of orders. He 
 found something congenial for a time to a deep though strug- 
 gling faith in the leadership of the Christian Brethren. Now, 
 however, something had broken in him ; he could preach no 
 more. But he could go back to his old school ; he could teach 
 his boys on Sundays and w^eek days ; he could take them out 
 country walks in spite of his lame limb ; he could deny himself 
 even the commonest necessaries of life for their sake ; he could 
 watch over each of them with a fervour, a moral intensity w^hich 
 wore him out. In this, in some insignificant journalism for a 
 religious paper, and in thinking, he spent his life. 
 
 There had been a dark page in his history. He had hardly 
 left Manchester New College when he married suddenly a girl of 
 some beauty, but with an undeveloped sensuous temperament. 
 They were to live on a crust and give themselves to the service 
 of man. His own dream was still fresh when she deserted him 
 in the company of one of his oldest friends. He followed them, 
 found them both in black depths of remorse, and took her back. 
 But the strain of living together proved too much. She implored 
 him to let her go and earn her living apart. She had been a 
 teacher, and she proposed to return to her profession. He saw 
 her established in Glasgow in the house of some good people who 
 knew her history, and who got her a post in a small school. 
 Then he returned to Manchester and threw himself with reckless 
 ardour into the work of feeding the hungry, and nursing the 
 dying, in the cotton famine. He emerged a broken man, physi- 
 cally and morally, liable thenceforward to recurrent crises of 
 melancholia ; but they were not frequent or severe enough to 
 prevent his working. He was at the time entirely preoccupied 
 with certain religious questions, and thankfully accepted the call 
 to the little congregation at Clough End. 
 
 Since then he had visited his wife twice every year. He was 
 extremely poor. His family, who had destined him for the Pres- 
 byterian ministry, were estranged from him ; hardly anyone in 
 Manchester knew him intimately ; only in one house, far away 
 in the Scotch lowlands, were there two people, who deeply loved 
 and thoroughly understood him. There he went when his dark 
 hours came upon him ; and thence, after the terrible illness 
 which overtook him on his leaving Clough End, he emerged 
 again, shattered but indomitable, to take up the battle of life as 
 he understood it. 
 
 He was not an able nor a literary man. His mind was a 
 strange medley, and his mental sight far from clear. Of late 
 the study of Newman had been a revelation to him. But he did 
 not cease for that to read the books of scientific psychology 
 vrhich tortured him — the books which seemed to make of mind a 
 function of matter, and man the slave of an immoral nature. 
 
CHAP. IV YOUTH 157 
 
 The only persistent and original gift in him— yet after all it is 
 the gift which for ever divides the sheep from the goats — was 
 that of a ' hunger and thirst after righteousness.' 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 It was towards noon on a November day, and Dora Lomax sat 
 worlcing at her embroidery frame in the little sitting-room over- 
 looking Market Place. The pale wintry sun touched her bent 
 head, her deftly moving hand, and that device of the risen Christ 
 circled in golden flame on which she was at work. The room in 
 which she sat was old and low ; the ceiling bulged here and there, 
 the floor had unexpected slopes and declivities. The furniture 
 was of the cheapest, the commonest odds and ends of a broker's 
 shop, for the most part. There was the usual horsehair suite, the 
 usual cheap sideboard, and dingy druggeting of a large geomet- 
 rical pattern. But amid these uninviting articles there were a 
 few tnings which gave the room individuality — some old prints 
 of places abroad, of different shapes and sizes, which partly dis- 
 guised the blue and chocolate paper on the walls ; some bits of 
 foreign carving, Swiss and Italian ; some eggs and shells and 
 stuffed birds, some of these last from the Vosges, some from the 
 Alps ; a cageful of canaries, singing their best against the noise 
 of Manchester ; and, lastly, an old bookcase full of miscellaneous 
 volumes, mostly large and worthless ' sets ' of old magazines and 
 encyclopaedias, which represented the relics of Daddy's bookselling 
 days. 
 
 The room smelt strongly of cooking, a mingled odour of 
 boiling greens and frying onions and stored apples which never 
 deserted it, and produced a constant slight sense of nausea in 
 Dora, who, like most persons of sedentary occupation, was in 
 matters of eating and digestion somewhat sensitive and delicate. 
 From below, too, there seemed to spread upwards a general sense 
 of bustle and disquiet. Doors banged, knives and plates rattled 
 perpetually, the great swing-door into the street was for ever 
 opening and shutting, each time shaking the old, frail house with 
 its roughly built additions through and through, and there was 
 a distant skurry of voices that never paused. The restaurant 
 indeed was in full work, and Daddy's voice could be heard at 
 intervals, shouting and chattering. Dora had been at work since 
 half-past seven, marketing, giving orders, making up accounts, 
 writing bills of fare, and otherwise organising the work of the 
 day. Now she had left the work for an hour or two to her father 
 and the stout Lancashire cook with her various handmaidens. 
 Daddy's irritable pride liked to get her out of the way and make 
 a lady of her as much as she would allow, and in her secret heart 
 she often felt that her embroidery, for which she was well paid as 
 a skilled and inventive hand, furnished a securer basis for their 
 lives than this restaurant, which, in spite of its apparent success, 
 
158 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book n 
 
 was a frequent source of dread and discomfort to her. The 
 money obligation it involved filled her sometimes with a kind of 
 panic. She knew her father so well ! 
 
 Now, as she sat absorbed in her work, sewing her heart into 
 it, for every stitch in it delighted not only her skilled artistic 
 sense but her religious feeling, little waves of anxious thought 
 swept across her one after another. She was a person of timid 
 and brooding temperament, and her father's eccentricities and 
 past history provided her with much just cause for worry. But 
 to-day she was not thinking much of him. 
 
 Again and again there came between her and her silks a face, 
 a face of careless pride and power, framed in strong waves of 
 black hair. It had once repelled her quite as much as it attracted 
 her. But at any rate, ever since she had first seen it, it had 
 taken a place apart in her mind, as though in the yielding stuff 
 of memory and feeling one impression out of the thousands of 
 every day had, without warning, yet irrevocably, stamped itself 
 deeper than the rest. The owner of it — David Grieve — filled her 
 now, as always, with invincible antagonisms and dissents. But 
 still the thought of him had in some gradual way become of late 
 part of her habitual consciousness, associated always, and on the 
 whole painfully associated, with the thought of Lucy Purcell. 
 
 For Lucy was such a little goose ! To think of the way in 
 which she had behaved towards young Grieve in the fortnight 
 succeeding his notice to quit, before he finally left Purcell's ser- 
 vice, made Dora hot all over. How could Lucy demean herself 
 so ? and show such tempers and airs towards a man who clearly 
 did not think anything at all about her ? And now she had fiung 
 herself upon Dora, imploring her cousin to help her, and threaten- 
 ing desperate things unless she and David were still enabled to 
 meet. And meanwhile Purcell had flatly forbidden any commu- 
 nication between his household and the young reprobate he had 
 turned out, whose threatened prosperity made at this moment the 
 angry preoccupation of his life. 
 
 What was Dora to do ? Was she to aid and abet Lucy, against 
 her father's will, in pursuing David Grieve ? And if in spite of 
 all appearances the little self-willed creature succeeded, and Dora 
 were the means of her marrying David, how would Dora's con- 
 science stand ? Here was a young man who believed in nothing, 
 and openly said so, who took part in those terrible atheistical 
 meetings and discussions, which, as Father Russell had solemnly 
 said, were like a plague-centre in Manchester, drawing in and 
 corrupting soul after soul. And Dora was to help in throwing 
 her young cousin, while she was still almost a child with no 
 ' Church principles ' to aid and protect her, into the hands of this 
 enemy of the Lord and His Church ? 
 
 Then, when it came to this point, Dora would be troubled and 
 drawn away by memories of young Grieve's talk and ways, of his 
 dashes into Market Place to see Daddy since he had set up for 
 himself, of his bold plans for the future which delighted Daddy 
 
CHAP. IV YOUTH 15d 
 
 and took her breath away ; of the flash of his black eyes ; the 
 triumphant energy of his youth ; and those indications in him, 
 too, which had so startled her of late since they — she and he- 
 had dropped the futile sparrings in which their acquaintance be- 
 gan, of an inner softness, a sensitive magnetic something— inde- 
 scribable. 
 
 Dora's needle paused in mid-air. Then her hand dropped on 
 her lap. A slight but charming smile — born of youth, sympathy, 
 involuntary admiration — dawned on her face. Shs sat so for a 
 minute or two lost in reminiscence. 
 
 The clock outside struck twelve. Dora with a start felt along 
 the edge of her frame under her work and brought out a book. 
 It was" a little black, worn manual of prayers for various times 
 and occasions compiled by a High Church dignitary. For Dora 
 it had a talismanic virtue. She turned now to one of the ' Prayers 
 for Noonday, ' made the sign of the cross, and slipped on to her 
 knees for an instant. Then she rose happily and went back to 
 her work. It was such acts as this that made the thi'ead on which 
 her life of mystical emotion was strung. 
 
 But her father was a Secularist of a pronounced type, and her 
 mother had been a rigid Baptist, old-fashioned and sincere, filled 
 with a genuine horror of Papistry and all its ways. 
 
 Adrian O'Connor Lomax, to give Daddy his whole magnificent 
 name, was the son of a reed-maker, of Irish extraction, at Hyde, 
 and was brought up at first to follow his father's trade — that of 
 making the wire ' reed,' or frame, into which the threads of the 
 warp are fastened before weaving. But such patient drudgery, 
 often continued, as it was in those days, for twelve and fourteen 
 hours out of the twenty-four, was gall and wormwood to a tem- 
 perament like Daddy's. He developed a taste for reading, fell in 
 with Byron's poems, and caught the fever of them ; then branched 
 out into politics just at the time of the first Eeform Bill, when all 
 over Lancashire the memory of Peterloo was still burning, and 
 when men like Henry Hunt and Samuel Bamford were the political 
 heroes of every weaver's cottage. He developed a taste for 
 itinerant lecturing and preaching, and presently left his family 
 and tramped to Manchester. 
 
 Here after many vicissitudes— including an enthusiastic and 
 on the whole creditable participation, as an itinerant lecturer, in 
 the movement for the founding of Mechanics' Institutes, then 
 spreading all over the north — Daddy, to his ill-fortune, came 
 across his future brother-in-law, the bookseller Purcell. At the 
 moment Daddy was in a new and unaccustomed phase of piety. 
 After a period of revolutionary spouting, in which Byron, Tom 
 Paine, and the various publications of Richard Carlile had formed 
 his chief scriptures, a certain Baptist preacher laid hold of the 
 Irishman's mercurial sense. Daddy was awakened and converted, 
 burnt his Byron and his Tom Paine in his three-pair back with 
 every circumstance of insult and contumely, and looked about for 
 
160 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 an employer worthj^ of one of the elect. Purcell at the time had 
 a shop in one of the main streets connecting Manchester and 
 Salford ; he v/as already an elder at the chapel Daddy frequented ; 
 the two made acquaintance and Lomax became Purcell's assistant. 
 At the moment the trade offered to him attracted Daddy vastly. 
 He had considerable pretensions to literature ; was a Shake- 
 spearian, a debater, and a haunter of a certain literary sympo- 
 sium, held for a long time at one of the old Manchester inns, and 
 attended by most of the small wits and poets of a then small and 
 homely town. The gathering had nothing saintly about it ; free 
 drinking went often hand in hand with free thought ; Daddy's 
 infant zeal was shocked, but Daddy's instincts were invincible, 
 and he went. 
 
 The result of the bookselling experiment has been already told 
 by Daddy himself. It was, of course, inevitable. Purcell was 
 then a young man, but in his 'dealings with Daddy he showed 
 precisely the same cast-iron self-importance, the same slowness of 
 brain coupled wdth the same assumptions of an unbounded and 
 righteous authority, the same unregenerate greediness in small 
 matters of gain and loss which now in his later life had made him 
 odious to David Grieve. Moreover, Daddy, by a happy instinct, 
 had at once made common cause with Purcell's downtrodden 
 sister, going on even, as his passionate sense of opposition de- 
 veloped, to make love to the poor humble thing mainly for the 
 sake of annoying the brother. The crisis came ; the irritated 
 tyrant brought down a heavy hand, and Daddy and Isabella 
 disappeared together from the establishment in Chapel Street. 
 
 By the time Daddy had set up as the husband of PurcelFs 
 sister in a little shop precisely opposite to that of his former 
 employer, he had again thrown over all pretensions to sanctity, 
 was, on the contrary, convinced afresh that all religion was one 
 vast perennial imposture, dominated, we may suppose, in this as 
 in most other matters, by the demon of hatred which now 
 possessed him towards his brother-in-law. His wife, poor soul, 
 was beginning to feel herself tied for good to the tail of a comet 
 destined to some mad career or other, and quite uncontrollable by 
 any efforts of hers. Lomax had married her for the most unpro- 
 mising reasons in the world, and he soon tired of her, and of the 
 trade, which required a sustained etfort, w^hich he was incapable 
 of giving. As long as Purcell remained opposite, indeed, hate 
 and rivalry kept him up to the mark. He was an attractive 
 figure at that time, with his long fair hair and his glancing 
 greenish eyes ; and his queer discursive talk attracted many a 
 customer, whom he would have been quite competent to keep had 
 his character been of the same profitable stuff as his ability. 
 
 But when Purcell vanished across the river mto Manchester, 
 the zest of Daddy's bookselling enterprise departed also. He 
 began to neglect his shop, was off here and there lecturing and 
 debating, and when he came back agam it was plain to the wife 
 that their scanty money had been squandered on other excesses 
 
CHAP. lY YOUTH 161 
 
 than those of talk. At last the business fell to ruins, and debts 
 pressed. Then suddenly Daddy was persuaded by a French com- 
 mercial traveller to take up his old trade of reed-making, and go 
 and seek employment across the Channel, where reed-makers 
 were said to be in demand. 
 
 In ecstasy at the idea of travel thus presented to him. Daddy 
 devoured what books about France he could get hold of, and tried 
 to teach himself French. Then one morning, without a word to 
 his wife, he stole downstairs and out of the shop, and was far on 
 the road to London before his flight was discovered. His poor 
 wife shed some tears, but he had ceased to care for her she 
 believed, largely because she had brought him no children, and 
 his habits had begun to threaten to lead her with unpleasant 
 rapidity to the workhouse. So she took comfort, and with the 
 help of some friends set up a little stationery and fancy business, 
 which just kept her alive. 
 
 Meanwhile Lomax found no work in Picardy, whither he had 
 first gone, and ultimately wandered across France to Alsace, in 
 search of bread, a prey to all possible hardships and privations. 
 But nothing daunted him. The glow of adventure and romance 
 was on every landscape. Cathedrals, forests, the wide river-plains 
 of central France, with their lights and distances, — all things on 
 this new earth and under these new heavens ' haunted him like a 
 passion. ' He travelled in perpetual delight, making love no doubt 
 here and there to some passing Mignon, and starving with the 
 gayest of hearts. 
 
 At Mulhausen he found work, and being ill and utterly desti- 
 tute, submitted to it for a while. But as soon as he had got 
 back his health and saved some money, he set out again, walking 
 this time, staff in hand, over the whole Rhine country and into 
 the Netherlands. There in the low Dutch plains he. fell ill again, 
 and the beauty of the Rhineland was no longer there to stand like 
 a spell between him and the pains of poverty. He seemed to come 
 to himself, after a dream in which the world and all its forms had 
 passed him by ' apparelled in celestial light. ' And the process of 
 self -finding was attended by some at least of those salutary pangs 
 which eternally belong to it. He suddenly took a resolution, 
 crept on board a coal smack going from a Dutch port to Grimsby, 
 toiled across Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, and appeared one 
 evening, worn to a shadow, in his wife's little shop in Sal- 
 ford. 
 
 He was received as foolish women in whom there is no ineradi- 
 cable taint of cruelty or hate will always receive the prodigal who 
 returns. And when Daddy had been fed and clothed, he turned 
 out for a time to be so amiable, so grateful a Daddy, such good 
 company, as he sat in the chair by his wife's fire and told stories 
 of his travels to her and anybody else who might drop in, that 
 not only the wife but the neighbourhood was appeased. His old 
 friends came back to him, he began to receive overtures to write 
 in some of the humbler papers, to lecture on his adventures in the 
 
163 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 Yorkshire and LancasMre towns. Daddy expanded, harangued, 
 grew daily in good looks and charm under his wife's eyes. 
 
 At last one day the papers came in with news of Louis 
 Philippe's overthrow. Daddy grew restless, and began to study 
 the foreign news with avidity. Revolution spread, and what with 
 democracy abroad and Chartism at home, there was more stimulus 
 in the air than such brains as Daddy's could rightly stand. One 
 May day he walked into the street, looked hesitatingly up and 
 down it, shading his eyes against the sun. Then with a shake of 
 his long hair, as of one throwing off a weight, he drew his hat 
 from under his arm, put it on, felt in his pockets, and set off at a 
 run, head downwards, while poor Isabella Lomax was sweeping 
 her kitchen. During the next few days he was heard of, rumour 
 said, now here, now there, but one might as well have attempted 
 to catch and hold the Pied Piper. 
 
 He was away for rather more than twenty months. Then one 
 day, as before, a lean, emaciated, sun-browned figure came slowly 
 up the Salford street, looking for a familiar door. It was Daddy. 
 He went into the shop, which was empty, stared, with a counte- 
 nance in which relief and repulsion were oddly mingled, at the 
 boxes of stationery, at the dusty counter with its string and glass 
 cases, when suddenly the inside door, which was standing ajar, 
 was pushed stealthily inwards, and a child stood in the doorway. 
 It was a tottering baby of a year old, holding in one fat hand a 
 crust of bread which it had been sucking. When it saw the 
 stranger it looked at him gravely for a second. Then without a 
 trace of fear or shyness it came forward, holding up its crust 
 appealingly, its rosy chin and lips still covered with bread-crumbs. 
 
 Daddy stared at the apparition, which seemed to him the 
 merest witchcraft. For it was himself, dwarfed to babyhood 
 and pinafores. His eyes, his prominent brow, his colour; his 
 trick of holding the head — they were all there, absurdly there. 
 
 He gave a cry, which was answered by another cry from 
 behind. His wife stood in the door. The stout, foolish Isabella 
 was white to the lips. Even she felt the awe, the poetry of the 
 moment. 
 
 'Aye,' she said, trembling. 'Aye ! it's yourn. It was born 
 seven months after yo left us. ' 
 
 Daddy, without greeting his wife, threw himself down by the 
 babe, and burst into tears. He had come back in a still darker 
 mood than on his first return, his egotistical belief in himself 
 more rudely shaken than ever by the attempts, the failures, the 
 miseries of the last eighteen months. For one illuminating 
 moment he saw that he was a poor fool, and that his youth was 
 squandered and gone. But in its stead, there— dropped suddenly 
 beside him by the forgiving gods — stood this new youth sprung 
 from his, and all his own, this child — Dora. 
 
 He took to her with a passion which the trembling Isabella 
 thought a great deal too excessive to last. But though the 
 natural Daddy very soon reappeared, with all the aggravating 
 
CHAP. IV YOUTH 163 
 
 peculiarities which belonged to him, the passion did last, and the 
 truant strayed no more. He set up a small printing business with 
 the help of some old customers — it was always characteristic of 
 the man that, be his failings what they might, he never lacked 
 friends— and with lecturing and writing, and Isabella's shop, they 
 struggled on somehow. Isabella's Life was hard enough. Daddy 
 was only good when he was happy ; and at other times he dipped 
 recklessly into vices which would have been the ruin of them aU 
 had they been persistent. But by some kind fate he always 
 emerged, and more and more, as years went on, owing to Dora. 
 He drank, but not hopelessly ; he gambled, but not past salvation ; 
 and there was generally, as we have said, some friend at hand to 
 pick the poor besmirched featherbrain out of the mire. 
 
 Dora grew up not unhappily. There were shifts and privations 
 to put up with ; there were stormy days when life seemed a 
 hurricane of words and tears. But there were bright spaces in 
 between, when Daddy had good resolutions, or a little more 
 money than usual ; and with every year the daughter instinctively 
 knew that her speU over her father strengthened. She was on the 
 whole a serious child, with fair pale hair, much given to straying 
 in long loose ends about her prominent brow and round cheeks. 
 Yet at the Baptist school, whither she was sent, she was certainly 
 popular. She had a passion for the little ones ; and her grey-blue 
 eyes, over which in general the fringed lids drooped too much, 
 had a charming trick of sudden smiles, when the soft soul behind 
 looked for an instant clearly and blithely out. At home she was 
 a little round-shouldered drudge in her mother's service. At 
 chapel she sat very patiently and happily under a droning 
 minister, and when the inert and despondent Isabella would have 
 let most of her religious duties drop, in the face of many troubles 
 and a scoffing husband, the child of fourteen gently and persis- 
 tently held her to them. 
 
 At last, however, when Dora was seventeen, Isabella died of 
 cancer, and Daddy, who had been much shaken and terrified by 
 her sufferings in her last illness, fell for a while into an irritable 
 melancholy, from which not even Dora could divert him. It was 
 then that he seemed for the first time to cross the line which had 
 hitherto divided him from ruin. The drinking at the White 
 Horse, where the literary circle met of which Lomax had been 
 so long an ornament, had been of late going from bad to worse. 
 The households of the wits concerned were up in arms ; neigh- 
 bourhood and police began to assert themselves. One night the 
 trembling Dora waited hour after hour for her father. About 
 midnight he staggered in, maddened with drink and fresh from 
 a skirmish with the police. Finding her there waiting for him, 
 pale and silent, he did what he had never done before under any 
 stress of trouble — struck and swore at her. Dora sank down with 
 a groan, and in another minute Lomax was dashing his head 
 against the wall, vowing that he would beat his brains out. In 
 the hours that followed, Dora's young soul was stretched as it 
 
164 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 were on a rack, from whicli it rose, not weakened, but with new 
 powers and a loftier stature. All her girlish levities and illusions 
 seemed to drop away from her. She saw her mission, and took 
 her squalid (Edipus in charge. 
 
 Next morning she went to some of her father's friends, 
 unknown to Daddy, and came back with a light in her blanched 
 face, bearing the offer of some work on a Radical paper at 
 Leicester. Daddy, now broken and miserable, submitted, and 
 off they went. 
 
 At Leicester the change of moral and physical climate produced 
 for a while a wonderful effect. Daddy found himself marvellously 
 at ease among the Secularist and Radical stockingers of the town, 
 and soon became well known to them as a being half butt, half 
 oracle. Dora set herself to learn dressmaking, and did her best 
 to like the new place and the new people. It was at Leicester, a 
 place seething with social experiment in its small provincial way, 
 with secularism, Owenism, anti-vaccination, and much else, that 
 Lomax fell a victim to one 'ism the more — to vegetarianism. It 
 was there that, during an editorial absence, and in the first 
 fervour of conversion. Daddy so belaboured a carnivorous world 
 in the columns of the ' Penny Banner ' for which he worked, and 
 so grotesquely and persistently reduced all the problems of the 
 time to terms of nitrogen and albumen, that curt dismissal came 
 upon him, and for a time Dora saw nothing but her precarious 
 earnings between them and starvation. It was then also that, by 
 virtue of that queer charm he could always exercise when he 
 pleased, he laid hold on a young Radical manufacturer and got 
 out of him a loan of 200Z. for the establishment of a vegetarian 
 restaurant wherein Leicester was to be taught how to feed. 
 
 But Leicester, alas ! remained unregenerate. In the midst of 
 Daddy's preparations a commercial traveller, well known both to 
 Manchester and Leicester, repeated to him one day a remark of 
 Purceirs, to the effect that since Daddy's migration Manchester 
 had been well rid of a vagabond, and he, Purcell, of a family 
 disgrace. Daddy, bursting with fatuous rage, and possessed 
 besides of the wildest dreams of fortune on the strength of his 
 200Z., straightway made up his mind to return to Manchester, 
 'pull Purcell's nose,' and plant himself and his prosperity that 
 was to be in the bookseller's eyes. He broke in upon Dora at 
 her work, and poured into her astonished ears a stream of talk, 
 marked by a mad inventiveness, partly in the matter of vegetarian 
 receipts, still more in that of Purcell's future discomforts. When 
 Daddy was once launched into a subject that suited him, he was 
 inexhaustible. His phrases flowed for ever ; of words he was 
 always sure. , Like a certain French talker, ' his sentences were 
 like cats ; he showered them into air and they found their feet 
 without trouble. ' 
 
 Dora sat through it, bewildered and miserable. Go back to 
 Manchester where they had been so unhappy, where the White 
 
CHAP. IV YOUTH 165 
 
 Horse and its crew were waiting for her father, simply to get 
 into debt and incur final ruin for the sake of a mad fancy she 
 humoured but could not believe in, and a still madder thirst for 
 personal vengeance on a man who was more than a match for 
 anything Daddy could do ! She was in despair. 
 
 But Daddy was obdurate, brutal in his determination to have 
 his way ; and when she angered him with her remonstrances, he 
 turned upon her with an irritable — 
 
 ' I know what it is— damn it ! It's that Puseyite gang you've 
 taken up with — you think of nothing but them. As if you 
 couldn't find antics and petticoats and priests in Manchester — 
 they're everywhere — like weeds. Wherever there's a dunghill of 
 human credulity they swarm. ' 
 
 Dora looked proudly at her father, as though disdaining to 
 reply, gentle creature that she -was ; then she bent again over her 
 work, and a couple of tears fell on the seam she was sewing. 
 
 Aye, it was true enough. In leaving Leicester, after these 
 two years, she was leaving what to her had been a spiritual birth- 
 place, — tearing asunder a new and tender growth of the soul. 
 
 This was how it had come about. 
 
 On her first arrival in Leicester, in a milieu., that is to say, 
 where at the time ' Gavroche,' as M. Kenan calls him — the street 
 philosopher who is no less certain and no more rational than the 
 street preacher — reigned supreme, where her Secularist father 
 and his associates, hot-headed and early representatives of a 
 phase of thought which has since then found much abler, though 
 hardly less virulent, expression in such a paper, say, as the 
 ' National Reformer,' were for ever rending and trampling on all 
 the current religious images and ideas, Dora shrank into herself 
 more and more. She had always been a Baptist because her 
 mother was. But in her deep reaction against her father's asso- 
 ciates, the chapel which she frequented did not now satisfy her. 
 She hungered for she knew not what, certain fastidious artistic 
 instincts awakening the while in unexpected ways. 
 
 Then one Easter Eve, as she came back from an errand into 
 the outskirts of the town, she passed a little iron church standing 
 in a very poor neighbourhood, where, as she knew, a 'Puseyite' 
 curate in charge officiated, and where a good many disturbances 
 which had excited the populace had taken place. She went in. 
 The curate, a long, gaunt figure, of a familiar monkish type, was 
 conducting ' vespers ' for the benefit of some twenty hearers, 
 mostly women in black. The little church was half decorated for 
 Easter, though the altar had still its Lenten bareness. Some- 
 thing in the ordering of the place, in its colours, its scents, in the 
 voice of the priest, in the short address he delivered after the 
 service, dwelling in a tone of intimate emotion, the tone of the 
 pastor to the souls he guides and knows, on the preparation need- 
 ful for the Easter Eucharist, struck home to Dora. Next day she 
 was present at the Easter festival. Never had religion spoken so 
 touchingly to her before as through these hymns, these flowers, 
 
166 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 this incense, this Eucharistic ceremonial wherein — being the mid- 
 day celebration — the congregation were merelj^ hushed spectators 
 of the most pathetic and impressive act in the religious symbol- 
 ism of mankind. In the dark corner where she had hidden her- 
 self, Dora felt the throes of some new birth within her. In six 
 weeks from that time she had been admitted, after instruction, to 
 the Anglican communion. 
 
 Thenceforward another existence began for this child of 
 English Dissent, in whom, however, some old Celtic leaven seems 
 to have always kept up a vague unrest, till the way of mystery 
 and poetry was found. 
 
 Daddy — the infidel Daddy — stormed a good deal, and lament- 
 ed himself still more, when these facts became known to him. 
 Dora had become a superstitious, priest-ridden dolt, of no good to 
 him or anyone else any more. What, indeed, was to become of 
 him? Natural affection cannot stand against the priest. A 
 daughter cannot love her father and go to confession. Down 
 with the abomination — ecrasez Vinfdme ! 
 
 Dora smiled sadly and went her way. Against her sweet 
 silent tenacity Daddy measured himself in vain. She would be a 
 good daughter to him, but she would be a good churchwoman first. 
 He began to perceive in her that germ of detachment from things 
 earthly and human which all ceremonialism produces, and in a 
 sudden terror gave way and opposed her no more. Afterwards, 
 in a curious way, he came even to relish the change in her. The 
 friends it brought her, the dainty ordering of the little flower- 
 decked oratory she made for herself in one corner of her bare 
 attic room, the sweet sobriety and refinement which her new loves 
 and aspirations and self-denials brought with them into the 
 house, touched the poetical instincts which were always dormant 
 in the queer old fellow, and besides flattered some strong and 
 secret ambitions which he cherished for his daughter. It 
 appeared to him to have raised her socially, to have made a lady 
 of her — this joining the Church. Well, the women must have 
 some religious bag or other to run their heads into, and the 
 Church bag perhaps was the most seemly. 
 
 On the day of their return to Manchester, Daddy, sitting with 
 crossed arms and legs in a corner of the railway carriage, might 
 have sat for a fairy-book illustration of Rumpelstiltzchen. His 
 old peaked hat, which he had himself brought from the Tyrol, fell 
 forward over his frowning brow, his cloak was caught fiercely 
 about him, and, as the quickly-passing mill-towns began to give 
 notice of Manchester as soon as the Derbyshire vales were left 
 behind, his glittering eyes disclosed an inward fever — a fever 
 of contrivance and of hate. He was determined to succeed, 
 and equally determined to make his success Purcell's annoy- 
 ance. 
 
 Dora sat opposite, with her bird-cage on her knee, looking sad 
 and weary. She had left behind, perhaps for ever, the dear 
 
CHAP. IV YOUTH 167 
 
 friends who had opened to her the way of holiness, and guided 
 her first steps. Her eyes filled with tears of gratitude and emo- 
 tion as she thought of them. 
 
 Two things only were pleasant to remember. One was that 
 the Church embroidery she had begun in her young zeal at 
 Leicester, using her odds and ends of time, to supplement the 
 needs of a struggling church depending entirely on voluntary 
 contributions, was now probably to become her trade. For she 
 had shown remarkable aptitude for it ; and she carried introduc- 
 tions to a large church- furniture shop in Manchester which would 
 almost certainly employ her. 
 
 The other was the fact that somewhere in Manchester she 
 had a girl-cousin— Lucy Purcell — who must be about sixteen. 
 Purcell had married after his migration to Half Street ; his wife 
 proved to be delicate and died in a few years ; this little girl was 
 all that was left to him. Dora had only seen her once or twice 
 in her life. The enmity between Lomax and Purcell of course 
 kept the families apart, and, after her mother's early death, 
 Purcell sent his daughter to a boarding-school and so washed his 
 hands of the trouble of her bringing up. But in spite of these 
 barriers Dora well remembered a slim, long-armed schoolgirl, 
 much dressed and becurled, who once in a by-street of Salford 
 had run after her and, looking round carefully to see that no one 
 was near, had thrust an eager face into hers and kissed her sud- 
 denly. 'Dora,— is your mother better? I wish I could come 
 and see you. Olu it^'s horrid of people to quarrel ! But I mustn't 
 stay,— some one *1 see, and I should just catch it ! Good-bye, 
 Dora ! ' and so another kiss, very hasty and frightened, but very 
 welcome to the cheek it touched. 
 
 As they neared Manchester, Dora, in her loneliness of soul, 
 thought very tenderly of Lucy— wondered how she had grown up, 
 whether she was pretty and many other things. She had cer- 
 tainly been a pretty child. Of course they must know each other 
 and be friends. Dora could not let her father's feud come 
 between her and her only relation. Purcell might keep them 
 apart ; but she would show him she meant no harm ; and she 
 would bring her father round— she would and must. 
 
 Two years had gone by. Of Daddy's two objects in leaving 
 Leicester, one had so far succeeded better than any rational being 
 would have foreseen. 
 
 On the first morning after their arrival he went out, giving 
 Dora the slip lest she might cramp him inconveniently in his 
 decision ; and came back radiant, having taken a deserted seed- 
 shop in Market Place, which had a long, irregular addition at the 
 back, formerly a warehouse, providentially suited, so Daddy 
 declared, to the purposes of a restaurant. The rent he had 
 promised to give seemed to Dora a crime, considering their 
 resources. The thought of it, the terror of the servants he was 
 engaging, the knowledge of the ridicule and blame with which 
 
168 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 their old friends regarded her father's proceedings, these things 
 kept the girl awake night after night. 
 
 But he would hear no remonstrances, putting all she had to 
 say aside with an arrogant boastfulness, which never failed. 
 
 In they went. Dora set her teeth and did her best, keeping 
 as jealous a watch on the purse-strings as she could, and furnish- 
 ing their three rooms above the shop for as few shillings as might 
 be, while Daddy was painting and decorating, composing menus, 
 and ransacking recipes w^ith the fever of an artist, now writing 
 letters to the Manchester papers, or lecturing to audiences in the 
 Mechanics' Institute and the different working men's clubs, and 
 now plastering the shop-front with grotesque labels, or posing at 
 his own doorway and buttonholing the passers-by in the T}Tolese 
 brigand's costume w^hich was his favourite garb. 
 
 The thing took. There is a certain mixture of prophet and 
 mountebank which can be generally counted upon to hit the 
 popular fancy, and Daddy attained to it. Moreover, the moment 
 was favourable. After the terrible strain of the cotton-famine 
 and the horrors of the cholera, Manchester w^as prosperous again. 
 Trade was brisk, and the passage of the new Reform Bill had 
 given a fresh outlet and impulse to the artisan mind which did 
 but answer to the social and intellectual advance made by the 
 working classes since '32. The huge town was growing fast, was 
 seething with life, with ambitions, with all the passions and 
 ingenuities that belong to gain and money -making and the race 
 for success. It was pre-eminently a city of young men of all 
 nationalities, three-fourths constantly engaged' in the chasse for 
 money, according to their degrees — here for shillings, there for 
 sovereigns, there for thousands. In such a milieu any man has 
 a chance who offers to deal afresh on new terms with those daily 
 needs which both goad and fetter the struggling multitude at 
 every step. Vegetarianism had, in fact, been spreading in Man- 
 chester ; one or two prominent workmen's papers were preaching 
 it ; and just before Daddy's advent there had been a great dinner 
 in a public hall, where the speedy advent of a regenerate and 
 frugivorous mankind, with length of days in its right hand, and 
 a captivating abundance of small moneys in its waistcoat pocket, 
 had been freely and ardently prophesied. 
 
 So Daddy for once seized the moment, and succeeded like the 
 veriest Philistine. On the opening day the restaurant was 
 crowded from morning till night. Dora, with her two cooks in 
 the suffocating kitchen behind, had to send out i\\Q pair of pant- 
 ing, perspiring kitchen-boys again and again for fresh supplies ', 
 while Daddy, at his wits' end for waiters, after haranguing a 
 group of customers on the philosophy of living, amid a tumult of 
 mock cheers and laugliter, would rush in exasperated to Dora, to 
 say that 'necer again would he trust her niggardly ways— she 
 would be the ruin of him with her economies. 
 
 When at night the doors were shut at last on the noise and 
 the crowd, and Daddy sat, with his full cash-box open on his knee, 
 
CHAP IV YOUTH 169 
 
 while the solitary gaslight that remained threw a fantastic and 
 colossal shadow of hini over the rough floor of the restaurant, 
 Dora came up to him dropping with fatigue. He looked at her, 
 his gaunt face working, and burst into tears. 
 
 ' Dora, we never had any money before, not when — when — 
 your mother was alive.' 
 
 And she knew that by a strange reaction there had come 
 suddenly upon him the memory of those ghastly months when 
 she and'he through the long hours of every day had been forced 
 —baffled and helpless— to watch her mother's torture, and when 
 the sordid struggle for daily bread was at its worst, robbing 
 death of all its dignity, and pity of all its power to help. 
 
 Do what she would, she could hardly get him to give up the 
 money and go to bed. He was utterly unstrung, and his triumph 
 for the moment lay bitter in the mouth. 
 
 It was now two years since that opening day. During that 
 time the Parlour had become a centre after its sort — a scandal to 
 some and a delight to others. The native youth got his porridge, 
 and apple pie, and baked potato there ; but the place was also 
 largely haunted by the foreign clerks of Manchester. There was, 
 for instance, a company of young Frenchmen VNho lunched there 
 habitually, and in whose society the delighted Daddy caught 
 echoes from that unprejudiced life of Paris or Lyons, which had 
 amazed and enlightened his youth. The place assumed a stamp 
 and character. To Daddy the development of his own popularity, 
 which was like the emergence of a new gift, soon became a 
 passion. He deliberately ' ran ' his own eccentricities as part of 
 the business. Hence his dress, his menus, his advertisements, 
 and all the various antics which half regaled, half scandalised the 
 neighbourhood. Dora marvelled and winced, and by dint of an 
 habitual tolerance retained the power of stopping some occasional 
 enormitv. 
 
 As to finances, they were not making their fortune ; far from 
 it ; but to Dora's amazement, considering her own inexperience 
 and her father's flightiness, they had paid their way and some- 
 thing more. She was no born woman of business, as any profes- 
 sional accountant examining her books might have discovered. 
 But she had a passionate determination to defraud no one, and 
 somehow, through much toil her conscience did the work. Mean- 
 while every month it astonished her freshly that they two should 
 be succeeding ! Success was so little in the tradition of their 
 tattered and variegated lives. Could it last ? At the bottom of 
 her mind lay a constant presentiment of new change, founded no 
 doubt on her knowledge of her father. 
 
 But outwardly there was little to justify it. The craving for 
 drink seemed to have left him altogether— a not uncommon effect 
 of this particular change of diet. And his hatred of Purcell, 
 though in itself it had proved quite unmanageable by all her arts, 
 had done nobody much harm. In a society dependent on law 
 
170 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book il 
 
 and police there are difficulties in the way of a man's dealing 
 primitively with his enemy. There had been one or two awkward 
 meetings between the two in the open street ; and at the Parlour, 
 among his special intimates, Daddy had elaborated a Purcell 
 myth of a Peeksniffian character which his invention perpetually 
 enriched. On the whole, however, it was in his liking for young 
 Grieve, originally a casual customer at the restaurant, that Dora 
 saw the chief effects of the feud. He had taken the lad up 
 eagerly as soon as he had discovered both his connection with 
 Purcell and his daring rebellious temper ; had backed him up in 
 all his quarrels with his master ; had taken him to the Hall of 
 Science, and introduced him to the speakers there ; and had 
 generally paraded him as a secularist convert, snatched from the 
 very jaws of the Baptist. 
 
 And now ! — now that David was in open opposition, attracting 
 Purceirs customers, taking Purcell's water, Daddy was in a tumult 
 of delight : wheeling off old books of his own, such as ' The Jour- 
 nal of Theology' and the 'British Controversialist,' to fill up 
 David's stall, running down whenever business was slack to see 
 how the lad was getting on ; and meanwhile advertising him with 
 his usual extravagance among the frequenters of the Parlour. 
 
 All through, however, or rather since Miss Purcell had 
 returned from school, Dora and her little cousin Lucy had been 
 allowed to meet. Lomax saw his daughter depart on her visits to 
 Half Street, in silence ; Purcell, when he first recognised her, 
 hardly spoke to her. Dora believed, what was in fact the truth, 
 that each regarded her as a means of keeping an eye on the 
 other. She conveyed information from the hostile camp — there- 
 fore she was let alone. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 ' Why— Lucy ! ' 
 
 Dora was still bending over her work when a well-known tap 
 at the door startled her meditations. 
 
 Lucy put her head in, and, finding Dora alone, came in with a 
 look of relief. Settling herself in a chair opposite Dora, she took 
 off her hat, smoothed the coils of hair to which it had been pinned, 
 unbuttoned the smart little jacket of pilot cloth, and threw back 
 the silk handkerchief inside ; and all with a feverish haste and 
 irritation as though ever}i:hing she touched vexed her. 
 
 ' What's the matter, Lucy ? ' said Dora, after a little pause. 
 At the moment of Lucy's entrance she had been absorbed in a 
 measurement. 
 
 ' Nothing ! ' said Lucy quickly. ' Dora, you've got your hair 
 loose ! ' 
 
 Dora put up her hand patiently. She was accustomed to be 
 put to rights. It was characteristic at once of her dreaminess and 
 her powers of self-discipline that she was fairly orderly, though 
 
CHAP. V 
 
 YOUTH 171 
 
 she had great difficulty in being so. Without a constant struggle, 
 she would have had loose plaits and hanging strings about her 
 always. Lucy's trimness was a perpetual marvel to her. It was 
 like the contrast between the soft indeterminate lines of her 
 charming face and Lucy's small, sharply cut features. 
 
 Lucy, still restless, began tormenting the feather in her 
 hat. 
 
 ' When are you going to finish that, Dora ? ' she asked, nodding 
 towards the frame. 
 
 ' Oh it won't be very long now,' said Dora, putting her head on 
 one side that she might take a general survey, at once loving and 
 critical, of her work. 
 
 'You oughtn't to sit so close at it,' said Lucy decidedly; 
 ' you'll spoil your complexion.' 
 
 'I've none to spoiL' 
 
 ' Oh, yes, you have, Dora— that's so silly of you. You aren't 
 sallow a bit. It's pretty to be pale like that. Lots of people say 
 so— not quite so pale as you are sometimes, perhaps —but I know 
 why that is,' said Lucy, with a half-malicious emphasis. 
 
 A slight pink rose in Dora's cheeks, but she bent over her 
 frame and said nothing. 
 
 'Does your clergyman tell you to fast in Lent, Dora — who 
 tells you ? ' 
 
 ' The Church ! ' replied Dora, scandalised and looking up with 
 bright eyes. ' I wish you understood things a little more, Lucy.' 
 
 ' I can t,' said Lucy, with a pettish sigh, ' and I don't care 
 twopence ! ' 
 
 She threw herself back in her rickety chair. Her arm dropped 
 over the side, and she lay staring at the ceiling. Dora went on 
 with her work in silence for a minute, and then looked up to see 
 a tear dropping from Lucy's cheek on to i^Q horsehair covering 
 of the chair. 
 
 'Lucy, what is the matter?— I knew there was something 
 wrong ! ' 
 
 Lucy sat up and groped energetically for her handkerchief. 
 
 ' You wouldn't care,' she said, her lips quivering—' nobody 
 
 cares 
 
 And, sinking down again, she hid her face and fairly burst 
 out sobbing. Dora, in alarm, pushed aside her frame and tried 
 to caress and console her. But Lucy held her off, and in a second 
 or two was angrily drying her eyes. 
 
 ' Oh, you can't do any good, Dora — not the least good. It's 
 father— you know well enough what it is— I shall never get on 
 with father if I live to be a hundred ! ' 
 
 ' Well, you haven't had long to try in,' said Dora, smiling. 
 
 ' Quite long enough to know,' rephed Lucy, drearily. ' I know 
 I shall have a horrid life— I must. Nobody can help it. Do you 
 know we've got another shopman, Dora ? ' 
 
 The tone of childish scorn she threw into the question was 
 inimitable. Dora with difficulty kept from laughing. 
 
in THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 * Well, what's he like ? ' 
 
 ' Like ? He's like — like nothing,' said Lucy, whose Yocabu- 
 lary was not extensive. ' He's fat and ugly — wears spectacles. 
 Father says he's a treasure — to me — and then when they're in 
 the shop I hear him going on at him like anything for being a 
 stupid. And I have to give the creature tea when father's away. 
 He's so shy he ahvays upsets something. Mary Ann and I have 
 to clear up after him as though he were a school -child. — And 
 father gets in a regular passion if I ask him about the dance — 
 and there's a missionary tea next week, and he's made me take 
 a table — and he wants me to teach in Sunday School — and the 
 minister's wife has been talking to him about my dress — and — 
 and — No, I can''t stand it, Dora — I can't and I won't ! ' 
 
 And Lucy, gulping down fresh tears, sat intensely upright, 
 and looked frowningly at Dora as though defying her to take the 
 matter lightly. 
 
 Dora was perplexed. Deep in her dove-like soul lay the fiercest 
 views about Dissent — that rent in the seamless vesture of Christ, 
 as she had learnt to consider it. Her mother had been a Baptist 
 till her death, she herself till she was grown up. But now she 
 had all the zeal — nay, even the rancour — of the convert. It was 
 one of her inmost griefs that her own change had not come earlier 
 — before her mother's death. Then perhaps her mother, her poor 
 — poor — mother, might have chfinged with her. It went against 
 her to urge Lucy to make herself a good Baptist. 
 
 ' It's no wonder Uncle Tom wants you to do what he likes,' she 
 said slowly. ' But if you don't take to chapel, Lucy — if you want 
 something different, perhaps — ' 
 
 'Oh, I don't want any church, thank you,' cried Lucy, up in 
 arms. ' I don't want anybody ordering me about. Why can't I 
 go my own way a bit, and amuse myself as I please ? It is too, 
 too bad ! ' 
 
 Dora did not know what more to say. She went on with her 
 work, thinking about it all. Suddenly Lucy astonished her by a 
 question in another voice. 
 
 ' Have you seen Mr. Grieve's shop, Dora ? ' 
 
 Dora looked up. 
 
 ' No. Father's been there a good many times. He says it's 
 capital for a beginning and he's sure to get on fast. There's one 
 or two very good sort of customers been coming lately. There's 
 the Earl of Driffield, I think it is — don't you remember, Lucy, it 
 was he gave that lecture with the magic lantern at the Institute 
 you and I went to last summer. He's a queer sort of gentleman. 
 Well, he's been coming several times and giving orders. And 
 there's some of the college gentlemen ; oh, and a lot of others. 
 They all seem to think he's so clever, father says — ' 
 
 * I know the Earl of Driffield quite well,' said Lucy loftily. 
 ' He used to be always coming to our place, and I've tied up his 
 books for him sometimes. I don't see what's the good of being an 
 earl — not to go about like that. And father says he's got a grand 
 
CHAP. V . YOUTH i-ra 
 
 place near Stalybridge too. Well, if he's gone to Mr. Grieve, 
 father '11 be just mad.' Lucy pursed up her small mouth with 
 energy. Dora evaded the subject. 
 
 'He says when he's quite settled,' she resumed presently, 
 ' we're to go and have supper with him for a house-warming. ' 
 
 Lucy looked ready to cry again. 
 
 ' He couldn't ask me — of course he couldn't,' she said, indis- 
 tinctly. ' Dora— Dora ! ' 
 
 ' Well ? Oh, don't mix up my silks, Lucy ; I shall never get 
 them right again. ' 
 
 Lucy reluctantly put them down. 
 
 ' Do you think, Dora, Mr. Grieve cares anything at all about 
 me ? ' she said at last, hurrying out the words, and looking Dora 
 in the face, very red and bold. 
 
 Dora laughed outright. 
 
 ' I knew you were going to ask that ! ' she said. * Perhaps I've 
 been asking myself ! ' 
 
 Lucy said nothing, but the tears dropped again down her 
 cheeks and on to her small quivering hands — all the woman 
 awake in her. 
 
 Dora pushed her frame away, and put her arm round her 
 cousin, quite at a loss what to say for the best. 
 
 Another woman would have told Lucy plumply that she was a 
 little fool ; that in the first place young Grieve had never shown 
 any signs of making love to her at all ; and that, in the second, 
 if he had, her father would never let her marry him without a 
 struggle which nobody could suppose Lucy capable of waging with 
 a man like Purcell. It was all a silly fancy, the whim of a green 
 girl, which would make her miserable for nothing. Mrs. Alderman 
 Head, for instance, Dora's chaperon for the Institute dance, the 
 sensible, sharp-tongued wife of a wholesale stationer in Market 
 Street, would certainly have taken this view of the matter, and 
 communicated it to Lucy with no more demur than if you had 
 asked her, say, for her opinion on the proper season for bottling 
 gooseberries. But Dora, whose inmost being was one tremulous 
 surge of feeling and emotion, could not approach any matter of 
 love and marriage without a thrill, without a sense of tragedy 
 almost. Besides, like Lucy, she was very young still — just twenty 
 — and youth answers to youth. 
 
 ' You know Uncle Tom wouldn't like it a bit, Lucy,' she began 
 in her perplexity. 
 
 ' I don't care ! ' cried Lucy, passionately. ' Girls can't marry 
 to please their fathers. I should have to wait, I suppose. I 
 would get my own way somehow. But what's the good of talking 
 about it, Dora ? I'm sick of thinking about it — sick of everything. 
 He'U marry somebody else — I know he will — and I shall break 
 my heart, or — ' 
 
 'Marry somebody else, too,' suggested Dora slyly. 
 
 Lucy drew herself angrily away, and had to be soothed into 
 forgiving her cousin. The child had, in fact, thought and worried 
 
114: THE HISTORY OF DAVID GlilEVE . book li 
 
 herself by now into such a sincere belief in her own passion, that 
 there was nothing for it but to take it seriously. Dora yielded 
 herself to Lucy's tears and her own tenderness. She sat 
 pondering. 
 
 Then, suddenly, she said something very different from what 
 Lucy expected her to say. 
 
 ' Oh ! if I could get him to go and talk to Father Kussell ! 
 He's so wonderful with young men.' 
 
 Her hand dropped on to her knee ; she looked away from Lucy 
 out of the window, her sweet face one longing. 
 
 Lucy was startled, and somewhat annoyed. In her disgust 
 with her father and her anxiety to attract David's notice, she had 
 so entirely forgotten his religious delinquencies, that it seemed 
 fussy and intrusive on Dora's part to make so much of them. 
 She instinctively resented, too, what sounded to her like a tone of 
 proprietary interest. It was not Dora that was his friend — ^it was 
 she ! 
 
 ' I don't see what you have to do with his opinions, Dora,' she 
 said stiffly ; ' he isn't rude to you now as he used to be. Young 
 men are always wild a bit at first. ' 
 
 And she tossed her head with all the worldly wisdom of 
 seventeen. 
 
 Dora sighed and was silent. She fell to her w^ork again, while 
 Lucy wandered restlessly about the room. Presently the child 
 stopped short. 
 
 ' Oh ! look here, Dora — ' 
 
 'Y^es.' 
 
 * Do come round with me and look at some spring patterns 
 I've got. You might just as well. I know you've been slaving 
 your eyes out, and it's a nice day.' 
 
 Dora hesitated, but finally consented. She had been at work 
 for many hours in hot rooms, and meant to work a good many 
 more yet before night. A break would revive her, and there was 
 ample time before the three o'clock dinner which she and her 
 father took together after the midday rush of the restaurant was 
 over. So she put on her things. 
 
 On their way Dora looked into the kitchen. Everjiihing was 
 in full work. A stout, red-faced w^oman was distributing and 
 superintending. On the long charcoal stove which Daddy under 
 old Barbier's advice had just put up, on the hot plates near, and 
 the glowing range in the background, innumerable pans were 
 simmering and steaming. Here was a table covered with stewed 
 fruits ; there another laden with round vegetable pies just out of 
 the oven — while a heap of tomatoes on a third lent their scarlet 
 to the busy picture. Some rays of wintry sun had slipped in 
 through the high windows, and were contending with the steam 
 of the pies and the smoke from the cooking. And in front of 
 all on an upturned box sat a pair of Lancashire lasses, peeling 
 apples at lightning speed, yet not so fast but they could laugh and 
 chat the while, their bright eyes wandering perpetually through 
 
CHAP. V YOUTH 175 
 
 the open serving hatches which ran along one side of the room, 
 to the restaurant stretching beyond, with its rows of well-filled 
 tables and its passing waitresses in their white caps and aprons. 
 
 Dora slipped in among them in her soft deprecating way, 
 smiling at this one and that till she came to the stout cook. 
 There she stopped and asked something. Lucy, standing at the 
 door, saw the huge woman draw a corner of her apron across her 
 eyes. 
 
 ' What did you want, Dora ? ' she inquired as her cousin re- 
 joined her. 
 
 ' It's her poor boy. He's in the Infirmary and very bad. I'm 
 sure they think he's dying. I wanted to send her there this 
 morning and do her work, but she wouldn't go. There's no more 
 news — but we mustn't be long, ' 
 
 She walked on, evidently thinking with a tender absorption of 
 the mother and son, while Lucy was conscious of her usual im- 
 patience with all this endless concern for unknown people, which 
 stood so much in the way of Dora's giving her full mind to her 
 cousin's affairs. 
 
 Yet, as she knew well, Sarah, the stout cook, had been the 
 chief prop of the Parlour ever since it opened. No other servant 
 had stayed long with Daddy. He was too fantastic and exacting 
 a master. She had stayed — for Dora's sake — and, from bearing 
 with him, had learnt to manage him. When she came she 
 brought with her a sickly, overgrown lad, the only son of her 
 widowhood, to act as kitchen-boy. He did his poor best for a 
 while, his mother in truth getting through most of his work as 
 well as her own, while Dora, who had the weakness for doctoring 
 inherent in all good women, stuffed him with cod-liver oil and 
 ' strengthening mixtures. ' Then symptoms of acute hip-disease 
 showed themselves, and the lad was admitted to the big Infirmary 
 in Piccadilly. There he had lain for some six or eight weeks now, 
 toiling no more, fretting no more, living on his mother's and 
 Dora's visits, and quietly loosening one life-tendril after another. 
 During all this time Dora had thought of him, prayed for him, 
 taught him — the wasted, piteous creature. 
 
 When they arrived at Half Street, they let themselves in by 
 the side-door, and Lucy hurried her cousin into the parlour that 
 there might be no meeting with her father, with whom she was on 
 decidedly uncomfortable terms. 
 
 The table in the parlour was strewn with patterns from several 
 London shops. To send for them, examine them, and imagine 
 what they would look like when made up was now Lucy's chief 
 occupation. To which might be added a little strumming on the 
 piano, a little visiting — not much, for she hated most of her 
 father's friends, and was at present too closely taken up with self- 
 pity and speculations as to what David Grieve might be doing to 
 make new ones — and a great deal of ordering about of Mary 
 Ann. 
 
176 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 Dora sat down, and Lucy pounced on one pattern after 
 another, folding them between her fingers and explaining eagerly 
 how this or that would look if it were cut so, or trimmed so. 
 
 ' Oh, Dora, look — this pink gingham with white spots ! Don't 
 you think it's a love? And, you know, pink always suits me, 
 except when it's a blue-pink. But you don't call that a blue- 
 pink, do you ? And yet it isn't salmon, certainly— it's something 
 between. It ought to suit me, but I declare—' and suddenly, to 
 Dora's dismay, the child flung down the patterns she held with a 
 passionate vehemence — ' I declare nothing seems to suit me now ! 
 Dora ! ' — in a tone of despair — ' Dora ! don't you think I'm going 
 off? My complexion's all dull, and— and — why I might be 
 thirty ! ' and running over to the glass, draped in green cut-paper, 
 which adorned the mantelpiece, Lucy stood before it examining 
 herself in an agony. And, indeed, there was a change. A touch 
 of some withering blight seemed to have swept across the whole 
 dainty face, and taken the dewy freshness from the eyes. There 
 was fever in it — the fever of fret and mutiny and of a starved 
 self-love. 
 
 Dora looked at her cousin with less patience than usual — 
 perhaps because of the inevitable contrast between Lucy's posings 
 and the true heartaches of the world. 
 
 ' Lucy, what nonsense ! You're just a bit worried, and you 
 make such a lot of it. Why can't you be patient ? ' 
 
 ' Because I can't ! ' said Lucy, sombrely, dropping into a chair, 
 and letting her arm fall over the back. ' It's aU very well, Dora. 
 You aren't in love with a man whom you never see, and whom 
 your father has a spite on ! And you won't do anything to help 
 me — you won't move a finger. And, of course, you might ! ' 
 
 ' What could I do, Lucy ? ' cried Dora, exasperated. ' I can't 
 go and ask young Grieve to marry you. I do wish you'd try and 
 put him out of your head, that I do. You're too young, and he's 
 got his business to think about. And while Uncle Tom's like 
 this, I can't be always putting myself forward to help you meet 
 him. It would be just the way to make him think something bad 
 — to make him suspect — ' 
 
 ' Well, and why shouldn't he suspect ? ' said Lucy, obstinately, 
 
 her little mouth set and hard ; ' it's all rubbish about girls leaving 
 
 it all to the men. If a girl doesn't show she cares about a man, 
 
 -how's he to know— and when she don't meet him— and when her 
 
 father keeps her shut up — shameful ! ' 
 
 She flung the word out through her small, shut teeth, the 
 brows meeting over her flashing eyes. 
 
 * Oh ! it's shameful, is it — eh. Miss Purcell ? ' said a harsh, 
 mimicking voice coming from the dark passage leading into the 
 shop. 
 
 Lucy sprang up in terror. There on the steps stood her 
 father, bigger, blacker, more formidable than he had ever been in 
 the eyes of the two startled girls. All unknown to them, the two 
 doors which parted them from the shop had been slightly ajar, 
 
CHAP. V YOUTH 177 
 
 and Purcell, catching their voices as they came in, and already on 
 the watch for his daughter, had maintained a treacherous quiet 
 behind them. Now he was entirely in his element. He surveyed 
 them both with a dark, contemptuous triumph. What fools 
 women were to be sure ! 
 
 As he descended the two steps into the parlour the floor shook 
 under his heavy tread. Dora had instinctively thrown her arm 
 round Lucy, who had begun to cry hysterically. She herself was 
 very pale, but after the first start she looked her uncle in the 
 face. 
 
 ' Is it you that's been teaching Lucy these beautiful senti- 
 ments ? ' said Purcell, with ironical emphasis, stopping a yard 
 from them and pointing at Dora, ' and do you get 'em from St. 
 Damian's ? ' 
 
 Dora threw up her head, and flushed. ' I get nothing from 
 St. Damian's that I'm ashamed of,' she said in a proud voice, 
 ' and I've done nothing with Lucy that I'm ashamed of.' 
 
 ' No, I suppose not,' said Purcell dryly ; 'the devil don't deal 
 much in shame. It's a losing article. ' 
 
 Then he looked at Lucy, and his expression suddenly changed. 
 The flame beneath leapt to sight. He caught her arm, dragged 
 her out of Dora's hold, and shook her as one might shake a 
 kitten. 
 
 ' Who were you talking of just now ? ' he said to her, holding 
 her by both shoulders, his eyes blazing down upon her. 
 
 Lucy was much too frightened to speak. She stood staring 
 back at him, her breast heaving violently. 
 
 Dora came forward in indignation. 
 
 ' You'll get nothing out of her if you treat her like that,' she 
 said, with spirit, ' nor out of me either. ' 
 
 Purcell recovered himself with difficulty. He let Lucy go, and 
 walking up to the mantelpiece stood there, leaning his arm upon 
 it, and looking at the girls from under his hand. 
 
 ' What do I want to get out of you ? ' he said, with scorn. 
 ' As if I didn't know already everything that's in your silly 
 minds ! I guessed already, and now that you have been so 
 obliging as to let your secrets out under my very nose — I know ! 
 That chit there ' — he pointed to Lucy — all his gestures had a 
 certain theatrical force and exaggeration, springing, perhaps, 
 from his habit of lay preaching—' imagines she going to marry 
 the young infidel I gave the sack to a while ago. Now don't she ? 
 Are you going to say no to that ? ' 
 
 His loud challenge pushed Dora to extremities, and it was all 
 left to her. Lucy was sobbing on the sofa. 
 
 ' I don't know what she imagines,' said Dora, slowly, seeking 
 in vain for words ; the whole situation was so ridiculous. ' Are 
 you going to prevent her falling in love with the man she 
 chooses ? ' 
 
 ' Certainly ! ' said Purcell, with mocking emphasis. ' Cer- 
 tainly — since she chooses wrong. The only concern of the godly 
 
178 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book il 
 
 in these matters is to see that their children are not yoked with 
 unbelievers. Whenever I see that young reprobate in the street 
 now, I smell the pit. And it'll not be long before the Lord 
 tumbles him into it ; there's an end comes to such devil's fry as 
 that. Oh, they may prosper and thrive, they may revile the 
 children of the Lord, they may lift up the hoof against the poor 
 Christian, but the time comes— the time comes.' 
 
 His solemnity, at once unctuous and full of vicious meaning, 
 only irritated Dora. But Lucy raised herself from the sofa, and 
 looked suddenly round at her father. Her eyes were streaming, 
 her hair in disorder, but there was a suspicion and intelligence in 
 her look which seemed to give her back self-control. She watched 
 eagerly for what her father might say or do next. 
 
 As soon as he saw her sitting up he walked over to her and 
 took her again by the shoulder. 
 
 ' Now look here,' he said to her, holding her tight, ' let's finish 
 mth this. That young man's the Lord's enemy— he's my enemy 
 —and I'll teach him a lesson before I've done. But that's neither 
 here nor there. You understand this. If you ever walk out of 
 this door with him, you'll not walk back into it, with him or 
 without him. I'd have done with you, and my money 'Id have 
 done with you. But there '—and Purcell gave a little scornful 
 laugh, and let her go with a push—' he don't care twopence about 
 you — I'll say that for him.' 
 
 Lucy flushed fiercely, and getting up began mechanically to 
 smooth her hair before the glass, with wild tremulous move- 
 ments, will and defiance settling on her lip, as she looked at 
 herself and at the reflection of her father. 
 
 'And as for you. Miss Lomax,' said Purcell deliberately, 
 standing opposite Dora, ' you've been aiding and abetting some- 
 how—I don't care how. I don't complain. There was nothing 
 better to be expected of a girl with your parentage and bringing 
 up, and a Puseyite into the bargain. But I warn you you'll go 
 meddling here once too often before you've done. If you'll take 
 my advice you'll let other people's business alone, and mind your 
 own. Them that have got Adrian Lomax on their hands needn't 
 go poaching on their neighbours for something to do.' 
 
 He spoke with a slow, vindictive emphasis, and Dora shrank 
 and quivered as though he had struck her. Then by a great 
 effort— the effort of one who had not gone through a close and 
 tender training of the soul for nothing— she put from her both 
 her anger and her fear. 
 
 'You're cruel to father,' she said, her voice fluttering ; 'you 
 might be thinking sometimes how straight he's kept since he took 
 the Parlour. And I don't believe young Grieve means any harm 
 to you or anybody — and I'm sure I don't.' 
 
 A sob rose in her throat. Anybody less crassly armoured in 
 self-love than Purcell must have been touched. As for him, he 
 turned on his heel. 
 
 ' ril protect myself, thank you,' he said dryly ; ' and I'll judge 
 
CHAP. V YOUTH 179 
 
 for myself. You can do as you like, and L^acy too, so long as she 
 takes the consequences. Do you understand, Lucy ? ' 
 
 ' Yes,' said Lucy, facing round upon him, all tremulous passion 
 and rebellion, but she could not meet his fixed, tyrannical eye. 
 Her own wavered and sank. Purcell enjoyed the spectacle of her 
 for a second or two, smiled, and went. 
 
 As soon as he was gone, Lucy dragged her cousin to the stairs, 
 and never let her go till Dora was safe in her room and the door 
 bolted. 
 
 Dora implored to be released. How could she stay in her 
 uncle's house after such a scene ? and she must get home quickly 
 anyway, as Lucy knew. 
 
 Lucy took no notice at all of what she was saying. 
 
 'Look here,' she said, breaking into the middle of Dora's 
 appeal, and speaking in an excited whisper—' he's going to do 
 him a mischief. I'm certain he is. That's how he looks when 
 he's going to pay some one out. Now, what's he going to do ? 
 I'll know somehow — trust me ! ' 
 
 She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her arms behind her, 
 supporting her, her little feet beating each other restlessly — a hot, 
 vindictive anger speaking from every feature, every movement. 
 The pretty chit of seventeen seemed to have disappeared. Here 
 was every promise of a wilful and obstinate woman, with more of 
 her father's stuff in her than anyone could have yet surmised. 
 
 A pang rose in Dora. She rose impulsively, and throwing 
 herself down by Lucy, drew the ruffled, palpitating creature into 
 her arms. 
 
 ' Oh, Lucy, isn't it only because you're angry and vexed, and 
 because you want to fight Uncle Purcell ? Oh, don't go on just 
 for that ! When we're — we're Christians, we mustn't want our 
 own way — we must give it up — we must give it up.'' Her voice 
 sank in a burst of tears, and she drooped her head on Lucy's, 
 kissing her cousin's brown hair. 
 
 Lucy extricated herself with a movement of impatience. 
 
 'When one loves anybody,' she said, sitting very upright and 
 twisting her fingers together, ' one must stick to him ! ' 
 
 Dora started at the word ' love. ' It seemed to her a profa- 
 nation. She dried her eyes, and got up to go without another 
 word. 
 
 ' Well, Dora,' said Lucy, frowning, ' and so you'll do nothing 
 for me — nothing f ' 
 
 Dora stood a moment in a troubled silence. Then she turned, 
 and took gentle hold of her cousin. 
 
 ' If I get a chance, Lucy, I'll try and find out whether he's 
 thinking of marrying at all. And if he isn't--and I'm sure he 
 isn't — will you give it all up, and try and live comfortable with 
 Uncle Purcell, and think of something else ? ' 
 
 Her eyes had a tender, nay a passionate entreaty in them. 
 
 ' No ! ' said Lucy with energy ; ' but I'll very likely drown 
 myself in the river some fine night.' 
 
180 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 Dora still held her, standing above her, and looking down at 
 her, trying hard to read her true mind. Lucy bore it defiantly 
 for a minute ; then suddenly two large tears rose. A quiver 
 passed over Dora's face ; she kissed her cousin quickly, and went 
 towards the door. 
 
 ' And I'll find out what father's going to do, or my name isn't 
 what it is ! ' said the girl behind her, in a shrill, shaking voice, as 
 she closed the door. 
 
 Dora ran back to Market Place, filled with a presentiment 
 that she was late, though the hand of the Cathedral clock was 
 still far from three. 
 
 At the side door stood a woman with a shawl over her head, 
 looking distractedly up the street. 
 
 ' Oh, Miss Dora ! Miss Dora ! they've sent. He's gooin— 
 gooin quick. An' he keeps wearyin' for ' ' mither an' Miss Dora. " ' 
 
 The powerful scarred face had the tremulous helplessness of 
 grief. Dora took her by the arm. 
 
 ' Let us run, Sarah— at once. Oh, never mind the work ! ' 
 
 The two women hurried through the crowded Saturday streets. 
 But halfway up Market Street Sarah stopped short, looking round 
 her in an agony. 
 
 ' Theer's his feyther. Miss Dora. Oh, he wor a bad 'un to me, 
 but he had alius a soft spot for t' lad. I'd be reet glad to send 
 worrud. He wor theer in the ward, they tell't me, last week.' 
 
 Three years before she had separated from her husband, a 
 sawyer, by mutual consent. He was younger than she, and he 
 had been grossly unfaithful to her ; she came of a good country 
 stock and her daleswoman's self-respect could put up with him no 
 longer. But she had once been passionately in love with him, 
 and, as she said, he had been on the whole kind to the boy. 
 
 ' Where is he ? ' said Dora. 
 
 ' At Mr. Whitelaw's yard, Edgell Street, Great Ancoats.' 
 
 They had just entered the broad Infirmary Square. Dora, 
 looking round her in perplexity, suddenly saw coming towards 
 them the tall figure of David Grieve. The leap of the heart of 
 which she was conscious through all her preoccupation startled 
 her. But she went up to him without a moment's hesitation. 
 David, swinging along as though Manchester belonged to him, 
 found himself arrested and, looking down, saw Dora's pale and 
 agitated face. 
 
 ' Mr. Grieve, will you help me ? ' 
 
 She drew him to the side and explained as quickly as she could. 
 Sarah stood by, and threw in directions. 
 
 ' He'll be to be found at Mr. Whitelaw's yard— Edgell Street— 
 an' whoever goos mun just say to him, " Sarah says to tha — "Wilt 
 tha coom, or wilt tha not coom ? — t' lad's deein." ' 
 
 She threw out the words with a sombre simplicity and force, 
 then, her whole frame quivering with impatience, she crossed the 
 road to the Infirmary without waiting for Dora. 
 
CHAP. V YOUTH 181 
 
 ' Can you send some one ? ' said Dora. 
 
 ' I will go myself at once. I'll find the man if he's there, and 
 bring him. You leave it to me.' 
 
 He turned without more ado, broke into a run, and disappeared 
 round tlie corner of Oldham Street. 
 
 Dora crossed to the Infirmary, her mind strangely divided for 
 a moment between the solemn image of what was coming, and the 
 vibrating memory of something just past. 
 
 But, once in the great ward, pity and death possessed her 
 wholly. He knew them, the poor lad — made, as it seemed, two 
 tremulous movements, — once, when his mother's uncontrollable 
 crying passed into his failing ear — once when Dora's kiss was laid 
 upon his hollow temple. Then again he lay unconscious, drawing 
 gently to the end. 
 
 Dora knelt beside him praying, his mother on the other side, 
 and the time passed. Then there were sounds about the bed, and 
 looking up, Dora saw two figures approaching. In front was a 
 middle-aged man, with a stupid, drink-stained face. He came 
 awkwardly and unsteadily up to the bedside, almost stumbling 
 over his wife, and laying his hand on the back of a chair to 
 support himself. He brought with him an overpowering smell of 
 beer, and Dora thought as she looked at him that he had only a 
 very vpgue idea of what was going on. His wife took no notice 
 of him whatever. 
 
 Behind at some little distance, his hat in his hand, stood David 
 Grieve. Why did he stay ? Dora could not get him out of her 
 «iind. Even in her praying she still saw the dark, handsome 
 nead and lithe figure thrown out against the whiteness of the 
 hospital walls. 
 
 There was a slight movement in the bed, and the nurse, 
 standing beside the boy, looked up and made a quick sign to the 
 mother. What she and Dora saw was only a gesture as of one 
 settling for sleep. Without struggle and without fear, the little 
 lad who had never lived enough to know the cost of dying, went 
 the way of all flesh. 
 
 ' They die so easily, this sort,' said the nurse to Dora, as she 
 tenderly closed the patient eyes ; ' it's like a plant that's never 
 rooted.' 
 
 A few minutes later Dora was blindly descending the long 
 stairs. The mother was still beside her dead, making arrange- 
 ments for the burial. The father, sobered and conscious, had 
 already slouched away. But at the foot of the stairs Dora, 
 looking round, saw that David was just behind her. 
 
 He came out with her. 
 
 'He was drunk when I found him,' he explained, 'he had 
 been drinking in the dinner hour. I had him by the arm all the 
 way, and thought I had best bring him straight in. And then— 
 I had never seen anyone die,' he said simply, a curious light in 
 his black eyes. 
 
182 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 Dora, still choked with tears, could not speak. With shaking 
 hands she searched for a bit of veil she had with her to hide her 
 eyes and cheeks. But she could not find it. 
 
 ' Don't go down Market Street, ' he said, after a shy look at 
 her. ' Come this way, there isn't such a crowd.' 
 
 And turning down Mosley Street, all the way he guided her 
 through some side streets where there were fewer people to stare. 
 Such forethought, such gentleness in him were quite new to her. 
 She gradually recovered herself, feeling all the while this young 
 sympathetic presence at her side— dreading lest it should desert 
 her. 
 
 He meanwhile was still under the tremor and awe of the new 
 experience. So this was dying ! He remembered 'Lias holding 
 Margaret's hand. ' Beein 's long — but iVs varra, varra peaceful. ' 
 Not always, surely ! There must be vigorous, tenacious souls that 
 went out with tempests and agonies ; and he was conscious of a 
 pang of fear, feeling himself so young and strong. 
 
 Presently he led her into 3t. Ann's Square, and then they 
 shook hands. He hurried off to his business, and she remained 
 standing a moment on the pavement outside the church which 
 makes one side of the square. An impulse seized her — she turned 
 and went into the church instead of going home. 
 
 There, in one of the old oak pews where the little tarnished 
 plates still set forth the names of their eighteenth-century 
 owners, she fell on her knees and wrestled with lierself and God. 
 
 She was very simple, very ignorant, but religion, as religion 
 can, had dignified and refined all the elements of character. She 
 said to herself in an agony — that he must love her — that she had 
 loved him in truth all along. And then a great remorse came 
 upon her — the spiritual glory she had just passed through closed 
 round her again. What ! she could see the heaven opened — the 
 Good Shepherd stoop to take his own — and then come away to 
 feel nothing but this selfish, passionate craving? Oh, she was 
 ashamed, she loathed herself ! 
 
 Lucy ! — Lucy had no claim ! should have no claim ! He did 
 not care for her. 
 
 Then again the pale dead face would flash upon her with its 
 submissive look, — so much gratitude for so little, and such a 
 tender ease in dying ! And she possessed by all these bad and 
 jealous feelings, these angry desires, fresh from such a presence ! 
 
 ' Oil ! Lamb ofOod — Lamb of God — that takest away the sins 
 of the world ! ' 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 And David, meanwhile, was thinking of nothing in the world but 
 the fortunes of a little shop, about twelve feet square, and of the 
 stall outside that shop. The situation— for a hero — is certainly 
 one of the flattest conceivable. Nevertheless it has to be faced. 
 
CHAP. VI 
 
 YOUTH 183 
 
 If, however, one were to say that he had marked none of Lucy 
 Purceirs advances, that would be to deny him eyes as well as 
 susceptibilities. He had, indeed, said to himself in a lordly way 
 that Lucy Purcell was a regular little flirt, and was beginning 
 those ways early. But a certain rough young modesty, joined 
 with a sense of humour at his own expense, prevented him from 
 making any more of it, and he was no sooner in his own den 
 watching for customers than Lucy vanished from his mind alto- 
 gether. He thought much more of Purcell himself, with much 
 vengeful chuckling and speculation. 
 
 As for Dora, he had certainly begun to regard her as a friend. 
 She had sense and experience, in spite of her Ritualism, whereas 
 Lucy in his eyes had neither. So that to run into the Parlour, 
 after each new day was over, and discuss with Daddy and her the 
 ups and downs, the fresh chances and prospects of his infant 
 business, was pleasant enough. Daddy and he met on the com- 
 mon ground of wishing to make the world uncomfortable for 
 Purcell ; while Dora supplied the admiring uncritical wonder, in 
 which, like a warm environment, an eager temperament expands, 
 and feels itself under the stimulus more inventive and more 
 capable than before. 
 
 But marrying ! The lad's careless good-humoured laugh 
 under Ancrum's probings was evidence enough of how the land 
 lay. Probably at the bottom of him, if he had examined, there 
 lay the instinctive assumption that Dora was one of the girls who 
 are not likely to marry. Men want them for sisters, daughters, 
 friends— and then go and fall in love with some minx that has a 
 way with her. 
 
 Besides, who could be bothered with ' gells,' when there was 
 a stall to be set out and a career to be made ? With that stall, 
 indeed, David was truly in love. How he fingered and meddled 
 with it !— setting out the cheap reprints it contained so as to 
 show their frontispieces, and strewing among them, in an artful 
 disorder, a few rare local pamphlets, on which he kept a careful 
 watch, either from the door or from inside. Behind these, again, 
 within the glass, was a precious shelf, containing in the middle 
 of it about a dozen volumes of a kind dear to a collector's eye- 
 chin volumes in shabby boards, then just beginning to be sought 
 •ifter— the first editions of nineteenth-century poets. For months 
 past David had been hoarding up a few in a corner of his little 
 lodging, and on his opening day they decoyed him in at least five 
 inquiring souls, all of whom stayed to talk a bit. There was a 
 'Queen Mab,' and a 'Lyrical Ballads;' an 'Endymion ; ' a f ew 
 Landors thrown in, and a ' Bride of Abydos '—this last not of 
 much account, for its author had the indiscretion, from the col- 
 lector's point of view, to be famous from the beginning, and so to 
 flood the world with large editions. 
 
 Round and about these dainty morsels were built in with solid 
 rubbish, with Daddy's 'Journals of Theology,' 'British Contro- 
 versialist,' and the rest. In one top corner lurked a few battered 
 
i84 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 and cut-down Elzevirs, of no value save to the sentiment of the 
 window, while a good many spaces were filled up with some new 
 and attractive editions of standard books just out of copyright, 
 contributed, these last, by the enterprising traveller of a popular 
 firm, from whom David had them on commission. 
 
 Inside, the shop w^as of the roughest : a plank or two on a 
 couple of trestles served for a counter, and two deal shelves, put 
 up by David, ran along the wall behind. The counter held a few 
 French scientific books, very fresh, and 'in the movement,' the 
 result of certain inquiries piit by old Barbier to a school friend of 
 his, now professor at the Sorbonne — meant to catch the ' college 
 people ; ' while on the other side lay some local histories of neigh- 
 bouring towns and districts, a sort of commodity always in 
 demand in a great expanding city, where new men have risen 
 rapidly and families are in the making. For these local books 
 the lad had developed an astonishing flair. He had the geo- 
 graphical and also the social instincts which the pursuit of them 
 demands. 
 
 On his first day David netted in all a profit of seventeen 
 shillings and twopence, and at night he curled himself up on a 
 mattress in the little back kitchen, with an old rug for covering 
 and a bit of fire, and slept the sleep of liberty. 
 
 In a few days more several of the old-established book-buyers 
 of the town, a more numerous body, perhaps, in Manchester than 
 in other northern centres, had found him out ; a certain portly 
 and wealthy lady, connected with one of the old calico-printing 
 families, a person of character, who made a hobby of Lancashire 
 Nonconformity, had walked into the shop, and given the boyish 
 owner of it much good advice and a few orders ; the Earl of 
 Driffield had looked in, and, caught by the lures of the stall, 
 customers had come from the most unlikely quarters, desiring 
 the most heterogeneous wares. The handsome, intelligent young 
 fellow, with his out-of-the-way strains of knowledge, with his 
 frank self-conceit and his equally frank ignorance, caught the 
 fancy of those who stayed to talk with him. A certain number 
 of persons had been already taken mth him in PurcelPs shop, and 
 were now vastly amused by the lad's daring and the ambitious 
 range of his first stock. 
 
 As for Lord Driffield, on the first occasion when he had 
 dropped in he had sat for an hour at least, talking and smoking 
 cigarettes across David's primitive counter. 
 
 This remarkable person, of whom Lucy thought so little, was 
 well known, and had been well known, for a good many years, 
 to the booksellers of Manchester and Liverpool. As soon as the 
 autumn shooting season began, Purcell, for instance, remembered 
 Lord Driffield, and began to put certain books aside for him. He 
 possessed one of the famous libraries of England, and he not 
 only owned but read. Scholars all over Europe took toll both of 
 his books and his brains. He lived to collect and to be consulted. 
 There was almost nothing he did not know, except how to make 
 
CHAP. Yi YOUTH 185 
 
 a book for himself. He was so learned that he had, so to speak, 
 worked through to an extreme modesty. His friends, however, 
 found nothing in life so misleading as Lord DrifReld's diffidence. 
 At the same time Providence had laid upon him a vast family 
 estate, and an aristocratic wife, married in his extreme youth to 
 please his father. Lady Driffield had the ideas of her caste, and 
 wlien they came to their great house near Stalybridge, in the 
 autumn, she insisted on a succession of proper guests, who would 
 shoot the grouse in a proper manner, and amuse her in the 
 evenings. For, as she had no children, life was often monoto- 
 nous, and when she was bored she had a stately way of making 
 herself disagreeable to Lord Driffield. He therefore did his best 
 to content her. He received her guests, dined with them in the 
 evenings, and despatched them to the moors in the morning. 
 But between those two functions he was his own master ; and on 
 the sloppy November afternoons he might as often as not be seen 
 trailing about Manchester or Liverpool, carrying his slouching 
 shoulders and fair spectacled face into every bookseller's shop, 
 good, bad, and indifferent, or giving lectures, mostly of a geo- 
 graphical kind, at popular institutions — an occupation in which 
 he was not particularly effective. 
 
 David had served him, once or twice, in Half Street, and had 
 sent a special notice of his start and his intentions to Benet's 
 Park, the Driffields' 'place.' Lord Driffield's first visit left him 
 quivering with excitement, for the earl had a way of behaving as 
 though everybody else were not only his social, but his intellectual 
 equal— even a lad of twenty, with his business to learn. He 
 would sit pleasantly smoking and asking questions— a benevolent, 
 shabby person, eager to be informed. Then, when David had 
 fallen into the trap, and was holding forth— proud, it might be, 
 of certain bits of knowledge which no one else in Manchester 
 possessed — Lord Driffield would throw in a gentle comment, and 
 then another and another, till the trickle became a stream, and 
 the young man would fall blankly listening, his mouth opening 
 wider and wider. When it was over, and the earl, with his 
 draggled umbrella, had disappeared, David sat, crouched on his 
 wooden stool, consumed with hot ambition and wonder. How 
 could a man know so much— and an earl, who didn't want it ? 
 For a few hours, at any rate, his self-conceit was dashed. He 
 realised dimly what it might be to know as the scholar knows. 
 And that night, when he had shut the shutters, he vowed to him- 
 self, as he gathered his books about him, that five hours was 
 enough sleep for a strong man ; that learn he must and should, 
 and that some day or other he would hold his own, even with 
 Lord Driffield. 
 
 How he loved his evenings— the paraffin lamp glaring beside 
 him, the crackling of the coal in his own fire, the book on his 
 knee ! Ancrum had kept his promise, and was helping him with 
 his Greek ; but his teaching hardly kept pace with the boy's 
 enthusiasm and capacity. The voracity with which he worked at 
 
186 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 his Thucydides and Homer left the lame minister staring and 
 sighing. The sound of the lines, the roll of the of s and ou's was 
 in David's ear all day, and to learn a dozen irregular verbs in 
 the interval between two customers was like the gulping of a 
 dainty. 
 
 Meanwhile, as he collected his English poets he read them. 
 And here was a whole new world. For in his occupation with 
 the Encyclopaedists he had cared little for poetry. The reaction 
 against his Methodist fit had lasted long, had developed a certain 
 contempt for sentiment, a certain love for all sharp, dry, calcu- 
 lable things, and for the tone of iro7ii/ in particular. But in such 
 a nature such a phase was sure to pass, and it was passing. 
 Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson — now he w^as making 
 acquaintance piecemeal with them all, as the precious volumes 
 turned up, which he was soon able to place with a precision which 
 tore them too soon out of his hands. The Voltairean temper in 
 him was melting, was passing into something warmer, subtler, 
 and more restless. 
 
 But he was not conscious of it. He was as secular, as cocksure, 
 as irritating as ever, when Ancrum probed him on the subject of 
 the Hall of Science or the various Secularist publications which he 
 supported. 
 
 ' Do you call yourself an atheist now, David ? ' said Ancrum 
 one day, in that cheerful, half -ironic tone which the young book- 
 seller resented. 
 
 'I don't call myself anything,' said David, stoutly. 'I'm all 
 for this world ; we can't know anything about another. At least, 
 that's my opinion, sir — no offence to you.' 
 
 ' Oh, dear me, no offence ! There have been a few philoso- 
 phers, you know, Davy, since Voltaire. There's a person called 
 Kant ; I don't know anything about him, but they tell me he 
 made out a very pretty case, on the practical side anyway, for 
 a God and immortality. And in England, too, there have been 
 two or three persons of consequence, you remember, like Coleridge 
 and John Henry Newman, who have thought it worth while to 
 believe a little. But you don't care about that ? ' 
 
 The lad stood silent a moment, his colour rising, his fine lip 
 curling. Then he burst out : 
 
 ' What's the good of thinking about things by the wrong end ? 
 There's such a lot to read ! ' 
 
 And with a great stretch of all his young frame he fell back 
 on the catalogue he was looking through, while Ancrum went on 
 turning over a copy of ' The Reasoner, ' a vigorous Secularist 
 paper of the day, which he had found on the counter, and which 
 had suggested his question. 
 
 Knotvledge — success : it was for these that David burned, and 
 he laid rapid hands upon them. He had a splendid physique, 
 and at this moment of his youth he strained it to the utmost. He 
 grudged the time for sleep and meals, and on Saturday afternoons, 
 the early-closing day of. Manchester, he would go out to country 
 
CHAP. VI YOUTH 187 
 
 sales, or lay plans for seeing the few considerable libraries— Lord 
 Driffield's among them— which the neighbouring districts pos- 
 sessed. On Sunday he read from morning till night, and once or 
 twice his assistant John, hammering outside for admittance in the 
 winter dark, wakened the master of the shop from the rickety 
 chair where he had fallen asleep over his books in the small hours 
 of the morning. 
 
 His assistant ! It may well be asked what a youth of twenty, 
 setting up on thirty pounds capital in a small shop, wanted with 
 an assistant before he had any business to speak of. The story is 
 a curious one. 
 
 Some time in the previous summer Daddy had opened a 
 smoking and debating room at the Parlour, by way of keeping his 
 clientele together and giving a special character to the place. He 
 had merely boarded off a bit of the original seed warehouse, put 
 in some rough tables and chairs, and a few newspapers. But by 
 a conjunction of circumstances the place had taken a Secularist 
 character, and the weekly debates which Daddy inaugurated 
 were, for a time at least, well attended. Secularism, like all 
 other forms of mental energy, had lately been active in Man- 
 chester ; there had been public discussions between Mr. Holyoake 
 and Mr. Bradlaugh as to whether Secularism were necessarily 
 atheistic or no. Some of the old newspapers of the movement, 
 dating from Chartist days, had recently taken a new lease of life ; 
 and combined with the protest against theology was a good deal 
 of co-operative and republican enthusiasm. Lomax, who had 
 been a Secularist and an Owenite for twenty years, and who was 
 a republican to boot, threw himself into the melee, and the 
 Parlour debates during the whole of the autumn and winter of 
 '69-70 were full of Hfe, and brought out a good many young 
 speakers, David Grieve among them. Indeed, David was for a 
 time the leader of the place, so ready was his gift, so confident 
 and effective his personality. 
 
 On one occasion in October he was holding forth on ' Science 
 — the true Providence of Life.' The place was crowded. A well- 
 known Independent had been got hold of to answer the young 
 Voltairean, and David was already excited, for his audience was 
 plying him with interruptions, and taxing to the utmost a natural 
 debating power.. 
 
 In the midst of it a printer's devil from the restaurant outside, 
 a stout, stupid-looking lad, found his way in, and stood at the 
 door listening. The fine classical head of the speaker, the 
 beautiful voice, the gestures so free and flowing, the fire and 
 fervour of the whole performance — these things left him gaping. 
 
 ' Who's that ? ' he ventured to inquire of a man near him, a 
 calico salesman, well known in the Salford Conservative Associa- 
 tion, who had come to support the Independent speaker. 
 
 The man laughed. 
 
 * That's young Grieve, assistant to old Purcell, Half Street. 
 He talks a d d lot of stuff— blasphemous stuff, too ; but if 
 
188 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book il 
 
 somebody 'd take and teach liim and send him into Parliament, 
 some day he'd make 'em skip, I warrant yo. I never heard 
 onybody frame better for public speaking, and I've heard a 
 lot.' 
 
 The printer's devil stayed and stared through the debate. 
 Then, afterwards, he began to haunt the paths of this young 
 Satan, crept up to him in the news-room, skulked about him in 
 the restaurant. At last David took notice of him, and they made 
 friends. 
 
 ' Have you got anybody belonging to you ? ' he asked him, 
 shortly. 
 
 'No,' said the boy. 'Father died last spring; mother was 
 took with pleurisy in November — ' 
 
 But the words stuck in his throat, and he coughed over them. 
 
 ' All right,' said David ; ' come for a walk Sunday afternoon ? ' 
 
 So a pretty constant companionship sprang up between them. 
 John Dalby came of a decent stock, and was still, as it were, 
 under the painful and stupefying surprise of those bereavements 
 which had left him an orphan. His blue eyes looked bewilder- 
 ment at the world ; he was bullied by the compositors he worked 
 under. Sometimes he had violent fits of animal spirits, but in 
 general he was dull and silent, and no one could have guessed 
 that he often read poetry and cried himself to sleep in the garret 
 where he lodged. Physically he was a great, overgrown creature, 
 not, in truth, much younger than David. But while David was 
 already the man, John was altogether in the tadpole-stage— a 
 being of large, ungainly frame, at war with his own hands and 
 feet, his small eyes lost in his pink, spreading cheeks, his speeds 
 shy and scanty. Yet, such as he was, David found a use for 
 him. Temperaments of the fermenting, expansive sort want a 
 listener at the moment of early maturity, and almost any two- 
 legged thing with the listener's gift will do. David worked off 
 much steam on the Saturday or Sunday afternoons, when the two 
 would push out into the country, walking some twenty miles or 
 so for the sheer joy of movement. While the one talked and de- 
 claimed, ploughing his violent way through the soil of his young 
 thought, the other, fat and silent, puffed alongside, and each in 
 his own way was happy. 
 
 Just about the time David was dismissed by Purcell, John's 
 apprenticeship came to an end. When he heard of the renting 
 of the shop in Potter Street, he promptly demanded to come as 
 assistant. 
 
 ' Don't be a fool ! ' said David, turning upon him ; ' what 
 should I want with an assistant in that bit of a place ? And I 
 couldn't pay you, besides, man.' 
 
 ' Don't mind that,' said John, stoutly. ' I'd like to learn the 
 trade. Perhaps you'll set up a printing business by-and-by. 
 Lots of booksellers do. Then I'll be handy. ' 
 
 ' And how the deuce are you going to live ? ' cried David, some- 
 what exasperated by these unpractical proposals. ' You're not 
 
CHAP. VI YOUTH 189 
 
 exactly a grasshopper ; ' and his eye, half angry, half laughing, 
 ran over John's plump person. 
 
 To which John replied, undisturbed, that he had got four 
 pounds still of the little hoard his mother had left him, and, 
 judging by what David had told him of his first months in Man- 
 chester, he could make that last for living a good while. When 
 he had learnt something of the business with David, he would 
 move on — trust him. 
 
 Whereupon David told him flatly that he wasn't going to help 
 him waste his money, and sent him about his business. 
 
 On the very day, however, that David opened, he was busy in 
 the shop, when he saw John outside at the stall, groaning under 
 a bundle. 
 
 ' It's Mr. Lomax ha sent you this,' said the lad, calmly, ' and 
 I'm to put it up, and tell him how your stock looks. ' 
 
 The bundle contained Daddy's contributions to young Grieve's 
 window, which at the moment were very welcome ; and David in 
 his gratitude instructed the messenger to take back a cordial 
 message. The only notice John took was to lift up two deal 
 shelves that were leaning against the wall of the shop, and to ask 
 where they were to go. 
 
 And, say what David would, he stuck, and would not be got 
 rid of. With the Lancashire accent he had also the Lancashire 
 persistence, and David after a while gave in, consented that he 
 should stay for some weeks, at any rate, and then set to work to 
 teach him, in a very impatient and intermittent way. For 
 watching and bargaining at the stall, at any rate, for fetching and 
 carrying, and for all that appertains to the carrying and packing 
 of parcels, John presently developed a surprising energy. David's 
 wits were thereby freed for the higher matters of his trade, while 
 John was beast of burden. The young master could work up his 
 catalogues, study his famous collections, make his own biblio- 
 graphical notes, "or run off here and there by 'bus or train in quest 
 of books for a customer ; he could swallow do^Ti his Greek 
 verbs or puzzle out his French for Barbier in the intervals of 
 business ; the humbler matters of the shop prospered none the 
 less. 
 
 Meanwhile both lads were vegetarians and teetotalers ; both 
 lived as near as might be on sixpence a day ; and an increasing 
 portion of the Manchester world— of that world, at any rate, 
 which buys books — began, as the weeks rolled on, to take interest 
 in the pair and their venture. 
 
 Christmas came, and David made up his accounts. He had 
 turned over the whole of his capital in six weeks, had lived and 
 paid his rent, and was very nearly ten pounds to the good. On 
 the evening when he made"^this out he sat jubilantly over the fire, 
 thinking of Louie. Certainly it would be soon time for him to 
 send for Louie at this rate. ' Yet there were pros and cons. He 
 would have to look after her when she did come, and there would 
 be an end of his first freedom. And what would she find to do ? 
 
190 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 Silk- weaving had been decaying year by year in Manchester, and 
 for hand-loom weaving, at any rate, there was no opening at 
 all. 
 
 No matter ! With his prosperity there came a quickening of 
 the sense of kinship, which would not let him rest. For the first 
 time for many years he thought often of his father. Who and 
 what had his mother been ? Why had Uncle Reuben never spoken 
 of his parents, save that one tormented word in the dark ? Why, 
 his father could not have been thirty when he died ! Some day 
 he would make Uncle Reuben tell all the story — he would know, 
 too, where his father was buried. 
 
 And meanwhile, in a few more weeks, he would write to 
 Kinder. He would be good to Louie — he decidedly meant that 
 she should have a good time. Perhaps she had grown out of her 
 tricks by now. Tom said she was thought to be uncommon 
 handsome. David made a little face as he remembered that. 
 She would be all the more difficult to manage. 
 
 Yet all the time David Grieve's prosperity was the most 
 insecure growth imaginable. 
 
 One evening Lucy rushed in late to see Dora. 
 
 ' Oh, Dora ! Dora ! Put down your work at once and listen 
 to me.' 
 
 Dora looked up in amazement, to see Lucy's little face all 
 crimson with excitement and resolution. 
 
 ' Dora, I've found it all out : he's going to buy the house over 
 Mr. Grieve's head, and turn him into the street, just as he's got 
 nicely settled. Oh ! he's done it before, I can tell you. There 
 was a man higher up Half Street he served just the same. He's 
 got the money, and he's got the spite. Well now, Dora, it's no 
 good staring. Has Mr. Grieve been up here lately ? ' 
 
 ' No ; not lately,' said Dora, with an involuntary sigh. 
 ' Father's been to see him. He says he's that busy he can't come 
 out. But, Lucy, how do you know all this ? ' 
 
 Whereupon, at first, Lucy wouldn't tell ; but being at bottom 
 intensely proud of her own cleverness at last confessed. She had 
 been for long convinced that her father meant mischief to young 
 Grieve, and had been on the watch. A little listening at doors 
 here, and a little prying into papers there, had presently given 
 her the clue. In a private drawer, unlocked by chance, she had 
 found a solicitor's letter containing the full description of No. 15 
 Potter Street, and of some other old houses in tlie same street, 
 soon to be sold and rebuilt. The description contained notes of 
 price and date in her father's hand. That very evening the 
 solicitor in question had come to see her father. She had been 
 sent upstairs, but had managed to listen all the same. The 
 purchase — whatever it was — was to be concluded ' shortly.' 
 There had been much legal talk, and her father had seemed in a 
 particularly good temper when Mr. Vance went away. 
 
 ' Well now, look here,' said Lucy, frowning and biting her lips ; 
 
CHAP. VI YOUTH 191 
 
 ' I shall just go right on and see him. I thought I might have 
 found him here. But there's no time to lose. ' 
 
 Dora had bent over her frame again, and her face was 
 hidden. 
 
 ' Why, it's quite late,' she said, slowly ; ' the shop will be shut 
 up long ago.' 
 
 'I don't care — I don't care a bit,' cried Lucy. 'One can't 
 think about what's proper. I'm just going straight away.' 
 
 And she got up feverishly, and put on her hat again. 
 
 ' Why can't you tell father and send him ? He's downstairs in 
 the reading-room,' said Dora. 
 
 ' I'll go myself, Dora, thank you,' said Lucy, with an obstinate 
 toss of her head, as she stood before the old mirror over the 
 mantelpiece. ' I dare say you think I'm a very bold girl. It 
 don't matter. ' 
 
 Then for a minute she became absorbed in putting one side of 
 her hair straight. Dora, from behind, sat looking at her, needle 
 in hand. The gaslight fell on her pale, disturbed face, showed 
 for an instant a sort of convulsion pass across it which Lucy did 
 not see. Then she drew her hand along her eyes, with a low, 
 quivering breath, and went back to her work. 
 
 As Lucy opened the door, however, a movement of anxiety, of 
 conscience, rose in Dora. 
 
 ' Lucy, shall I go with you ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, no,' said Lucy, impatiently. ' I know what's what, thank 
 you, Dora. I'll take care of myself. Perhaps I'll come back and 
 tell you what he says.' 
 
 And she closed the door behind her. Dora did not move from 
 her work ; but her hand trembled so that she made several false 
 stitches and had to undo them. 
 
 Meanwhile Lucy sped along across Market Street and through 
 St. Ann's Square. Her blood was up, and she could bgve done 
 anything, braved anybody, to defeat her father and win a smile 
 from David Grieve. Yet, as she entered Potter Street, she began 
 to quake a little. The street was narrow and dark. On one side 
 the older houses had been long ago pulled down and replaced by 
 tall warehouses, which at night were a black and towering mass, 
 without a light anywhere. The few shops opposite closed early, 
 for in the office quarter of Manchester there is very little doing 
 after office hours, when the tide of life ebbs outwards. 
 
 Lucy looked for No. 15, her heart beating fast. There was a 
 light in the first floor, but the shop-front was altogether dark. 
 She crossed the street, and, lifting a shaking hand, rang the bell 
 of the very narrow side door. 
 
 Instantly there were sounds inside — a step— and David stood 
 on the threshold. 
 
 He stared in amazement at his unwonted visitor. 
 
 ' Oh, Mr. Grieve — please — I've got something to tell you. Oh, 
 no, I won't come in — we can stand here, please, out of the wind. 
 But father's going to buy this place over your head, and I thought 
 
192 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 I'd better come and tell you. He'll be pretty mad if he tbinks 
 I've let out ; but I don't care.' 
 
 She was leaning against the wall of the passage, and David 
 could just see the defiance and agitation on her face by the light 
 of the gas-lamp outside. 
 
 He himself gave a low whistle. 
 
 ' Well, that's rather strong, isn't it, Miss Purcell ? ' 
 
 ' It's mean — it's abominable,' she cried, ' I vowed I'd stop it. 
 But I don't know what he'll do to me — kill me, most likely.' 
 
 'Nobody shall do anything to you,' said David, decidedly. 
 ' You're a brick. But look here — can you tell me anything 
 more ? ' 
 
 She commanded herself with great difficulty, and told all she 
 knew. David leant against the wall beside her, twisting a medi- 
 tative lip. The situation was ominous, certainly. He had always 
 known that his tenure was precarious, but from various indica- 
 tions he had supposed that it would be some years yet before his 
 side of the street was much meddled with. That old fox ! He 
 must go and see Mr. Ancrum. 
 
 A passion of hate and energy rose within him. Somehow or 
 other he would pull through. 
 
 When Lucy had finished the tale of her eavesdroppings, the 
 young fellow shook himself and stood erect. 
 
 ' Well, I am obliged to you. Miss Purcell. And now I'll just 
 go straight off and talk to somebody that I think '11 help me. But 
 I'll see you to Market Street first. ' 
 
 ' Oh ! — somebody will see us ! ' she cried in a fever, ' and tell 
 father. ' 
 
 ' Not they ; I'll keep a look out.' 
 
 Then suddenly, as they walked along together, a great shyness 
 fell upon them both. Why had she done this thing, and run the 
 risk of her father's wrath ? As David walked beside her, he felt 
 for an instant, through all his gratitude, as though some one had 
 thrown a lasso round him, and the cord were tightening. He 
 could not have explained the feeling, but it made him curt and 
 restive, absorbed, apparently, in his own thoughts. Meanwhile 
 Lucy's heart swelled and swelled. She did think he would have 
 taken her news differently — have made more of it and her. She 
 wished she had never come — she wished she had brought Dora. 
 The familiar consciousness of failure, of insignificance, returned, 
 and the hot tears rose in her eyes. 
 
 At Market Street she stopped him hurriedly. 
 
 ' Don't come any farther. I can get home.' 
 
 David, meanwhile, was saying to himself that he was a churl- 
 ish brute ; but for the life of him he could not get out any pretty 
 speeches worthy of the occasion. 
 
 ' I'm sure I take it most kind of you. Miss Purcell. There's 
 nothing could have saved me if you hadn't told. And I don't 
 know whether I can get out of it now. But if ever I can do any- 
 thing for you, you know — ' 
 
CHAP. VII YOUTH 193 
 
 ' Oh, never mind ! — never mind ! ' she said, incoherently, 
 stabbed by his constraint. ' Good night. ' 
 
 And she ran away into the darkness, choked by the sorest 
 tears she had ever shed. 
 
 David, meanwhile, went on his way to Ancrum, scourging 
 himself. If ever there was an ungrateful cur, it was he ! Why 
 could he find nothing nice to say to that girl in return for all her 
 pluck? Of course she would get into trouble. Coming to see 
 him at that time of night, too ! Why, it was splendid ! 
 
 Yet, all the same, he knew perfectly well that if she had been 
 there beside him again, he would have been just as tongue-tied as 
 before. 
 
 CHAPTEE VII 
 
 On the following night David walked into the Parlour about eight 
 o'clock, hung up his hat with the air of an emperor, and looked 
 round for Daddy. 
 
 "'Look here, Daddy! I've got something to say to you, but 
 not down here : you'll be letting out my private affairs, and I 
 can't stand that. ' 
 
 ' Well, come upstairs, then, you varmint ! You're a poor sort 
 of fellow, always suspecting your friends. Come up — come up 
 with you ! I'll humour you ! ' 
 
 And Daddy, bursting with curiosity, led the way upstairs to 
 Dora's sitting-room. Dora was moving about amid a mass of 
 silks, which lay carefully spread out on the table, shade melting 
 into shade, awaiting their transference to a new silk case she had 
 been busy upon. 
 
 As the door opened she look up, and when she saw David her 
 face flushed all over. 
 
 Daddy pushed the lad in. 
 
 ' Dora, he's got some news. Out with it, sir ! ' 
 
 And he stood opposite the young fellow, on tiptoe, quivering 
 with impatience. 
 
 David put both hands in his pockets, and looked out upon 
 them, radiant. 
 
 ' I think,' he said slowly, ' I've scotched old Purcell this time. 
 But perhaps you don't know what he's been after ? ' 
 
 ' Lucy was in here last night, ' said Dora, hesitating ; ' she 
 told me about it.' 
 
 ' Lucy ! ' cried Daddy, exasperated. ' What have you been 
 making secrets about ? I'll have no secrets from me in this house, 
 Dora. Why, when Lucy tells you something important, is it all 
 hidden up from me ? Nasty close ways ! ' 
 
 And he looked at her threateningly. 
 
 ISTothing piqued the old Bohemian so much as the constant 
 assumption *of the people about him that he was a grown-up baby, 
 
194 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 of no discretion at all. That the assumption was true made no 
 difference whatever to the irritating quality of it. 
 
 Dora dropped her head a little, but said nothing. David 
 interposed : 
 
 ' Well, now I'll tell you all about it.' 
 
 His tone was triumph itself, and he plunged into his story. 
 He described what Purcell had meant to do, and how nearly he 
 had done it. In a month, if the bookseller had had his way, his 
 young rival would have been in the street, with all his connection 
 to make over again. At the moment there was not another 
 corner to be had, within David's means, anywhere near the 
 centre of the town. It would have meant a completely fresh 
 beginning, and temporary ruin. 
 
 But he had gone to Ancrum. And Ancrum and he had 
 bethought them of the rich Unitarian gentleman who had been 
 David's sponsor when he signed his agreement. 
 
 There and then, at nine o'clock at night, Ancrum had gone 
 off to Higher Broughton, where the good man lived, and laid the 
 case before him. Mr. Doyle had taken the night to think it over, 
 and the following morning he had paid a visit to his lawyer. 
 
 ' He and his wife thought it a burning shame, he told Mr. 
 Ancrum ; and, besides, he's been buying up house property in 
 Manchester for some time past, only we couldn't know that^that 
 w^as just luck. He looked upon it as a good chance both for him 
 and for me. He told his lawyer it must be all settled in three 
 hours, and he didn't mind the price. The lawyer found out that 
 Purcell was haggling, went in to win, put the cash down, and 
 here in my pocket I've got the fresh agreement between me and 
 Mr. Doyle — three months' notice on either side, and no likelihood 
 of my being turned out, if I want to stay, for the next three or 
 four years. Hurrah ! ' 
 
 And the lad, quite beside himself with jubilation, raised the 
 blue cap he held in his hand, and flung it round his head. 
 Dora stood and looked at him, leaning lightly against the table, 
 her arms behind her. His triumph carried her away ; her lips 
 parted in a joyous smile ; her whole soft, rounded figure trembled 
 with animation and sympathy. 
 
 As for Daddy, he could not contain himself. He ran to the 
 top of the stairs, and sent a kitchen-boy flying for a bottle of 
 champagne. 
 
 ' Drink, you varmint, drink ! ' he said, when the liquor came, 
 ' or I'll be the death of you I Hold your tongue, Dora ! Do you 
 think a man can put up with temperance drinks when his 
 enemy's smitten hip and thigh? Oh, you jewel, David, but 
 you'll bring him low, lad — you'll bring him low before you've 
 done — promise me that. I shall see him a beggar yet, lad, shan't 
 I ? Oh, nectar ! ' 
 
 And Daddy poured down his champagne, apostrophising it 
 and David's vengeance together. 
 
 Dora looked distressed. 
 
CHAP. VII YOUTH 195 
 
 ' Father — Lucy ! How can you say such things ? ' 
 
 ' Lucy— eh ? — Lucy ? She won't be a beggar. She'll marry ; 
 she's got a bit of good looks of her own. But, David, my lad, 
 what was it you were saying? How was it you got wind of this 
 precious business ? ' 
 
 David hesitated. 
 
 'Well, it was Miss Purcell told me,' he said. 'She came to 
 see me at my place last evening.' 
 
 He drew himself together with a little nervous dignity, as 
 though foreseeing that Daddy would make remarks. 
 
 ' Miss Purcell ! — what, Lucy ? — Lucy ? Upon my word, Davy ! 
 Why, her father'll wring her neck when he finds it out. And she 
 came to warn you ? ' 
 
 Daddy stood a moment taking in the situation, then, with a 
 queer grin, he walked up to David and poked him in the ribs. 
 
 ' So there were passages — eh, young man — when you were up 
 there ? ' 
 
 The young fellow straightened himself, with a look of annoy- 
 ance., 
 
 ' Nothing of the sort. Daddy ; there were no passages. But 
 Miss Lucy's done me a real friendly act, and I'd do the same for 
 her any day.' 
 
 Dora had sat down to her silks again. As David spoke she 
 bent closely over them, as though the lamp-light puzzled her 
 usually quick perception of shade and quality. 
 
 As for Daddy, he eyed the lad doubtfully. 
 
 ' She's got a pretty waist and a brown eye, Davy, and she's 
 seventeen. ' 
 
 'She may be for me,' said David, throwing his head back 
 and speaking with a certain emphasis and animation. ' But she's 
 a little brick to have given me notice of this thing.' 
 
 The warmth of these last words produced more effect on 
 Daddy than his previous denials. 
 
 'Dora,' he said, looking round — 'Dora, do you believe the 
 varmint ? All the same, you know, he'll be for marrying soon. 
 Look at him ! ' and he pointed a thin theatrical finger at Davi(^ 
 from across the room. ' When I was his make I was in love witlj 
 half the girls in the place. Blue eyes here — brown eyes there- 
 nothing came amiss to me. ' 
 
 ' Marrying ! ' said David, with an impatient shrug of the 
 shoulders, but flushing all over. ' You might wait, I think, til) 
 I've got enough to keep one on, let alone two. If you talk such 
 stuff, Daddy, I'll not tell you my secrets when there are any to 
 tell.' 
 
 He tried to laugh it off ; but Dora's grey eye, glancing timidly 
 round at him, saw that he was in some discomfort. There was a 
 bright colour in her cheek too, and her hand touched her silks 
 uncertainly. 
 
 ' Thank you for nothing, sir,' said Daddy, unabashed. ' Trust 
 an old hound like me for scenting out what he wants. But, go 
 
196 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 along with you ! I'm disappointed in you. The young men 
 nowadays have got no blood ! They're made of sawdust and 
 brown paper. The world was our orange, and we sucked it. 
 Bedad, we did ! But you — cold-blooded cubs — go to the devil, I 
 tell you, and read your Byron ! ' 
 
 And, striking an attitude which was a boisterous reminiscence 
 of Jd^acready, tiie old wanderer flung out the lines : 
 
 'Alas ! wfien mingling souls forget to blend, 
 
 Death hath but little left him to destroy. 
 
 Ah ! happy years ! Once more, who would not be a boy ? * 
 
 David laughed out. Daddy turned petulantly away, and 
 looked out of window. The night was dreary, dark, and wet. 
 
 ' Dora ! ' 
 
 'Yes, father.' 
 
 * Manchester's a damned dull hole. I'm about tired of it.' 
 
 Dora started, and her colour disappeared in an instant. She 
 got up and went to the window. 
 
 ' Father, you know they'll be waiting for you downstairs,' she 
 said, putting her hand on his shoulder. ' They always say they 
 can't get on without you on debating nights. ' 
 
 ' Stuff and nonsense ! ' said Daddy, throwing off the hand. 
 But he looked mollified. The new reading-room was at present 
 his pet hobby ; his interest in the restaurant proper had dropped 
 a good deal of late, or so Dora's anxiety persuaded her. 
 
 ' It's quite true,' said David. ' Go and start 'em. Daddy, and 
 I'll come down soon and cut in. I feel as if I could speak the 
 roof off to-night, and I don't care a hang about what ! But first 
 I've got something to say to Miss Dora. I want to ask her a 
 favour.' 
 
 He came forward smiling. She gave him a startled look, but 
 her eyes — poor Dora ! — could not light on him now without taking 
 a new brightness. How well his triumph sat on him ! How 
 crisply and handsomely his black hair curled above his open 
 brow ! 
 
 ' More secrets,' growled Daddy. 
 
 ' Nothing of any interest. Daddy. Miss Dora can tell you all 
 about it, if she cares. Now go along ! Start 'em on the Bishop 
 of Peterborough and the Secularists. I've got a lot to say about 
 that.' 
 
 He pushed Daddy laughingly to the door, and came back again 
 to where Dora was once more grappling with her silks. Her 
 expression had changed again. Oh ! she had so many things to 
 open to him, if only she could find the courage. 
 
 He sat down and looked at a bit of her embroidery, which lay 
 uncovered beside her on the frame. 
 
 ' I say, that is fine work ! ' he said, wondering. ' I hope you 
 get well paid for it. Miss Dora. You ought. Well, now, I do 
 want to ask your advice. This business of the house has set me 
 thinking about a lot of things.' 
 
CHAP. VII YOUTH 197 
 
 He lay back in his chair, with his hands in his pockets, and 
 threw one leg over the other. He was in such a state of nervous 
 excitement, Dora could see, that he could hardly keep himself still. 
 
 ' Did I ever tell you alDout my sister ? No, I know I haven't. 
 I've kept it dark. But now I'm settled I want to have her to live 
 with me. There's no one but us two, except the old uncle and 
 aunt that brought us up. I must stick to her— and I mean to. 
 But she's not like other girls. She's a queer one.' 
 
 He stopped, frowning a little as the recollections of Louie 
 rushed across him, seeking for words in which to draw her. And 
 directly he paused, Dora, who had dropped her silks again in her 
 sudden astonishment, burst into questions. How old was his 
 sister? Was she in Manchester? Had she a trade? Her soul 
 was full of a warm, unexpected joy, her manner was eager — 
 receptive. He took up his parable and told the story of his child- 
 hood and Louie's at the farm. His black eye kindled as he 
 looked past Dora into the past— into the bosom of the Scout. 
 Owing partly to an imaginative gift, partly to his reading habit, 
 when he was stimulated — when he was, as it were, talking at 
 large, trying to present a subject as a whole, to make a picture of 
 it — he rose into ways of speech quite different from those of his 
 class, and different from his own dialect of every day. This 
 latent capacity for fine expression was mostly drawn out at this 
 time by his attempts at public speaking. But to-night, in his 
 excitement, it showed in his talk, and Dora was bewildered. Oh, 
 how clever he was ! He talked like a book — just like a book. 
 She pushed her chair back from the silks, and sat absorbed in the 
 pleasure of listening, environed too by the happy thought that he 
 was making a friend of her, giving her — plain, insignificant, 
 humble Dora Lomax — his confidence. 
 
 As for him, the more he talked the more he enjoyed talking. 
 Never since he came to Manchester had he fallen into such a 
 moment of unburdenment, of intimacy, or something like it, with 
 any human being. He had talked to Ancrum and to John. But 
 that was quite different. No man confides in a woman as he 
 confides in a man. The touch of difference of sex gives charm 
 and edge, even when, as was the case here, the man has no thrill 
 whatever in his veins, and no thought of love-making in his head. 
 
 ' You must have been very fond of your sister,' Dora said at 
 last, tremulously. ' You two all alone — and no mother. ' 
 
 Somehow the soft sentiment in her words and tone struck him 
 suddenly as incongruous. His expression changed. 
 
 ' Oh, I don't know,' he said, with a sort of laugh, not a very 
 bright one. ' Don't you imagine I was a pattern brother ; I was 
 a brute to her lots of times. And Louie — ah, well, you'll see for 
 yourself what she's like ; she's a queer customer sometimes. And 
 now I'll tell you what I wanted to ask you. Miss Dora. You see, 
 if Louie comes it won't do for her to have no employment, after 
 she's had a trade all day ; and she won't take to mine— she can't 
 abide books.' 
 
198 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 And he explained to her his perplexities— the ebbing of the 
 silk trade from Manchester, and so on. He might hire a loom, 
 but Louie would get no work. All trades have their special 
 channels, and keep to them. 
 
 So it had occurred to him, if Louie was willing, would Dora 
 take her as an apprentice, and teach her the church work ? He 
 would be quite ready to pay for the teaching ; that would be only 
 fair. 
 
 ' Teach her my work ! ' cried Dora, instinctively drawing back. 
 ' Oh, I don't think I could.' 
 
 He coloured, and misunderstood her. In a great labour-hive 
 like Lancashire, with its large and small industries, the native 
 ear is very familiar with the jealous tone of the skilled worker, 
 threatened with competition in a narrow trade. 
 
 ' I didn't mean any offence,' he said, with a little stiffness. ' I 
 don't want to take the bread out of anybody's mouth. If there 
 isn't work to be had, you've only to say so. Miss Dora. ' 
 
 ' Oh, I didn't mean that,' she cried, wounded in her turn. 
 ' There's plenty of work. At the shop last week they didn't know 
 what to do for hands. If she was clever at it, she'd get lots of 
 work. But — ' 
 
 She laid her hand on her frame lovingly, not knowing how 
 to explain herself, her gentle brows knitting in the effort of 
 thought. 
 
 Her work was so much more to her than ordinary work paid 
 for in ordinary coin. Into these gorgeous altar-cloths, or these 
 delicate wrappings for chalice and paten, she stitched her heart. 
 To work at them was prayer. Jesus, and His Mother, and the 
 Saints : it was with them she communed as her stitches flowed. 
 She sat in a mystic, a heavenly world. And the silence and 
 solitude of her work made one of its chief charms. And now to 
 be asked to share it with a strange girl, who could not love it as 
 she did, who would take it as hard business— never to be alone 
 any more with her little black book and her prayers ! 
 
 And then she looked up, and met a young man's half -offended 
 look, and a shy, proud eye, in which the nascent friendship of 
 five minutes before seemed to be sinking out of sight. 
 
 ' Oh yes, I will,' she cried. ' Of course I will. It just sounded 
 a bit strange to me at first. I've been so used to be alone 
 always.' 
 
 But he demurred now — wished stiffly to take back his pro- 
 posal. He did not want to put upon her, and perhaps, after all, 
 Louie would have her own notions. 
 
 But she could not bear it, and as he retreated she pressed 
 forward. Of course there was work. And it would be very good 
 for her, it would stir her up to take a pupil ; it was just her old- 
 maidish ways — it had startled her a bit at first. 
 
 And then, her reserve giving way more and more as her 
 emotion grew, she confessed herself at last completely. 
 
 ' You see, it's not just work to me, and it's not the money^ 
 
CHAP. Yii YOUTH 199 
 
 though I'm glad enough for that ; but it's for the church ; and I'd 
 live on a crust, and do it for nothing, if I could ! ' 
 
 She looked up at him— that ardent dream-life of hers leaping 
 to the eyes, transforming the pale face. 
 
 David sat silent and embarrassed. He did not know what to 
 say — how to deal with this turn in the conversation. 
 
 ' Oh, I know you think I'm just foolish,' she said, sadly, taking 
 up her needle. ' You always did ; but I'll take your sister — 
 indeed I will.' 
 
 'Perhaps you'll turn her your way of thinking,' said David, 
 with a little awkward laugh, looking round for his hat. 'But 
 Louie isn't an easy one to drive.' 
 
 ' Oh, you can't drive people ! ' cried Dora, flushing ; ' you can't, 
 and you oughtn't. But if Father Kussell talked to her she might 
 like him— and the church. Oh, Mr. Grieve, won't you go one 
 Sunday and hear him — won't you — instead of — ' 
 
 She did not finish her sentence, but David finished it for her : 
 ' Instead of going to the Hall of Science ? Well, but you know. 
 Miss Dora, I being what I am, I get more good out of a lecture at 
 the Hall of Science than I should out of Father Eussell. I should 
 be quarrelling with him all the time, and wanting to answer him.' 
 
 ' Oh, you couldn't,' said Dora eagerly, ' he's so good, and he's 
 a learned man— I'm sure he is. Mr. Foss, the curate, told me 
 they think hell be a bishop some day.' 
 
 'All the better for him,' said David, unmoved. 'It don't 
 make any difference to me. No, Miss Dora, don't you fret your- 
 self about me. Books are my priests.' 
 
 He stood over her, his hands on his sides, smiling. 
 
 ' Oh, no ! ' cried Dora, involuntarily. ' You mustn't say that. 
 Books can't bring us to God.' 
 
 ' No more can priests,' he said, with a sudden flash of his dark 
 eyes, a sudden dryness of his tone. ' If there is a God to bring us 
 to — prove me that first. Miss Dora. But it's a shame to say 
 these things to you— that it is — and I've been worrying you a deal 
 too much about my stupid affairs. Good night. We'll talk about 
 Father Russell again another time.' 
 
 He ran downstairs. Dora went back to her frame, then 
 pushed it away again, ran eagerly to the window, and pulled the 
 blind aside. Down below in the lighted street, now emptying 
 fast, she saw the tall figure emerge, saw it run down the street, 
 and across St. Mary's Gate. She watched it till it disappeared ; 
 then she put her hands over her face, and leant against the 
 window-frame weeping. Oh, what a sudden descent from a 
 moment of pure joy ! How had the jarring note come ? They 
 had been put wrong with each other ; and perhaps, after all, he 
 would be no more to her now than before. And she had seemed 
 to make such a leap forward — to come so near to him. 
 
 ' Oh ! I'll just be good to his sister,' she said to herself 
 drearily, with an ache at her heart that was agony. 
 
 Then she thought of him as he had sat there beside her ; and 
 
300 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 suddenly in her pure thought there rose a vision of herself in his 
 arms, her head against his broad shoulder, her hand stealing 
 round his neck. She moved from the window and threw herself 
 down in the darkest corner of the room, wrestling desperately 
 with what seemed to her a sinful imagination. She ought not to 
 think of him at all ; she loathed herself. Father Russell would 
 tell her she was ^vicked. He had no faith— he was a hardened 
 unbeliever — and she could not make herseK think of that at all — 
 could not stop herself from v^SLJiting— wanting him for her own, 
 whatever happened. 
 
 And it was so foolish too, as well as bad ; for he hadn't an» 
 idea of falling in love with anybody— anyone could see that. And 
 she who was not pretty, and not a bit clever— it was so likely he 
 would take a fancy to her ! Why, in a few years he would be a 
 big man, he would have made a fortune, and then he could take 
 his pick. 
 
 ' Oh ! and Lucy — Lucy would hate me.' 
 
 But the thought of Lucy, instead of checking her, brought 
 with it again a wild gust of jealousy. It was fiercer than before, 
 the craving behind it stronger. She sat up, forcing back her 
 tears, her whole frame tense and rigid. Whatever happened he 
 would nei-€J' marry Lucy ! And who could wish it ? Lucy was 
 just a little, vain, selfish thing, and when she found David Grieve 
 wouldn't have her, she would soon forget him. The surging 
 longing within refused, proudly refused, to curb itself— for Lucy's 
 
 Then the bell of St. Ann's slowly began to strike ten o'clock. 
 It brought home to her by association one of the evening hymns 
 in the little black book she was frequently accustomed to croon to 
 herself at night as she put away her work : 
 
 O God who canst not change nor fail, 
 
 Guiding the hours as they roll by, 
 Brightening with beams the morning pale. 
 
 And burning in the mid-day sky ! 
 
 Quench thou the fires of hate and strife. 
 
 The wasting fever of the heart ; 
 From perils guard our feeble life, 
 
 And to our souls thy peace impart. 
 
 The words flowed in upon her, but they brought no comfort., only 
 a fresh sense of struggle and effort. Her Christian peace was 
 gone. She felt herself wicked, faithless, miserable. 
 
 Meanwhile, in the stormy night outside, David was running 
 and leaping through the streets, flourishing his stick from side to 
 side in cut and thrust with an imaginary enemy whenever the 
 main thoroughfares were left behind, and he found himself in 
 some dark region of wareliouses, where his steps echoed, and he 
 was king alike of roadway and of pavement. 
 
CHAP. VII YOUTH 201 
 
 The wind, a stormy north-easter, had risen since the afternoon. 
 David fought with it, rejoiced in it. After the little hot sitting- 
 room, the stinging freshness, the rough challenge of the gusts, 
 were delicious to him. He was overflowing with spirits, with 
 health, with exultation. 
 
 As he thought of Purcell he could hardly keep himself from 
 shouting aloud. If he could only be there to see when Purcell 
 learnt how he had been foiled ! And trust Daddy to spread a 
 story which would certainly do Purcell no good ! No, in that 
 direction he felt that he was probably safe from attack for a long 
 time to come. Success beckoned to him ; his enemy was under 
 foot ; his will and his gifts had the world before them. 
 
 Father Russell indeed ! Let Dora Lomax set him on. His 
 young throat filled with contemptuous laughter. As a bookseller, 
 he knew what the clergy read, what they had to say for them- 
 selves. How much longer could it go on, this solemn folly of 
 Christian superstition ? ' Just give us a good Education Bill, and 
 we shall see ! ' 
 
 Then, as he fell thinking of his talk with Dora and Lomax, he 
 wished impatiently that he had been even plainer with Daddy 
 about Lucy Purcell. With regard to her he felt himself caught in 
 a tangled mesh of obligation. He must, somehow, return her the 
 service she had done him. And then all the world would think 
 he was making up to her and wanted to marry her. Meanwhile 
 — in the midst of real gratitude, a strong desire to stand between 
 her and her father, and much eager casting about for some means 
 of paying her back — his inner mind was in reality pitilessly critical 
 towards her. Her overdone primness and neatness, her fashion- 
 able frocks, of which she was so conscious, her horror of things 
 and people that were not 'nice,' her contented ignorance and 
 silly chattering ways — all these points of manner and habit were 
 scored against her in his memory. She had become less congenial 
 to him rather than more since he knew her first. All the same, 
 she was a little brick, and he would have liked one minute to kiss 
 her for her pluck, make her some lordly present, and the next — 
 never to see her again ! 
 
 In reality his mind at this moment was filling with romantic 
 images and ideals totally remote from anything suggested by his 
 own everyday life. A few weeks before, old Barbier, his French 
 master, had for the first time lent him some novels of George 
 Sand's. David had carried them oft', had been enchanted to find 
 that he could now read them with ease and rapidity, and had 
 plunged straightway into the new world thus opened to him with 
 indescribable zest and passion. His Greek had been neglected, 
 his science laid aside. Mght after night he had been living with 
 Valentine, with Consuelo, with Caroline in 'Le Marquis de 
 Villemer.' His poetical reading of the winter had prepared the 
 way for what was practically his first introduction to the modern 
 literature of passion. The stimulating novelty and foreignness 
 of it was stirring all his blood. George Sand's problenis, her 
 
202 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 situations, her treatment of the great questions of sex, her social 
 and religious enthusiasms — these things were for the moment a 
 new gospel to this provincial self-taught lad, as they had been 
 forty years before to the youth of 1830. Under the vitalising 
 touch of them the man was fast developing out of the boy ; the 
 currents of the nature were setting in fresh directions. And in 
 such a mood, and with such preoccupations, how was one to bear 
 patiently with foolish, friendly fingers, or with uncomfortable 
 thoughts of your own, pointing you to Lucy Purcell f With the 
 great marriage-night scene from ' Valentine ' thrilling in your 
 mind, how was it possible to think of the prim self-conceit, the 
 pettish temper and mincing airs of that little person in Half Street 
 without irritation ? 
 
 No, no ! The unknown^ the unforeseen ! The young man 
 plunged through the rising storm, and through the sleety rain, 
 which had begun to beat upon him, with face and eyes uplifted 
 to the night. It was as though he searched the darkness for some 
 form which, even as he looked, began to take vague and luminous 
 shape there. 
 
 Next morning Daddy, in his exultation, behaved himself with 
 some grossness towards his enemy. About eleven o'clock he 
 became restless, and began patrolling Market Place, passing every 
 now and then up the steps into the narrow passage of Half Street, 
 and so round by the Cathedral and home. He had no definite 
 purpose, but ' have a squint at Tom,' under the circumstances, he 
 must, some way or other. 
 
 And, sure enough, as he was coming back through Half Street 
 on one of his rounds, and was within a few yards of PurcelFs 
 window, the bookseller came out with his face set in Daddy's 
 direction. Purcell, whose countenance, so far as Daddy could 
 see at first sight, was at its blackest and sourest, and whose eyes 
 were on the ground, did not at once perceive his adversary, and 
 came stem on. 
 
 The moment was irresistible. Laying his thumbs in his waist- 
 coat pocket, and standing so as to bar his brother-in-law's path. 
 Daddy launched a few unctuous words in his smoothest voice. 
 
 ' Tom, me boy, thou hast imagined a device which thou wast 
 not able to perform. But the Lord, Tom, hath made thee turn 
 thy back. And they of thy own household, Tom, have lifted up 
 the heel against thee.' 
 
 Purcell, strong, dark-browed fellow that he was, wavered and 
 blenched for a moment under the surprise of this audacious 
 attack. Then with an oath he put out his hand, seized Daddy's 
 thin shoulder, flung him violently round, and passed him. 
 
 ' Speak to me again in the street, you scoundrel, and I'll give 
 you in charge ! ' he threw behind him, as he strode on just in time 
 to avoid a flight of street-arabs, who had seen the scuffle from a 
 distance and were bearing down eagerly upon him. 
 
 Daddy went home in the highest spirits, stepping jauntily 
 
CHAP. VII YOUTH 203 
 
 along like a man who has fulfilled a mission. But when he came 
 to boast himself to Dora, he found to his chagrin that he had 
 only earned a scolding. Dora flushed up, her soft eyes all aflame. 
 
 ' You've done nothing but mischief, father,' said Dora, bitterly. 
 ' How could you say such things ? You might have left Uncle 
 Tom to find out for himself about Lucy. He'll be mad enough 
 without your stirring him up. Now he'll forbid her to come here, 
 or see me at all. I don't know what'll become of that child ; and 
 whatever possessed you to go aggravating him worse and worse I 
 can't think.' 
 
 Daddy blinked under this, but soon recovered himself. No 
 one, he vowed, could be expected to put up for ever with Purcell's' 
 mean tricks. He had held his tongue for twenty-one years, and 
 now he had paid back one little text in exchange for the hundreds 
 wherewith Purcell had been wont to break his bones for him in 
 past days. As for Dora, she hadn't the spirit of a fly. 
 
 ' Well, I dare say I am afraid,' said Dora, despondently. ' I 
 saw Uncle Tom yesterday, too, and he gave me a look made me 
 feel cold down my back. I don't like anybody to hate us like 
 that, father. Who knows— ' 
 
 A tremor ran through her. She gave her father a piteous, 
 childish look. She had the timidity, the lack of self-confidence 
 which seems to cling through life to those who have been at a 
 disadvantage with the world in their childhood and youth. The 
 anger of a man like Purcell terrified her, lay like a nightmare on 
 a sensitive and introspective nature. 
 
 ' Pish ! ' said Daddy, contemptuously ; ' I should like to know 
 what harm he can do us, now that I've turned so d d respec- 
 table. Though it is a bit hard on a man to have to keep so in 
 order to spite his brother-in-law. ' 
 
 Dora laughed and sighed. She came up to her father's chair, 
 put his hair straight, re-tied his tie, and then kissed him on the 
 cheek 
 
 ' Father, you're not getting tired of the Parlour ? ' she said, 
 unsteadily. He evaded her downward look, and tried to shake 
 her off. 
 
 ' Don't I slave for you from morning till night, you thankless 
 chit, you ? And don't you begrudg-e me all the little amusements 
 which turn the tradesman into the man and sweeten the pill of 
 bondage — eh, you poor-sou led thing ? ' 
 
 Her eyes, however, drew his after them, whether he would or 
 no, and they surveyed each other— he uneasily hostile ; she sad. 
 She slowly shook her head, and he perfectly understood what was 
 in her mind, though she did not speak. He had been extremely 
 slack at business lately ; the month's accounts made up that 
 morning had been unusually disappointing ; and twice during the 
 last ten days Dora had sat up till midnight to let her father in, 
 and had tried with all the energy of a sinking heart to persuade 
 herself that it was accident, and that he was only excited, and 
 not drunk. 
 
204 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 Now, as she stood looking at him, suddenly all the horror of 
 those long-past days came back upon her, thrown up against the 
 peace of the last few years. She locked her hands round his neck 
 with a vehement pathetic gesture. 
 
 ' Father, be good to me ! don't let bad people take you away 
 from me — don't, father — you're all I have — all I ever shall have. ' 
 
 Daddy's green eyes wavered again uncomfortably. 
 
 ' Stuff ! ' he said, irritably. ' You'll get a husband directly, and 
 think no more of me than other girls do when the marrying fit 
 takes 'em. What are you grinning at now, I should like to know ? ' 
 
 For she was smiling — a light tremulous smile which puzzled 
 him. 
 
 ' At you, father. You'll have to keep me whether you like it 
 or no. For I'm not a marrying sort.' 
 
 She looked at him with a curious defiance, her lip twitching. 
 
 ' Oh, we know all about that ! ' said Daddy, impatiently, add- 
 ing in a mincing voice, ' " I will not love ; if I do hang me ; i' 
 faith I will not." No, my pretty dear, not till the " wimjDled, 
 whining, purblind, wayward boy " comes this road — oh, no, not 
 till next time ! Quite so.' 
 
 She let him rail, and said nothing. She sat down to her 
 work ; he faced round upon her suddenly, and said, frowning : 
 
 ' What do you mean by it, eh ? You're as good-looking as 
 anybody ! ' 
 
 'Well, I want you to think it, father,' she said, affectionately, 
 raising her eyes to his. A mother must have seen the shrinking 
 sadness beneath the smile. What Daddy saw was simply a 
 rounded girlish face, with soft cheeks and lips which seemed to 
 him made for kissing ; nothing to set the Thames on fire, perhaps, 
 but why should she run herself down ? It annoyed him, touched 
 his vanity. 
 
 ' Oh, I dare say ! ' he said to her, roughly, with an affected 
 brutality. ' But you'll be precious disappointed if some one else 
 doesn't think so too. Don't tell me ! ' 
 
 She bent over her frame without speaking. But her heart 
 filled with bitterness, and a kind of revolt against her life. 
 
 Meanwhile her conscience accused her about Lucy. Lucy 
 must have got herself into trouble at home, that she was sure of. 
 And it was unlike her to keep it to herself — not to come and 
 complain. 
 
 Some days — a week — passed. But Dora dared not venture 
 herself into her uncle's house after Daddy's escapade, and she 
 was, besides, mucli pressed with her work. A whole set of altar 
 furniture for a new church at Blackburn had to be finished by a 
 given day. 
 
 The affairs of the Parlour troubled her, and she got up long 
 before it was light to keep the books in order and to plan for the 
 day. Daddy had no head for figures, and he seemed to her to be 
 growing careless about expenses. Iler timid, over-anxious mind 
 
CHAP. VII YOUTH 305 
 
 conjured up the vision of a slowly rising tide of debt, and it 
 haunted her all day. When she went to her frame she was 
 already tired out, and yet there she sat over it hour after hour. 
 
 Daddy was blind. But Sarah, the stout cook, who worshipped 
 her, knew well enough that she was growing thin and white. 
 
 ' If yo doan't draw in yo'U jest do yoursel a mischief,' she said 
 to her, angrily. ' Yo're nowt but a midge onyways, and a body 
 '11 soon be able to see through yo. ' 
 
 * I shall be all right, Sarah,' Dora would say. 
 'Aye, we'st aw on us be aw reet in our coifins,' returned the 
 irate Sarah. Then, melting into affection, 'Neaw, honey, be 
 raysonable, an' I'st just run round t' corner, an' cook you up a 
 bit o' meat for your supper. Yo git no strength eawt i' them 
 messin things yo eat. Theer's nowt but mnd^in em.' 
 
 But not even the heterodox diet with wliich, every now and 
 then, Dora for peace' sake allowed herself to be fed, behind 
 Daddy's back, put any colour into her cheeks. She went heavily 
 m these days, and the singularly young and childish look which 
 she had kept till now went into gradual eclipse. 
 
 David Grieve dropped in once or twice during the week to 
 laugh and gossip about Purcell with Daddy. Thanks to Daddy's 
 tongue, the bookseller's plot against his boy rival was already 
 known to a large circle of pei-sons, and was likely to cost him 
 customers. 
 
 Whenever she heard the young full voice below or on the 
 stairs, Dora would, as it were, draw herself together— stand on 
 her defence. Sometimes she asked him eagerlv about his sister. 
 Had he written ? l^o ; he thought he would still wait a week or 
 two. Ah, well, he must let her know. 
 
 And, on the whole, she was glad when he went, glad to get to 
 bed and sleep. Being no sentimental heroine, she was prosaically 
 thankful that she kept her sleep. Otherwise she must have fallen 
 ill, and the accounts would have gone wrong. 
 
 At last one evening came a pencil note from Lucy, in these 
 terms : 
 
 ' You may come and see me, father says. I've been ill.— 
 Lucy.' 
 
 In a panic Dora put on her things and ran. Mary Ann, the 
 little hunted maid, let her in, looking more hunted and scared 
 than usual. Miss Lucy was better, she said, but she had been 
 'terr'ble bad.' No, she didn't know what it was took her. 
 They'd got a nurse for her two nights, and she, Mary Ann, had 
 been run off her legs, 
 
 ' Why didn't you send for me ? ' cried Dora, and hurried up to 
 the attic. Purcell did not appear. 
 
 Lucy was waiting for her, looking out eagerly from a bank of 
 pillows. 
 
 Dora could not restrain an exclamation which was almost a 
 cry. She could not have believed that anyone could have changed 
 so in ten days. Evidently the acute stage— whatever had been 
 
206 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GKIEVE book u 
 
 the illness — was past. There was already a look of convalescence 
 in the white face, with its black-rimmed eyes and peeling lips. 
 But the loss of flesh was extraordinary for so short a time. The 
 small face was so thinned and blanched that the tangled masses 
 of golden-brown hair in which it was framed seemed ridiculously 
 out of proportion to it ; the hand playing with some grapes on 
 the counterpane was of a ghostly lightness. 
 
 Dora was shocked almost beyond speaking. She stood hold- 
 ing Lucy's hand, and Lucy looked up at her, evidently enjoying 
 her consternation, for a smile danced in her hollow eyes. 
 
 ' Lucy, why didn't you send for me ? ' 
 
 ' Because I was so feverish at first. I was all light-headed, 
 and didn't know where I was ; and then I was so weak I didn't 
 care about anything,' said Lucy, in a small thread of a voice. 
 
 ' What was it ? ' 
 
 'Congestion of the lungs,' said the girl, with pride. 'They 
 just stopped it, or you'd be laying me out now, Dora. Dr. Alford 
 told father I was dreadful run-down or I'd never have taken it. 
 I'm to go to Hastings. Father's got a cousin there that lets lodg- 
 ings. ' 
 
 ' But how did you get so ill, Lucy ? ' 
 
 Lucy was silent a bit. Then she said : 
 
 ' Sit down close here. My voice is so bad still.' 
 
 Dora sat close to her pillow, and bent over, stroking her 
 hands with emotion. The fright of her entrance was still upon 
 her. 
 
 ' Well, you know,' she said in a hoarse whisper, ' father found 
 out about me and Mr. Grieve — I don't know how, but it was one 
 morning. I was sitting in here, and he came in all white, with 
 his eyes glaring. I thought he was going to kill me, and I was 
 that frightened, I watched my chance, and ran out of the door 
 and along into Mill Gate as fast as I could to get away from him ; 
 and then I thought I saw him coming after me, and I ran on 
 across the bridge and up Chapel Street a long, long way. I was 
 in a terrible fright, and mad with him besides. I declared to 
 myself I'd never come back here. Well, it was pouring with 
 rain, and I got wet through. Then I didn't know where to go, 
 and what do you think I did ? I just got into the Broughton 
 tram, and rode up and down all day ! I had a shilling or two in 
 my pocket, and I waited and dodged a bit at either end, so the 
 conductor shouldn't find out. And that was what did it — sitting 
 in my wet things all day. I didn't think anything about dinner, 
 I was that mad. But when it got dark, I thought of that girl — 
 you know her, too — Minnie Park, that lives with her brother and 
 sells fents, up Cannon Gate. And somehow I dragged up there — 
 I thought I'd ask her to take me in. And what happened I don't 
 rightly know. I suppose I was took with a faint before I could 
 explain anything, for I was shivering and pretty bad when I got 
 there. Anyway, she put me in a cab and brought me home ; and 
 I don't remember anything about it, for I was queer in the head 
 
CHAP. VII YOUTH . 207 
 
 very soon after they got me to bed. Oh, I ivas bad ! It was just 
 a squeak,'— said Lucy, her voice dropping from exhaustion ; but 
 her eyes glittered in her pinched face with a curious triumph, 
 difficult to decipher. 
 
 Dora kissed her tenderly, and entreated her not to talk ; she 
 was sure it was bad for her. But Lucy, as usual, would not be 
 managed. She held herself quite still, gathering breath and 
 strength ; then she began again : 
 
 ' If I'd died, perhaps he'd have been sorry. You know who I 
 mean. It was all along of him. And father '11 never forgive me 
 — never. He looks quite different altogether somehow. Dora! 
 you're not to tell him anything till I've got right away. I think— 
 I think — I hate him ! ' 
 
 And suddenly her beautiful brown eyes opened wide and 
 fierce. 
 
 Dora hung over her, a strange, mingled passion in her look. 
 ' You poor little thing ! ' she said slowly, with a deep emphasis, 
 answering not the unreal Lucy of those last words, but the real 
 one, so pitifully evident beneath. 
 
 ' But look here, Dora ; when I'm gone away, you may tell him, 
 you must tell him, Dora,' said the child, imperiously. 'I'd not 
 have him see me now for anything. I made Mary Ann put all 
 the glasses away. I don't want to remember what a fright I am. 
 But at Hastings I'll soon get weU ; and — and remember, Dora, 
 you are to tell him. I'd like him to know I nearly caught my 
 death that day, and that it was all along of him ! ' 
 
 She laid her hands across each other on the sheet with a curious 
 sigh of satisfaction, and was quiet for a little, while Dora held her 
 hand. But it was not long before the stillness broke up in sudden 
 agitation. A tremor ran through her, and she caught Dora's 
 fingers. In her weakness she could not control herself, and her 
 inmost trouble escaped her. 
 
 ' Oh, Dora, he wasn't kind to me, not a bit — when I went to 
 tell him that night. Oh ! I cried when I came home. I did think 
 he'd have taken it different. ' 
 
 ' What did he say ? ' asked Dora, quietly. Her face was turned 
 away from Lucy, but she still held her hand. 
 
 ' Oh, I don't know ! ' said Lucy, moving her head restlessly 
 from side to side and gulping down a sob. ' I believe he was just 
 sorry it was me he'd got to thank. Oh, I don't know ! — I don't 
 know ! — very likely he didn't mean it.' 
 
 She waited a minute, then she began again : 
 
 ' Oh of course you think I'm silly ; and that I'd have much 
 more chance if I turned proud, and pretended I didn't care. I 
 know some girls say they'd never let a man know they cared for 
 him first. I don't believe in 'em ! But I don't oare. I can't help 
 it. It's my way. But, Dora, look here ! ' 
 
 The tears gathered thick in her eyes. Dora, bending anxiously 
 over her, was startled by the change of expression in her. From 
 what depths of new emotion had the silly Lucy caught the sweet- 
 
^8 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 ness which trembled for a moment through every line of her little 
 trivial face ? 
 
 ' You know, Dora, it was all nonsense at the beginning. I just 
 wanted some one to amuse myself with and pay me attentions. 
 But it isn't nonsense now. And I don't want him all for myself. 
 Friday night I thought I was going to die. I don't care whether 
 the doctor did or not ; / did. And I prayed a good deal. It was 
 queer praying, I dare say. I was very light-headed, but I thanked 
 God I loved him, though — though — he didn't care about me ; and 
 I thought if I did get Vv'ell, and he were to take a fancy to me, 
 I'd show him I could be as nice as other girls. I wouldn't want 
 everything for myself, or spend a lot of money on dress. ' 
 
 She broke off for want of breath. This moral experience of 
 hers was so new and strange to her that she could hardly find 
 words in which to clothe it. 
 
 Dora had slipped down beside her and buried her face in the 
 bed. When Lucy stopped, she still knelt there in a quivering 
 silence. But Lucy could not bear her to be silent — she must have 
 sympathy. 
 
 ' Aren't you glad, Dora ? ' she said presently, when she had 
 gathered strength again. 'I thought you'd be glad. You've 
 always wanted me to turn religious. And — and — perhaps, when 
 I get well and come back, I'll go with you to St. Damian's, Dora. 
 I don't know what it is. I suppose it's caring about somebody — 
 and being ill — makes one feel like this.' 
 
 And, drawing herself from Dora's hold, she turned on her 
 side, put both her thin hands under her cheek, and lay staring at 
 the window with a look which had a certain dreariness in it. 
 
 Dora at last raised herself. Lucy could not see her face. 
 There was in it a sweet and solemn resolution — a new light and 
 calm. 
 
 ' Dear Lucy,' she said, tremulously, laying her cheek against 
 her cousin's shoulder, ' God speaks to us when we are unhappy 
 — that was what you felt. He makes everything a voice to call 
 unto Himself.' 
 
 Lucy did not answer at once. Then suddenly she turned, and 
 said eagerly : 
 
 ' Dora, did you ever ask him — did you ever find out — whether 
 he was thinking about getting married ? You said you would.' 
 
 ' He isn't, Lucy. He was vexed with father for speaking about 
 it. I think he feels he must make his way first. His business 
 takes him up altogether.' 
 
 Lucy gave an irritable sigh, closed her eyes, and would talk 
 no more. Dora stayed with her, and nursed her through the 
 evening. When at last the nurse arrived who was to take charge 
 of her through the night, Lucy pulled Dora down to her and said, 
 in a hoarse, excitable whisper : 
 
 ' Mind you tell him — that I nearly died — that father '11 never 
 be the same to me again — and it was all for him ! You needn't 
 say / said so. ' 
 
CHAP, VII YOUTH 209 
 
 Late that night Dora stood long at her attic- window in the 
 roof looking out at the April night. From a great bank of clouds 
 to the east the moon was just appearing, sending her light along 
 the windy streamers which, issuing from the main mass, spread 
 like wide open fingers across the inner heaven. Opposite there 
 was an old timbered house, one of the few relics of an earlier 
 Manchester, which still, in the very centre of the modern city, 
 thrusts out its broad eaves and overhanging stories beyond the 
 line of the street. Above and behind it, roof beyond roof, to the 
 western limit of sight, rose block after block of warehouses, vast 
 black masses, symbols of the great town, its labours and its 
 wealth ; far to the right, closing the street, the cathedral cut the 
 moonlit sky ; and close at hand was an old inn, with a wide arch- 
 way, under which a huge dog lay sleeping. 
 
 Town and sky, the upper clouds and stars, the familiar streets 
 and buildings below — to-night they were all changed for Dora, 
 and it was another being that looked at them. In all intense 
 cases of religious experience the soul lies open to 'voices' — to 
 impressions which have for it the most vivid and, so to speak, 
 physical reality. Jeanne d' Arc's visions were but an extreme 
 instance of what humbler souls have known in their degree in all 
 ages. The heavenly voices speak, and the ear actually hears. So 
 it was with Dora. It seemed to her that she had been walking in 
 a feverish loneliness through the valley of the shadow of death ; 
 that one hke unto the Son of Man had drawn her thence with 
 warning and rebuke, and she was now at His feet, clothed and in 
 her right mind. Words were in her ear, repeated again and 
 again— peremptory words which stabbed and healed at once : 
 ' Daughter, thou shalt not covet. I have refused thee this gift. 
 If it he My will to give it to another, what is that to thee ? 
 Follow thou Me."* 
 
 As she sank upon her knees, she thought of the confession she 
 would make on Sunday — of the mysterious sanctity and sweetness 
 of the single life — of the vocation of sacrifice laid upon her. 
 There rose in her a kind of ecstasy of renunciation. Her love- 
 already so hopeless, so starved ! — was there simply that she might 
 offer it up — burn it through and through with the fires of the 
 spirit. 
 
 Lucy should never know, and David should never know. 
 Unconsciously, sweet soul, there was a curious element of spiritual 
 arrogance mingled with this absolute surrender of the one 
 passionate human desire her life was ever to wrestle with. The 
 baptised member of Christ's body could not pursue the "love of 
 David Grieve, could not marry him as he was now, without risk 
 and sin. But Lucy— the child of schism, to whom the mysteries 
 of Church fellowship and sacramental grace were unknown — for 
 her, in her present exaltation, Dora felt no further scruples. 
 Lucy's love was clearly ' sent ' to her ; it was right, whether it 
 were ultimately happy or no, because of the religious effect it had 
 already had upon her. 
 
210 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book n 
 
 The human happiness Dora dared no longer grasp at for her- 
 self she yearned now to pour lavishly, quickly, into Lucy's hands. 
 Only so — such is our mingled life ! — could she altogether still, 
 violently and by force, a sort of upward surge of the soul which 
 terrified her now and then. ~A mystical casuistry, bred in her 
 naturally simple nature by the subtle influences of a long- 
 descended Christianity, combined in her with a piteous human 
 instinct. When she rose from her knees she was certain that she 
 would never win and marry David Grieve ; she was equally 
 certain that she would do all in her power to help little Lucy to 
 win and marry him. 
 
 So, like them of old, she pressed the spikes into her flesh, and 
 found a numbing consolation in the pain. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Some ten days more elapsed before Lucy was pronounced fit to 
 travel south. During this time Dora saw her frequently, and 
 the bond between the two girls grew much closer than before. 
 On the one hand, Lucy yielded herself more than she had ever 
 done yet to Dora's example and persuasion, promised to go to 
 church and see at least what it was like when she got to Hastings, 
 and let Dora provide her with some of her favourite High Church 
 devotional books. On the other, it was understood between 
 them that Dora would look after Lucy's interests, and keep her 
 informed how the land lay while she was in the south, and Lucy, 
 with the blindness of self-love, trusted herself to her cousin with- 
 out a suspicion or a qualm. 
 
 While she was tending Lucy, Dora never saw Purcell but 
 twice, when she passed him in the little dark entry leading to 
 the private part of the house, and on those occasions he did not, 
 so far as she could perceive, make any answer whatever to her 
 salutation. He was changed, she thought. He had always been 
 a morose-looking man, with an iron jaw ; but now there was a 
 fixed venom and disquiet, as well as a new look of age, in the 
 sallow face, which made it doubly unpleasing. She would have 
 been sorry for his loneliness and his disappointment in Lucy but 
 for the remembrance of his mean plot against David Grieve, and 
 for a certain other little fact. A middle-aged woman, in a dowdy 
 brown-stutf dress and black mantle, had begun to haunt the 
 house. She sat with Purcell sometimes in the parlour down- 
 stairs, and sometimes he accompanied her out of doors. Mary 
 Ann reported that she was a widow, a Mrs. Whymper, who be- 
 longed to the same chapel that Purcell did, and who was supposed 
 by those who knew to have been making up to him for some time. 
 
 'And perhaps she'll get him after all,' said the little ugly 
 maid, with a grin. ' Catch me staying then, Miss Dora ! It's 
 bad enough as it is,' 
 
 On one occasion Dora came across the widow, waiting in the 
 
CHAP, vm YOUTH 211 
 
 little sitting-room. She was an angular person, with a greyish- 
 brown complexion, a prominent mouth and teeth, and a generally 
 snappish, alert look. After a few commonplaces, in which Mrs. 
 Whymper was clearly condescending, she launched into a de- 
 nunciation of Lucy's ill behaviour to her father, which at last 
 roused Dora to defence. She w^axed bold, and pointed out that 
 Lucy might have been managed if her father had been a little more 
 patient with her, had allowed her a few ordinary amusements, 
 and had not insisted in forcing her at once, fresh from school, 
 into ways and practices she did not naturally like, while she had 
 never been trained to them by force of habit. 
 
 ' Hoity toity, Miss ! ' said the widow, bridling, ' young people 
 are very uppish nowadays. They never seem to remember there 
 is such a thing as the fifth commandment. In my young days 
 what a father said was law, and no questions asked ; and I've 
 seen many a Lancashire man take a stick to his gell for less pro- 
 vocation than this gell's given her feyther ! I wonder at you, 
 Miss Lomax, that I do, for backing her up. But I'm afraid from 
 what I hear you've been taking up with a lot of Popish ways.'_ 
 
 And the woman looked her up and down with an air which 
 .plainly said that she was on her own ground in that parlour, and 
 might say exactly what she pleased there. 
 
 ' If I have, I don't see that it matters to you,' said Dora 
 quietly, and retreated. 
 
 Yes, certainly, a stepmother looked likely ! Lucy in her 
 bedroom upstairs knew nothing, and Dora decided to tell her 
 nothing till she was stronger. But this new development made 
 the child's future more uncertain than ever. 
 
 On the day before her departure for Hastings, Lucy came 
 out for a short walk, by w^ay of hardening herself for the journey. 
 She w^alked round the cathedral and up Victoria Street, and 
 then, tired out with the exertion, she made her way in to Dora, 
 to rest. Her face was closely hidden by a thick Shetland veil, 
 for, in addition to her general pallor and emaciation, her usually 
 clear and brilliant skin was roughened and blotched here and 
 there by some effect of her illness ; she could not bear to look at 
 herself in the glass, and shrank from meeting any of her old 
 acquaintances. It was, indeed, curious to watch the effect of the 
 temporary loss of beauty upon her ; her morbid impatience under 
 it showed at every turn. But for it, Dora was convinced that 
 she must and would have put herself in David Grieve's way 
 again before leaving Manchester. As it was, she was still deter- 
 mined not to let him see her. 
 
 She came in, much exhausted, and threw herself into Daddy's 
 arm-chair with groans of self-pity. Did Dora think she would 
 ever be strong again— ever be anything but an ugly fright ? It 
 was hard to have all this come upon you, just through doing a 
 service to some one who didn't care. 
 
 ' Hasn't he heard yet that I've been ill ? ' she inquired petu- 
 lantly. 
 
213 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 No ; Dora did not think he had. Neither she nor Daddy had 
 seen him. He must have been extra busy. But she would get 
 Daddy to ask him up to supper directly, and tell him all about it. 
 
 'And then, perhaps,' she said, looking up with a sweet, 
 intense look— how little Lucy was able to decipher it ! — ' perhaps 
 he may write a letter. ' 
 
 Lucy was cheered by this suggestion, and sat looking out of 
 window for a while, idly watching the passers-by. But she 
 could not let the one topic that absorbed her mind alone for long, 
 and soon she was once more questioning Dora in close detail 
 about David Grieve's sister and all that he had said about her. 
 For, by way of obliging the child to realise some of the incon- 
 venient burdens and obligations which were at that moment 
 banging round the young bookseller's neck, and making the 
 very idea of matrimony ridiculous to him, Dora had repeated to 
 her some of his confidences about himself and Louie. Lucy had 
 not taken them very happily. Everything that turned up now 
 seemed only to push her further out of sight and make her more 
 insignificant. She was thirsting, with aw^oman's nascent passion 
 and a schoolgirl's vanity, to be the centre and heroine of the 
 play ; and here she was reduced to the smallest and meanest of 
 parts — a part that caught nobody's eye, do what she would. 
 
 Suddenly she broke off what she was saying, and called to 
 Dora : 
 
 ' Do you see that pair of people, Dora ? ' Come — come at 
 once ! What an extraordinary -looking girl ! ' 
 
 Dora turned unwillingly, being absorbed in a golden halo 
 w^hich she had set herself to finish that day ; then she dropped 
 her needle, and pushed her stool back that she might see better. 
 From the cathedral end of Market Place an elderly grey-haired 
 man and a young girl were advancing along the pavement to- 
 wards the Parlour. As they passed, the flower-sellers at the 
 booths were turning to look at them, some persons in front of 
 them were turning back, and a certain number of errand-boys 
 and other loungers w^ere keeping pace with them, observing 
 them. The man leant every now and then on a thick stick he 
 carried, and looked uncertainly from house to house. He had a 
 worn, anxious expression, and the helpless movements of short 
 sight. Whenever he stopped the girl moved on alone, and he 
 had to hurry after her again to catch her up. She, meanwhile, 
 was perfectly conscious that she was being stared at, and stared 
 in return with a haughty composure which seemed to draw the 
 eyes of the passers-by after it like a magnet. She was very tall 
 and slender, and her unusual height made her garish dress the 
 more conspicuous. The small hat perched on her black hair was 
 all bright scarlet, both the felt and the trimming ; under her 
 jacket, which was purposely thrown back, there was a scarlet 
 bodice, and there was a broad band of scarlet round the edge of 
 her black dress. 
 
 Lucy could not take her eyes off her. 
 
CHAP. viTi YOUTH 213 
 
 ' Did you ever see anybody so handsome, Dora ? But what a 
 fast, horrid creature to dress like that ! And just look at her; 
 she won't wait for the old man, though he's calling to her— she 
 goes on staring at everybody. They'll have a crowd, presently ! 
 Why, they're coming here!'' 
 
 For suddenly the girl stopped outside the doorway below, and 
 beckoned imperiously to her companion. She said a few sharp 
 words to him, and the pair upstairs felt the swing-door of the 
 restaurant open and shut. 
 
 Lucy, forgetting her weakness, ran eagerly to the sitting- 
 room door and listened. 
 
 There was a sound of raised voices below, and then the door 
 at the foot of the stairs opened, and Daddy was heard shout- 
 ing. 
 
 'There— go along upstairs. My daughter, she'll speak to 
 you. And don't you come back this way— a man can't be feed- 
 ing Manchester and taking strangers about, all in the same 
 twinkling of an eye, you know, not unless he happens to have a 
 few spare bodies handy, which ain't precisely my case. My 
 daughter '11 tell you what you want to know, and show you out 
 by the private door. Dora ! ' 
 
 Dora stood waiting rather nervously at the sitting-room door. 
 The girl came up first, the old man behind her, bewildered and 
 groping his way. 
 
 ' We're strangers here— we want somebody to show us the 
 way. We've been to the book-shop in Half Street, and they sent 
 us on here. They were just brutes to us at that book- shop,' 
 said the girl, with a vindictive emphasis and an imperious self- 
 possession which fairly paralysed Lucy and Dora. Lucy's eyes, 
 moreover, were riveted on her face, on its colour, its fineness of 
 feature, its brilliance and piercingness of expression. And what 
 was the extraordinary likeness in it to something familiar ? 
 
 ' Why ! ' said Dora, in a little cry, ' aren't you Mr. David 
 Grieve's sister ? ' 
 
 For she had traced the likeness before Lucy. ' Oh, it must 
 •be ! ' 
 
 ' Well, I am his sister, if you want to know,' said the stranger, 
 looking astonished in her turn. ' He wrote to me to come up. 
 And I lent the letter to uncle to read— that's his uncle— and he 
 went and lost it somehow, fiddling about the fields while I was 
 putting my things together. And then we couldn't think of the 
 proper address there was in it— only the name of a man Purcell, 
 in Half Street, that David said he'd been with for two years. So 
 we went there to. ask ; and, my .^—weren't they rude to us ! 
 There was an ugly black man there chivied us out in no time — 
 wouldn't tell us anything. But as I was shutting the door the 
 shopman whispered to me, "Try the Parlour— Market Place." 
 So we came on here, you see.' 
 
 And she stared about her, at the room, and at the girls, 
 taking in everything with lightning rapidity— the embroidery 
 
214 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book u 
 
 frame, Lucy's veil and fashionably cut jacket, the shabby furni- 
 ture, the queer old pictures. 
 
 'Please come in,' said Dora civilly, ' and sit down. If you're 
 strangers here, I'll just put on my hat and take you round. Mr. 
 Grieve's a friend of ours. He's in Potter Street. You'll find 
 him nicely settled by now. This is my cousin, Mr. Purcell's 
 daughter.' 
 
 And she ran upstairs, leaving Lucy to grapple with the 
 new-comers. 
 
 The two girls sat down, and eyed each other. Reuben stood 
 patiently waiting. 
 
 ' Is the man at Half Street your father ? ' asked the new- 
 comer, abruptly. 
 
 'Yes,' said Lucy, conscious of the strangest mmglmg of 
 admiration and dislike, as she met the girl's wonderful eyes. 
 ' Did he and Davy fall out ? ' 
 
 ' They didn't get on about Sundays,' said Lucy, unwillingly, 
 glad of the sheltering veil which enabled her to hold her own 
 against this masterful creature. 
 
 ' Is your father strict about chapel and that sort of thing? ' 
 Lucy nodded. She felt an ungracious wish to say as little as 
 possible. 
 
 David's sister laughed. 
 
 'Davy was that way once—just for a bit— afore he ran 
 away, /knew he wouldn't keep it on.' 
 
 Then, with a queer look over her shoulder at her uncle, she 
 relapsed into silence. Her attention was drawn to Dora's frame, 
 and she moved up to it, bending over it and lifting the handker- 
 chief that Dora had thrown across it. 
 
 ' You mustn't touch it ! ' said Lucy, hastily, provoked, she 
 knew not why, by every movement the girl made. ' It's very 
 particular work.' 
 
 ' I'm used to fine things,' said the other, scornfully. ' 1 m a 
 silk-weaver— that's my trade— all the best brocades, drawing- 
 room trains, that style of thing. If you didn't handle them 
 carefully, you'd know it. Yes, she's doing it well,' and the 
 speaker put her head down and examined the work critically. 
 ' But it must go fearful slow, compared to a loom.' 
 
 'She does it splendidlv,' said Lucy, annoyed ; ' she's gettmg 
 quite famous for it. That's going to a great church up m 
 London, and she's got more orders than she can take.' 
 ' Does she get good pay ? ' asked the girl eagerly. 
 ' I don't know,' replied Lucy shortly. 
 
 'Because, if there's good pay,' said the other, exammmg the 
 work again closely, ' I'd soon learn it— why I'd learn it m a 
 week, you see ! If I stay here I shan't get no more silk-weav- 
 ing. And of course I'll stay. I'm just sick of the country. I'd 
 have come up long ago if I'd known where to find Davy.' 
 ' I'm ready,' said Dora in a constrained voice beside her. 
 Louie Grieve looked up at her. 
 
CHAP. VIII YOUTH 215 
 
 ' Ob, you needn't look so glum ! — I haven't hurt it. I'm used 
 to good things, stuffs at two guineas a yard, and the like of that. 
 What money do you take a week ? ' and she pointed to the frame. 
 
 Something in the tone and manner made the question specially 
 offensive. Dora pretended not to hear it. 
 
 ' Shall we go now ? ' she said, hurriedly covering her precious 
 work up from those sacrilegious fingers and putting it away. 
 ' Lucy, you ought to be going home.' 
 
 ' Well, I will directly,' said Lucy. ' Don't you bother about 
 me.'. 
 
 They all went downstairs. Lucy put up her veil, and pressed 
 her face against the window, watching for them. As she saw 
 them cross Market Street, she was seized with hungry longing. 
 She wanted to be going with them, to talk to him herself — to let 
 him see what she had gone through for him. It would be 
 months and months, perhaps, before they met again. And Dora 
 would see him — his horrid sister — everyone but she. He would 
 forget aU about her, and she w^ould be dull and wretched at 
 Hastings. 
 
 But as she turned away in her restless pain, she caught sight 
 of her changed face in the cracked looking-glass over the mantel- 
 piece. Her white lips tightened. She drew down her veil, and 
 went home. 
 
 Meanwhile Dora led the way to Potter Street. Louie took 
 little notice of any attempts to talk to her. She was wholly 
 engaged in looking about her and at the shops. Especially was 
 she attracted by the drapers' windows in St. Ann's Square, 
 pronouncing her opinion loudly and freely as to their contents. 
 
 Dora fell meditating. Young Grieve would have his work 
 cut out for him, she thought, if this extraordinary sister were 
 really going to settle wdth him. She was very like him — 
 strangely like him. And yet in the one face there was a quality 
 which was completely lacking in the other, and which seemed to 
 make all the difference. Dora tried to explain what she meant 
 to herself, and failed. 
 
 'Here's Potter Street,' she said, as they turned into it. 
 ' And that's his shop — that one with the stall outside. Oh, 
 there he is ! ' 
 
 David was in fact standing on his step talking to a customer 
 who was turning over the books outside. 
 
 Louie looked at him. Then she began to run. Old Grieve 
 too, crimson all over, and evidently much excited, hurried on. 
 Dora fell behind, her quick sympathies rising. 
 
 'They won't want me interfering,' she said, turning round. 
 ' I'll just go back to my work.' 
 
 Meanwhile, in David's little back room, which he had already 
 swept and garnished — for after his letter of the night before, he 
 had somehow expected Louie to rush upon him by the earliest 
 
216 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 possible train — the meeting of these long-sundered persons took 
 place. 
 
 David saw Reuben come in with amazement. 
 
 ' Why, Uncle Reuben ! Well, I'm real glad to see you. I 
 didn't think you'd have been able to leave the farm. Well, this 
 is my bit of a place, you see. What do you think of it ? ' 
 
 And, holding his sister by the hand, the young fellow looked 
 joyously at his uncle, pride in his new possessions and the 
 recollection of his destitute childhood rushing upon him 
 together as he spoke. 
 
 'Aye, it's a fine beginning j'o've made, Davy,' said the old 
 man, cautiously looking round, first at the little room, with its 
 neat bits of new furniture in Louie's honour, and then through 
 the glass door at the shop, which was now heavily lined with 
 books. ' Yo wor alius a cliver lad, Davy. A' think a'll sit down.' 
 
 And Reuben, subsiding into a chair, fell forthwith into an 
 abstraction, his old knotted hands trembling a little on his knees. 
 
 Meanwhile David was holding Louie at arm's-length to look 
 at her. He had kissed her heartily when she came in first, and 
 now he was all pleasure and excitement. 
 
 ' 'Pon my word, Louie, you've grown as high as the roof ! 
 I say, Louie, what's become of that smart pink dress you wore 
 at last "wake," and of that overlooker, with the moustaches, 
 from New Mills, you walked about with all day ?' 
 
 She stared at him open-mouthed. 
 
 ' What do you mean by that ?' she said, quickly. 
 
 David laughed out. 
 
 'And who was it gave Jim Wigson a box on the ears last 
 fifth of November, in the lane just by the Dye-works, eh, Miss 
 Louie?— and danced with young Redway at the Upper Mill 
 dance. New Year's Day ? — and had words with Mr. James at the 
 office about her last " cut," a fortnight ago— eh, Louie ? ' 
 
 'What ever do you mean ?' she said, half crossly, her colour 
 rising. ' You've been spying on me.' 
 
 She hated to be mystified. It made her feel herself in some 
 one else's power ; and the wild creature in her blood grew 
 restive. 
 
 ' Why, I've known all about you these four years ! ' the lad 
 began, with dancing eyes. Then suddenly his voice changed, 
 and dropped : ' I say, look at Uncle Reuben ! ' 
 
 For Reuben sat bent forward, his light blurred eyes looking 
 out straight before him, with a singular yet blind intentness, 
 as though, while seeing nothing round about him, they passed 
 beyond the walls of the little room to some vision of their own. 
 
 'I don't know whatever he came for,' began Louie, as they 
 both examined him. 
 
 'Uncle Reuben,' said David, going up to him and touching 
 him on the shoulder, ' you look tired. You'll be wanting some 
 dinner. I'll just send my man, John Dalby, round the corner 
 for something.' 
 
CHAP. YiTi YOUTH 217 
 
 And he made a step towards the door, but Reuben raised his 
 hand. 
 
 ' Noa, noa, Davy ! Shut that door, wiltha ? ' 
 
 David wondered, and shut it. 
 
 Then Reuben gave a long sigh, and put his hand deep into 
 his coat pocket, with the quavering, uncertain movement cha- 
 racteristic of him. 
 
 'Davy, my lad, a've got summat to say to tha.' 
 
 And with many hitches, while the others watched him in 
 astonishment, he pulled out of his pocket a canvas bag and put 
 it down on an oak stool in front of him. Then he undid the 
 string of it with his large awkward fingers, and pushed the stool 
 across to David. 
 
 ' Theer's sixty pund theer, Davy — sixty pund ! Yo can 
 keawnt it — it's aw reet. A've saved it for yo, this four year- 
 four year coom lasst Michaelmas Day. Hannah nor nobory 
 knew owt abeawt it. But it's yourn — it's yor share, being t' 
 half o' Mr. Gurney's money. Louie's share — that wor different ; 
 we had a reet to that, she bein a growin girl, and doin nowt 
 mich for her vittles. Fro the time when yo should ha had it— 
 whether for wages or for 'prenticin — an yo couldna ha it, because 
 Hannah had set hersen agen it, — a saved it for tha, owt o' t' 
 summer cattle moastly, without tellin nobory, so as not to mak 
 words.' 
 
 David, bewildered, had taken the bag into his hand. Louie's 
 eyes were almost out of her head with curiosity and amazement. 
 ' Mr. G-urney's money ! ' What did he mean ? It was all double- 
 Dutch to them. 
 
 David, with an effort, controlled himself, being now a man 
 and a householder. He stood with his back against the shop 
 door, his gaze fixed on Reuben. 
 
 ' Now, Uncle Reuben, I don't understand a bit of what you've 
 been saying, and Louie don't either. Who's Mr. Gurney ? and 
 what's his money ? ' 
 
 Unconsciously the young man's voice took a sharp, magisterial 
 note. Reuben gave another long sigh. He was now leaning on 
 his stick, staring at the floor. 
 
 ' Noa,— a' know yo doan't understan ; a've got to tell tha — 
 'at's t' worst part on 't. An I'm soa bad at tellin. Do yo mind 
 when yor feyther deed, Davy ?' he said suddenly, looking up. 
 
 David nodded,— a red flush of presentiment spread itself over 
 his face — his whole being hung on Reuben's words. 
 
 ' He sent for me afore he deed,' continued Reuben, slowly ; 
 ' an he towd me aw about his affairs. Six hunderd pund he'd 
 got sdsYiid—six-hunderd-pund ! Aye, it wor a lot for a yoong 
 mon like him, and after sich a peck o' troobles 1 And he towd 
 me Mr. Gurney ud pay us th' interest for yor bringin-up— th' two 
 on yo ; an whan yo got big, Davy, I wor to tak keawnsel wi Mr. 
 Gurney, an, if yo chose for t' land, yo were to ha yor money for 
 a farm, when yo wor big eneuf, an if yo turned agen th' land, yo 
 
218 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE fioOK ii 
 
 wor to be 'prenticed to soom trade, an ha yor money when yo 
 wanted it, — Mr. Gurney bein willin. An I promised him I'd 
 deal honest wi his childer, an — ' 
 
 Reuben paused painfully. He was wrestling with his con- 
 science, and groping for words about his wife. The brother and 
 sister sat open-mouthed, pale with excitement, afraid of losing 
 a single syllable. 
 
 ' An takkin it awthegither,' he said, bringing each word out 
 with an effort, ' I doan't think, by t' Lord's mercy, as I've gone 
 soa mich astray, though I ha been mich troobled this four year 
 wi thowts o' Sandy — my brither Sandy — an wi not knowin wheer 
 yo wor gone, Davy. Bit yo seem coom to an honest trade — an 
 Louie theer ha larnt a trade too, — an addle't a bit money, — an 
 she's a fine-grown lass — ' 
 
 He turned a slow, searching look upon her, as though he were 
 pleading a cause before some unseen judge. 
 
 ' An theer's yor money, Dav)^ It's aw th' same, a'm thinkin, 
 whether yo get it fro me or fro Mr. Gurney. An here — ' 
 
 He rose, and unbuttoning his inner coat, fumbled in the 
 pocket of it till he found a letter. 
 
 ' An here is a letter for Mr. Gurney. If yo gie me a pen, 
 Davy, I'll write in to 't yor reet address, an put it in t' post as I goo 
 to t' station. I took noatice of a box as I coom along. An then — ' 
 
 He stood still a moment pondering, one outspread hand on 
 the letter. 
 
 ' An then theer's nowt moor as a can remember, — an your 
 aunt uU be wearyin ; an it's but reet she should know now, at 
 wonst, abeawt t' money a've saved this four year, an t' letter to 
 Mr. Gurney. Yo understan — when yor letter came this mornin — 
 t' mon browt it up to Louie abeawt eight o'clock — she towd me 
 fust out i' th' yard — an I said to her, " Doan't you tell yor aunt 
 nowt abeawt it, an we'st meet at t' station." An I made soom 
 excuse to Hannah abeawt gooin ower t' Scout after soom beeasts 
 — an — an— Louie an me coom thegither.' 
 
 He passed his other hand painfully across his brow. The 
 travail of expression, the moral struggle of the last twenty-four 
 hours, seemed to have aged him before them. 
 
 David sat looking at him in a stupefied silence. A light was 
 breaking in upon him, transfiguring, combining, interpreting a 
 hundred scattered remembrances of his boyhood. But Louie, the 
 instant her uncle stopped, broke into a string of questions, shrill 
 and breathless, her face quite white, her eyes glittering. Reuben 
 seemed hardly to hear her, and in the middle of them David said 
 sharply, 
 
 ' Stop that, Louie, and let me talk to Uncle Reuben ! ' 
 
 He drew the letter from under Reuben's fingers, and went on, 
 steadily looking up into his uncle's face : 
 
 ' You'll let me read it, uncle, and I'll get you a pen directly to 
 put in the address. But first will you tell us about father ? You 
 never did— you nor Aunt Hannah. And about mother, too ? ' 
 
CHAP, viir YOUTH 219 
 
 He said the last words with difficulty, having all his life been 
 pricked by a certain instinct about his mother, which had, how- 
 ever, almost nothing definite to work upon. Reuben thought a 
 minute, then sat down again patiently. 
 
 ' Aye, a'U tell tha. Theer's nobory else can. An tha ought 
 to know, though it'll mebbe be a shock to tha.' 
 
 And, with his head resting against his stick, he began to tell 
 the story of his brother and his brother's marriage as he remem- 
 bered it. 
 
 First came the account of Sandy's early struggles, as Sandy 
 himself had described them on that visit which he had paid to 
 the farm in the first days of his prosperity ; then a picture of his 
 ultimate success in business, as it had appeared to the dull elder 
 brother dazzled by the younger's ' cliverness.' 
 
 ' Aye, he might ha been a great mon ; he might ha coom to 
 varra high things, might Sandy,' said Reuben solemnly, his voice 
 suddenly rising, ' bit for th' hizzy that ruined him ! ' 
 
 Both his hearers made an involuntary movement. But Reu- 
 ben had now lost all count of them. He was intent on one thing, 
 and capable only of one thing. They had asked him for his 
 story, and he was telling it, with an immense effort of mind, 
 recovering the past as best he could, and feeling some of it over 
 again intensely. 
 
 So when he came to the marriage, he told the story like one 
 thinking it out to himself, with an appalling plainness of phrase. 
 It was, of course, impossible for him to explain Sandy's aberra- 
 tion — there were no resources in him equal to the task. Louise 
 Suveret became in his account what she had always remained in 
 his imagination since Sandy's employers told him what was known 
 of her story — a mere witch and devil, sent for his brother's per- 
 dition. All his resentment against his brother's fate had passed 
 into his hatred of this creature whom he had never seen. Nay, 
 he even held up the picture of her hideous death before her 
 children with a kind of sinister triumph. So let the ungodly and 
 the harlot perish ! 
 
 David stood opposite to the speaker all the while, motionless, 
 save for an uneasy movement here and there when Reuben's 
 words grew more scripturally frank than usual. Louie's face 
 was much more positive than David's in what it said. Reuben 
 and Reuben's vehemence annoyed and angered her. She 
 frowned at him from under her black brows. It was evident 
 that he, rather than his story, excited her. 
 
 ' An we buried him aw reet an proper,' said Reuben at last, 
 wiping his brow, damp with this unwonted labour of brain and 
 tongue. ' Mr. Gurney he would ha it aw done handsome ; and 
 we put him in a corner o' Kensal Green, just as close as might be 
 to whar they'd put her after th' crowner had sat on her. Yor 
 feyther had left word, an Mr. Gurney would ha nowt different. 
 But it went agen me — aye, it did — to leave him wi her after 
 aw !' 
 
230 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 And falling suddenly silent, Reuben sat wrapped in a sombre 
 mist of memory. 
 
 Then Louie broke out, rolling and unrolling the ribbons of her 
 hat in hot fingers. 
 
 ' I don't believe half on't — I don't see how you could know — 
 nor Mr. Gurney either.' 
 
 Reuben looked round bewildered. Louie got up noisily, went 
 to the window and threw it open, as though oppressed by the 
 narrowness of the room. 
 
 'No, I don't,' she repeated, defiantly — 'I don't believe the 
 half on't. But I'll find out some day.' 
 
 She leaned her elbows on the sill, and, looking out into the 
 squalid bit of yard, threw a bit of grit that lay on the window at 
 a cat that sat sleepily blinking on the flags outside. 
 
 Reuben rose heavily. 
 
 ' Gie me pen and ink, Davy, an let me go.' 
 
 The young man brought it him without a word. Reuben put 
 in the address. 
 
 ' Ha yo read it, Davy ? ' 
 
 David started. In his absorption he had forgotten to read it. 
 
 'I wor forced to write it i' the top sheepfold,' Reuben began 
 to explain apologetically, then stopped suddenly. Several times 
 he had been on the point of bringing Hannah into the conversa- 
 tion, and had always refrained. He refrained now. David read 
 it. It was written in Reuben's most laborious business style, and 
 merely requested that Mr. Gurney would now communicate with 
 Sandy's son direct on the subject of his father's money. He had 
 left Needham Farm, and was old enough to take counsel himself 
 with Mr. Gurney in future as to what should be done with it. 
 
 Reuben looked over David's shoulder as he read. 
 
 ' An Louie ? ' he said uncertainly, at the end, jerking his 
 thumb towards her. 
 
 ' I'm stayin here, ' said Louie peremptorily, still looking out of 
 window. 
 
 Reuben said nothing. Perhaps a shade of relief lightened his 
 old face. 
 
 When the letter was handed back to him, he sealed it and put 
 it into his pocket, buttoning up his coat for departure. 
 
 'Yo wor talkin abeawt dinner, Davy— or summat,' said the 
 old man, courteously. 'Thankee kindly. I want for nowt. I 
 mun get home— I mun get home.' 
 
 Louie, standing absorbed in her own excited thoughts, could 
 hardly be disturbed to say good-bye to him. David, still in a 
 dream, led him through the shop, where Reuben peered about 
 him with a certain momentary curiosity. 
 
 But at the door he said good-bye in a great hurry and ran 
 down the steps, evidently impatient to be rid of his nephew. 
 
 David turned and came slowly back through the little piled- 
 up shop, where John, all eyes and ears, sat on a high stool in the 
 corner, into the living room. 
 
CHAP. VIII YOUTH 221 
 
 As be entered it Louie sprang upon him, and seizing him with 
 both hands, danced him madly round the little space of vacant 
 boards, till she tripped her foot over the oak stool, and sank 
 down on a chair, laughing wildly. 
 
 ' How much of that money am I going to have ? ' she demanded 
 suddenly, her arms crossed over her breast, her eyes brilliant, 
 her whole aspect radiant and exulting. 
 
 David was standing over the fire, looking down into it, and 
 made no answer. He had disengaged himself from her as soon 
 as he could. 
 
 Louie waited a while ; then, with a contemptuous lip and a 
 shrug of the shoulders, she got up. 
 
 ' What's the good of worriting about things, I'd like to know ? 
 You won't do 'em no good. Why don't you think about the 
 money ? My word, won't Aunt Hannah be mad ! How am I to 
 get my parcels from the station, and where am I to sleep ? ' 
 
 ' You can go and see the house,' said David, shortly. ' The 
 lodgers upstairs are out, and there's the key of the attic' 
 
 He threw it to her, and she ran off. He had meant to take 
 her in triumphal progress through the little house, and show 
 her all the changes he had been making for her benefit and his 
 own. But a gulf had yawned between them. He was relieved 
 to see her go, and when he was left alone he laid his arms on 
 the low mantelpiece and hid his face upon them. His mother's 
 story, his father's fate, seemed to be burning into his heart. 
 
 Reuben hurried home through the bleak March evening. In 
 the train he could not keep himself still, fidgeting so much that 
 his neighbours eyed him with suspicion, and gave him a wide 
 berth. As he started to walk up to Kinder a thin, raw sleet 
 came on. It drove in his face, chilling him through and through, 
 as he climbed the lonely road, where the black moorland farms 
 lay all about him, seen dimly through the white and drifting 
 veil of the storm. But he was conscious of nothing external. 
 His mind was absorbed by the thought of his meeting with 
 Hannah, and by the excited feeling that one of the crises of his 
 timid and patient life was approaching. During the last four 
 years they had been very poor, in spite of Mr. Gurney's half- 
 yearly cheque, partly because of the determination with which 
 he had stuck to his secret saving. Hannah would think they 
 were going now to be poorer still, but he meant to prove to her 
 that what with Louie's departure and the restoration of their 
 whole income to its natural channels, there would not be so 
 much difference. He conned his figures eagerly, rehearsing 
 what he would say. For the rest he walked lightly and briskly. 
 The burden of his brother's children had dropped away from 
 him, and in those strange inner colloquies of his he could look 
 Sandy in the face again. 
 
 Had Hannah discovered his flight, he wondered ? Some one. 
 he was afraid, might have seen him and Louie at the station and 
 
222 THP HISTORY OF DAVID GKIEYE book ii 
 
 told tales. He was not sure that one of the Wigsons had not 
 been hanging about the station yard. And that letter of David's 
 to Louie, which in his clumsy blundering way he had dropped 
 somewhere about the farm buildings or the house, and had not 
 been able to find again ! It gave him a cold sweat to think that 
 in his absence Hannah might have come upon it and drawn her 
 own conclusions. As he followed out this possibility in his mind, 
 his step quickened till it became almost a run. 
 
 Aye, and Hannah had been ailing of late — there had been 
 often 'summat wrang wi her.' Well, they were both getting 
 into years. Perhaps now that Louie with her sharp tongue and 
 aggravating ways was gone, now that there was only him to do 
 for, Hannah would take things easier. 
 
 He opened the gate into the farmyard and walked up to the 
 house door with a beating heart. It struck him as strange that 
 the front blinds were not drawn, for it was nearly dark and the 
 storm beat against the windows. There was a glimmer of fire 
 in the room, but he could see nothing clearly. He turned the 
 handle and went into the passage, making a clatter on purpose. 
 But nothing stirred in the house, and he pushed open the kitchen 
 door, which stood ajar, filled with a vague alarm, 
 
 Hannah was sitting in the rocking-chair, by the fire. Beside 
 her was the table partly spread with tea, which, however, had 
 been untouched. At Eeuben's entrance she turned her head 
 and looked at him fixedly. In the dim light — a mixture of the 
 dying fire and of the nioonlight from outside — he could not see 
 her plainly, but he felt that there was something strange, and he 
 ran forward to her. 
 
 ' Hannah, are yo bad ? — is there owt wrang wi yo ?' 
 
 Then his seeking eye made out a crumpled paper in her left 
 hand, and he knew at once that it must be Davy's letter. 
 
 Before he could speak again she gave him a push backward 
 with her free hand, and said with an effort : 
 
 ' Where's t' gell ? ' 
 
 ' Louie ? She's left i' Manchester. A've found Davy, Hannah.' 
 
 There was a pause, after which he said, trembling : 
 
 ' Shall I get yo summat, Hannah ? ' 
 
 A hoarse voice came out of the dark : 
 
 ' Ha doon wi yo ! Yo ha been leein to me. Yo wor seen at 
 t' station.' 
 
 Reuben sat down. 
 
 ' Hannah,' he said, 'yo mun just listen to me.' 
 
 And taking his courage in both hands, he told everything 
 without a break : how he had been ' feeart ' of what Sandy might 
 say to him 'at th' joodgment,' how he had saved and lied, and 
 how now he had seen David, had written to Mr. Gurney, and 
 stopped the cheques for good and all. 
 
 When he came to the letter to Mr. Gurney, Hannah sat 
 suddenly upright in her chair, grasping one arm of it. 
 
 'It shall mak noa difference to tha, a tell tha,' he cried 
 
CHAP. IX YOUTH 223 
 
 hastily, putting up his hand, fearing he knew not what, ' nobbut 
 a few shillins ony way. I'll work for tha an mak it up.' 
 
 She made a sound which turned him cold with terror — a 
 sound of baffled weakness, pain, vindictive passion all in one^ 
 then she fell helplessly to one side in her chair, and her grey 
 head dropped on her shoulder. 
 
 In another moment he was crying madly for help in the road 
 outside. For long there was no answer— only the distant roai 
 of the Downfall and the sweep of the wind. Then a labourer, 
 on the path leading to the Wigsons' farm, heard and ran up. 
 
 An hour later a doctor had been got hold of, and Hannah 
 was lying upstairs, tended by Mrs. Wigson and Reuben. 
 
 'A paralytic seizure,' said the doctor to Reuben. 'This 
 woman says she's been failing for some time past. She's lived 
 and worked hard, Mr. Grieve ; you know that. And there's been 
 some shock.' 
 
 Reuben explained incoherently. The doctor did not under- 
 stand, and did not care, being a dull man and comparatively new 
 to the place. He did what he could, said she would recover — oh, 
 yes, she would recover ; but, of course, she could never be the 
 same woman again. Her working days were done. 
 
 A servant came over from Wigsons' to sit up with Reuben, 
 ifrs. Wigson being too delicate to undertake it. The girl went 
 to lie down first for an hour or two in the room across the land- 
 ing, and he was left alone in the gaunt room with his wife. Poor 
 quailing soul ! As he sat there in the windy darkness, hour after 
 hour, open-mouthed and open-eyed, he was steeped in terror — 
 terror of the future, of its forlornness, of his own feebleness, of 
 death. His heart clave piteously to the unconscious woman 
 beside him, for he had nothing else. It seemed to him that the 
 Lord had indeed dealt hardly with him, thus to strike him down 
 on the day of his great atonement I 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 No news of the catastrophe at Needham Farm reached the brother 
 and sister in Potter Street. The use of the pen had always been 
 to Reuben one of the main torments and mysteries of life, and he 
 had besides all those primitive instincts of silence and conceal- 
 ment which so often in the peasant nature accompany misfortune. 
 His brain-power, moreover, was absorbed by his own calamity 
 and by the changes in the routine of daily life which his wife's 
 state brought upon him, so that immediately after his great effort 
 of reparation towards them— an effort which had taxed the whole 
 man physically and mentally— his brother's children and their 
 affairs passed for a while strangely and completely from his 
 troubled mind. 
 
 Meanwhile, what a transformation he had wrought in their 
 fortunes ! When the shock of his parents' story had subsided in 
 
224 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 him, and that other shock of jarring temperaments, which the 
 first hour of Louie's companionship had brought with it, had been 
 for tlie time forgotten again in the stress of plans and practical 
 detail, David felt to the full the exhilaration of his new prospects. 
 He had sprung at a leap, as it seemed to him, from the condition 
 of the boy-adventurer to that of the man of affairs. And as he 
 looked back upon their childhood and realised that all the time, 
 instead of being destitute and dependent orphans, they and their 
 money had really been the mainstay of Hannah and the farm, the 
 lad seemed to cast from him the long humiliation of years, to rise 
 in stature and dignity. That old skinflint and hypocrite, Aunt 
 Hannah ! With the usual imperfect sympathy of the young he 
 did not much realise Reuben's struggle. But he bore his uncle 
 no grudge for these years' delay. The contrivances and hard- 
 ships of his Manchester life had been, after all, enjoyment. 
 Without them and the extravagant self-reliance they had de- 
 veloped in him his pride and ambition would have run less high. 
 And at this moment the nerve and savour of existence came to 
 him from pride and from ambition. 
 
 But first of all he had to get his money. As soon as Mr. 
 Gurney's answer to Reuben's letter came, David took train for 
 London, made his way to the great West-End shop which had 
 employed his father, and saw the partner who had taken charge 
 of Sandy's money for so long. Mr. Gurney, a shrewd and 
 pompous person, was interested in seeing Grieve's son, inquired 
 what he vv^as about, ran over the terms of a letter to himself, 
 which he took out of a drawer, and then, with a Little flourish as 
 to his own deserts in the matter of the guardianship of the money 
 — a flourish neither unnatural nor unkindly — handed over to the 
 lad both the letter and a cheque on a London bank, took his 
 receipt, talked a little, but with a blunted memory, about the 
 lad's father, gave him a little general business advice, asked 
 whether his sister was still alive, and bade him good morning. 
 Both were satisfied, and the young man left the office with the 
 cheque lying warm in his pocket, looking slowly and curiously 
 round the shop where his father had earned it, as he walked 
 away. 
 
 Outside he found himself close to Trafalgar Square, and, 
 striking down to the river, he went to sit on the Embankment 
 and ponder the enclosures which Mr. Gurney had given him. 
 First he took out the cheque, with infinite care, lest the breeze on 
 the Embankment should blow it out of his hand, and spread it on 
 his knee. 6001. ! As he stared at each letter and flourish his 
 eyes widened anew ; and when he looked up across the grey and 
 misty river, the figures still danced before him, and in his 
 exultation he could have shouted the news to the passers-by. 
 Then, when the precious paper had been safely stowed away 
 again, he hesitatingly took out the other — his father's dying 
 memorandum on the subject of his children, so he had under- 
 stood Mr. Gurney. It was old and brown ; it had been written 
 
CHAP. IX YOUTH 225 
 
 with anguish, and it could only be deciphered with difficulty. 
 There had been no will properly so called. Sandy had placed 
 more confidence in ' the firm ' than in the law, and had left 
 behind him merely the general indication of his wishes in the 
 hands of the partner who had specially befriended him. The 
 provisions of it were as Sandy had described them to Reuben on 
 his death-bed. Especially did the father insist that there should 
 be no artificial restriction of age. ' I wanted money most when 
 I was nineteen, and I could have used it just as well then as I 
 could at any later time. ' 
 
 So he might have been a rich man at least a year earlier. 
 Well, much as he had loathed Purcell, he w^as glad, on the whole, 
 that things were as they were. He had been still a great fool, he 
 reflected, a year ago. 
 
 Then, as to Louie, the letter ran : ' Let Davy have all the 
 money, and let him manage for her. I won't divide it ; he must 
 judge. He may want it all, and it may be best for them both he 
 should have it. He's got a good heart ; I know that ; he'll not 
 rob his sister. I lay it on him, now I'm dying, to be patient 
 with her, and look after her. She's not like other children. But 
 it's not her fault ; it was born in her. Let him see her married 
 to a decent man, and then give her what's honestly hers. That 
 little lad has nursed me like a woman since I've been ill. He was 
 always a good lad to me, and I'd like him to know when he's 
 grown up that his father loved him — ' 
 
 But here the poor laboured scrawl came to an end, save for a 
 few incoherent strokes. David thrust it back into his pocket. 
 His cheek was red ; his eyes burnt ; he sat for long, with his 
 elbows on his knees, staring at the February river. The choking, 
 passionate impulse to comfort his father he had felt so often as a 
 child was there again, by association, alive and piteous. 
 
 Suddenly he woke up with a start. There, to either hand, lay 
 the bridges, with the moving figures atop and the hurrying river 
 below. And from one of them his mother had leapt when she 
 destroyed herself. In the trance of thought that followed, it was 
 to him as though he felt her wild nature, her lawless blood, stir- 
 ring within him, and realised, in a fierce, reluctant way, tliat he 
 was hers as well as his father's. In a sense, he shared Reuben's 
 hatred ; for he, best of all, knew what she had made his father 
 suffer. Yet the thought of her drew his restless curiosity after 
 it. Where did she come from ? Who were her kindred ? From 
 the south of France, Reuben thought. The lad's imagination 
 travelled with difficulty and excitement to the far and alien land 
 whence half his being had sprung. A few scraps of poetry and 
 history recurred to him — a single tattered volume of ' Monte 
 Cristo,' which he had lately bought with an odd lot at a sale— but 
 nothing that suggested to his fancy anything like the peasant 
 farm in the Mont Ventoux, within sight of Aries, where Louise 
 Suveret's penurious childhood had been actually cradled. 
 
 Two o'clock struck from the belfry of St. Paul's, looming there 
 
226 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 to his left in the great bend of the river. At the sound he shook 
 off all his thoughts. Let him see something of London. He had 
 two hours and a half before his train from Euston. Westminster 
 first — a hasty glance ; then an omnibus to St. Paul's, that he 
 might look down upon the city and its rush ; then north. He had 
 a map with him, and his quick intelligence told him exactly how 
 to use his time to the best advantage. Years afterwards he was 
 accustomed to look back on this hour spent on the top of an 
 omnibus, which was making its difficult way to the Bank through 
 the crowded afternoon streets, as one of the strong impressions 
 of his youth. Here was one centre of things ; Westminster 
 represented another ; and both stood for knowledge, wealth, and 
 power. The boy's hot blood rose to the challenge. His foot was 
 on the ladder, and many men with less chances than he had risen 
 to the top. At this moment, small Manchester tradesman that 
 he was, he had the constant presentiment of a wide career. 
 
 That night he let himself into his own door somewhere about 
 nine o'clock. What had Louie been doing with herself all day ? 
 She was to have her first lesson from Dora Lomax ; but she must 
 have been dull since, unless Dora had befriended her. 
 
 To his astonishment", as he shut the door he heard voices in 
 the kitchen— Louie and John. John, the shy, woman-hating 
 creature, who had received the news of Louie's expected advent 
 in a spirit of mingled irritation and depression — who, after his 
 first startled look at her as she passed through the shop, seemed 
 to David to have fled the sight of her whenever it was possible ! 
 
 Louie was talking so fast and laughing so much that neither of 
 them had heard David's latchkey, and in his surprise the brother 
 stood still a moment in the dark, looking round the kitchen-door, 
 which stood a little open. Louie was sitting by the fire with some 
 yards of flowered cotton stuff on her knee, at which she was sew- 
 ing ; John was opposite to her on the oak stool, crouched over a 
 box of nails, from which he was laboriously sorting out those -of a 
 certain size, apparently at her bidding, for she gave him sharp 
 directions from time to time. But his toil was intermittent, for 
 whenever her sallies were louder or more amusing than usual his 
 hand paused, and he sat staring at her, his small eyes expanding, 
 a sympathetic grin stealing over his mouth. 
 
 It seemed to David that she was describing her lover of the 
 winter ; he caught her gesture as she illustrated her perform- 
 ance with Jim Wigson— the boxing of the amorous lout's ears 
 in the lane by the Dye-works. Her beautiful curly black hair 
 was combed to-night into a sort of wild halo round her brow 
 and cheeks, and in this arrangement counteracted the one fault 
 of the face— a slightly excessive length from forehead to chin. 
 But the brilliance of the eyes, the redness of the thin lips over 
 the small and perfect teeth, the flush on the olive cheek, the 
 slender neck, the distinction and delicacy of every sweeping line 
 and curve— for the first time even David realised, as he stood 
 
CHAP. IX YOUTH 227 
 
 there in the dark, that his sister was an extraordinary beauty. 
 Strange ! Her manner and voice had neither natural nor 
 acquired refinement ; and yet in the moulding of the head and 
 face there was a dignity and perfection— a touch, as it were, of 
 the grand style— which marked her out in a northern crowd and 
 riveted the northern eye. Was it the trace of another national 
 character, another civilisation, longer descended, less mixed, 
 more deeply graven than ours ? 
 
 But what was that idiot John doing here ? — the young master 
 wanted to know. He coughed loudly and hung up his hat and 
 his stick, to let them hear that he was there. The pair in the 
 kitchen started. Louie sprang up. flung down her work, and ran 
 out to him. 
 
 ' Well,' said she breathlessly, ' have you got it ? ' 
 
 ♦Yes.' 
 
 She gave a little shriek of excitement. 
 
 'Show it then.' 
 
 'There's nothing to show but a cheque. It's all right. Is 
 there anything for supper ? ' 
 
 'There's some bread and cheese and cold apple-pie in there,' 
 said Louie, annoyed with him already ; then, turning her head 
 over her shoulder, ' Mr. Dalby, I'll trouble you to get them out. ' 
 
 With awkward alacrity John flew to do her bidding. When 
 the lad had ransacked the cupboard and placed all the viands it 
 contained on the table, he looked at David. That young man, 
 with a pucker in his brow, was standing by the fire with his 
 hands in his pockets, making short answers to Louie's sharp and 
 numerous questions. 
 
 'That's all I can find,' said John. 'Shall I run for some- 
 thing ? ' 
 
 'Thanks,' said David, still frowning, and sat him down, 
 ♦that'll do.' 
 
 Louie made a face at John behind her brother's back. The 
 assistant slowly flushed a deep red. In this young fellow, with 
 his money buttoned on his breast, both he and Louie for the first 
 time realised the master. 
 
 'Well, good night,' he said, hesitating, 'I'm going.' 
 
 David jumped up and went with him into the passage. 
 
 ' Look here,' he said abruptly, ' you and I have got some busi- 
 ness to talk to-morrow. I'm not going to keep you slaving here 
 for nothing now that I can afford to pay you.' 
 
 ' Are you going to turn me off ? ' said the other hastily. 
 
 David"^ laughed. The cloud had all cleared from his brow. 
 
 ' Don't be such a precious fool ! ' he said. ' Now be off — and 
 seven sharp. I must go at it like ten horses to-morrow.' 
 
 John disappeared into the night, and David went back to his 
 sister. He found her looking red and excited, and sewing ener- 
 getically. 
 
 ' Look here I ' she said, lifting a threatening eye to him as he 
 entered the room. ' I'm not going to be treated like a baby. If 
 
228 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 you don't tell me all about that money, I'll write to Mr. Gumey 
 myself. It's part of it mine, and I'll know^ so there ! ' 
 
 ' I'll tell you everything,' he said quietly, putting a hand into 
 his coat pocket before he sat down to his supper again. ' There's 
 the cheque— and there's our father's letter, — what Mr. Gurney 
 gave me. There was no proper will — this was instead. ' 
 
 He pretended to eat, but in reality he watched her anxiously 
 as she read it. The result was very much what he had expected. 
 She ran breathlessly through it, then, with a look all flame and 
 fury, she broke out — 
 
 ' Upow my word ! So you're going to take it all, and I'm to 
 be beholden to you for every penny. I'd like to see myself ! ' 
 
 'Now look here, Louie,' he said, firmly, pushing back his chair 
 from the table, ' I want to explain things to you. I should like 
 to tell you aU about my business, and what I think of doing, and 
 then you can judge for yourself. I'll not rob you or anyone.' 
 
 Whereupon with a fierce gesture she caught up her work 
 again, and he fell into long and earnest talk, setting his mind to 
 the task. He explained to her that the arrival of this money— 
 this capital — made just all the difference, that the whole of it 
 would be infinitely more useful to him than the half, and that he 
 proposed to employ it both for her benefit and his own. He had 
 already cleared out the commission agent from the first floor, and 
 moved down the lodgers— a young foreman and his wife— from 
 the attics to the first-floor back. That left the two attics for him- 
 self and Louie, and gave him the front first-floor room, the best 
 room in the house, for an extension of stock. 
 
 ' Why don't you turn those people out altogether ? ' said 
 Louie, impatiently. ' They pay very little, and you'll be wanting 
 that room soon, very like.' 
 
 'Well, I shall get it soon,' said David bluntly; 'but I can't 
 get it now. Mrs. Mason's bad ; she going to be confined.' 
 
 ' Well, I dare say she is ! ' cried Louie. ' That don't matter ; 
 she isn't confined yet.' 
 
 David looked at her in amazement. Then his face hardened. 
 
 'I'm not going to turn her out, I tell you,' he said, and imme- 
 diately returned to his statement. Well, there Vvere all sorts of 
 ways in which he might employ his money. He might put up a 
 shed in the back yard, and get a printing-press. He knew of a 
 press and a very decent fount of type, to be had extremely cheap. 
 John was a capital workman, and between them they might 
 reprint some of the scarce local books and pamphlets, which were 
 always sure of a sale. As to his stock, there were endless possi- 
 bilities. He knew of a collection of rare books on early America, 
 which belonged to a gentleman at Cheadle. He had been nego- 
 tiating about them for some time. Now he would close at once ; 
 from his knowledge of the market the speculation was a certain 
 one. He was also inclined to largely increase his stock of foreign 
 books, especially in the technical and scientific direction. There 
 was a considerable opening, he believed, for such books in Man- 
 
CHAP. IX YOUTH 229 
 
 Chester ; at any rate, be meant to try for it. And as soon as 
 ever he could he should learn German. There was a fellow — a 
 German clerk — who haunted the Parlour, who would teach him 
 in exchange for English lessons. 
 
 So, following a happy instinct, he opened to her all his mind, 
 and talked to her as though they were partners in a firm. The 
 event proved that he could have done nothing better. Very 
 early in his exposition she began to put her wits to his, her irrita- 
 tion dropped, and he was presently astonished at the intelligence 
 she showed. Every element almost in the problems discussed 
 was unfamiliar to her, yet after a while a listener coming in 
 might have thought that she too had been Purcell's apprentice, 
 so nimbly had she gathered up the details involved, so quick she 
 was to see David's points and catch his phrases. If there was no 
 moral fellowship between them, judging from to-night, there 
 bade fair to be a comradeship of intelligence. 
 
 'There now,' he said, when he had come to the end of his 
 budget, ' you leave your half of the money to me. Mind, I agree 
 it's your half, and I'll do the best I can with it. Ill pay you 
 interest on it for two years, and I'll keep you. Then well see. 
 And if you want to improve yourself a bit, instead of going to 
 work at once, I'll pay for teachers. And look here, we'll keep 
 good friends over it.' 
 
 His keen eyes softened to a charming, half-melancholy smile. 
 Louie took no notice ; she was absorbed in meditation ; and at 
 the end of it, she said \sdth a long breath — 
 
 ' Well, you may have it, and I'll keep an eye on the accounts. 
 But you needn't think I'll sit at home " improving " myself ! 
 Not I. I'll do that church-work. That girl gave me a lesson this 
 morning, and I'm going again to-morrow.' 
 
 DaA-id received the news with satisfaction, remarking heartily 
 that Dora Lomax was a real good sort, and if it weren't for her 
 the Parlour and Daddy would soon be in a fix. He told the story 
 of the Parlour, dwelling on Dora's virtues. 
 
 ' But she is a crank, though 1 ' said Louie. ' Why, if you make 
 free with her things a bit, or if you call 'em by the wrong names, 
 she'U fly at you ! How's anybody to know what they're meant for ? ' 
 
 David laughed, and got up to get some books he was repairing. 
 As he moved away he looked back a moment. 
 
 ' I say, Louie,' he began, hesitating, ' that fellow John's 
 worked for me like a dozen, and has never taken a farthing from 
 me. Don't you go and make a fool of him.' 
 
 A flush passed over Louie's face. She Lifted her hand and 
 tucked away some curly ends of long hair that had fallen on her 
 shoulders. , 
 
 ' He's like one of Aunt Hannah's suet rolies,' she said, after a 
 minute, with a gleam of her white teeth. ' Seems as if some one 
 had tied him in a cloth and boiled him that shape.' 
 
 jS'either of them cared to go to bed. They sat up talking. 
 
330 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 David was mending, sorting, and pricing a number of old books 
 he had bought for nothing at a country sale. He knew enough 
 of bookbinding to do the repairing with much skill, showing the 
 same neatness of finger in it that he had shown years ago in the 
 carving of toy boats and water-wheels. Louie went on with her 
 work, which proved to be a curtain for her attic. She meant to 
 have that room nice, and she had been out buying a few things, 
 whereby David understood — as indeed Reuben had said— that she 
 had some savings. Moreover, with regard to certain odd jobs of 
 carpentering, she had already pressed John into her service, 
 which explained his lingering after hours, and his eagerness 
 among the nails. As to the furniture David had bought for her, 
 on which, in the intervals of his busy days, he had spent some 
 time and trouble, and of which he was secretly proud, humble 
 and cheap as it was — she took it for granted. He could not 
 remember that she had said any ' thank you's ' since she came. 
 
 Still, youth and comradeship were pleasant. The den in 
 which they sat was warm with light and fire, and was their own. 
 Louie's exultation, too, in their change of fortune, which flashed 
 out of her at every turn, was infectious, and presently his spirits 
 rose with hers, and the two lost themselves in the excitement of 
 large schemes and new horizons. 
 
 After a time he found himself comparing notes with her as to 
 that far-off crisis of his running away. 
 
 ' I suppose you heard somehow about Jim Wigson and me ? ' 
 he asked her, his pulse quickening after all these years. 
 
 She nodded with a little grin. He had already noticed, by the 
 way, that she, while still living among the moors, had almost 
 shaken herself free of the Kinder dialect, whereas it had taken 
 quite a year of Manchester life to rub off his own Doric. 
 
 ' Well, you didn't imagine ' — he went on — ' I was going to stop 
 after that '^ I could put a knife between Jim's ribs now when I 
 think of it ! ' 
 
 And, pushing his book away from him, he sat recalling that 
 long past shame, his face, glowing with vindictive memory, 
 framed in his hands. 
 
 ' I don't see, though, what you sneaked off for like that after 
 all you'd promised me,' she said with energy. 
 
 ' No, it was hard on you,' he admitted. ' But I couldn't think 
 of any other way out. I was mad with everybody, and just 
 wanted to cut and run. But before I hit on that notion about 
 Tom' (lie had just been explaining to her in detail, not at all to 
 her satisfaction, his device for getting regular nev.s of her) ' I 
 used to spend half my time wondering what you'd do. I thought, 
 perhaps, you'd run away too, and that would have been a kettle 
 offish.' 
 
 ' I did run away,' she said, her wild eyes sparkling — ' twice.' 
 
 ' Jiminy ! ' said David with a schoolboy delight, ' let's hear ! ' 
 
 Whereupon she took up her tale and told hini a great deal that 
 was still quite unknown to him. She told- it in her own way with 
 
CHAP. IX YOUTH 231 
 
 characteristic blindnesses and hardnesses, but the truth of it was 
 this. The very day after David's departure she too had run away, 
 in spite of the fact that Hannah was keeping her in something 
 very like imprisonment. She supposed that David had gone to 
 Manchester, and she meant to follow him there. But she had 
 been caught begging the other side of Glossop by a policeman, 
 who was a native of Clough End and knew all about her. 
 
 ' He made me come along back, but he must have got the 
 mark on his wrist still where I bit him, I should think,' remarked 
 Miss Louie, mth a satisfaction untouched apparently by the lapse 
 of time. 
 
 The next attempt had been more serious. It was some months 
 afterwards, and by this time she was in despair about David, and 
 had made up her passionate mind that she would never see him 
 again. But she loathed Hannah more and more, and at last, in 
 the middle of a snowy February, the child determined to find her 
 way over the Peak into the wild valley of the Woodlands, and so 
 to Ashopton and Sheffield, in which last town she meant to go to 
 service. But in the effort to cross the plateau of the Peak she 
 very nearly lost her life. Long before she came in sight of the 
 Snake Inn, on the "Woodlands side, she sank exhausted in the 
 snow, and, but for some Frimley shepherds who were out after 
 their sheep, she would have drawn her last breath in that grim 
 solitude. They carried her down to Frimley and dropped her at 
 the nearest shelter, which happened to be Margaret Dawson's 
 cottage. 
 
 Margaret was then in the first smart of her widowhood. 'Lias 
 was just dead, and she was withering physically and mentally 
 under the heart-hunger of her loss. The arrival of the pallid, 
 half-conscious child— David's sister, with David's eyes— for a time 
 distracted and appeased her. She nursed the poor waif, and sent 
 word to Needham Farm. Keuben came for the girl, and Margaret, 
 partly out of compassion, partly out of a sense of her own decaying 
 strength, bribed her to go back home by the promise of teaching 
 her the silk- weaving. 
 
 Louie learnt the trade with surprising quickness, and as she 
 shot up in stature and her fingers gained in cunning and rapidity, 
 Margaret became more bowed, helpless and ' fond,' until at last 
 Louie did everything, brought home the weft and warp, set it up, 
 worked off the ' cuts,' and took them to the warehouse in Clough 
 End to be paid ; while Margaret sat in the chimney corner, pining 
 inwardly for 'Lias and dropping deeper day by day into the gulf 
 of age. By this time of course various money arrangements had 
 been made between them, superintended by Margaret's brother, a 
 weaver in the same village who found it necessary to keep a very 
 sharp eye on this girl-apprentice whom Margaret had picked up. 
 Of late Louie had been paying Margaret rent for the loom, 
 together with a certain percentage on the weekly earnings, 
 practically for 'goodwill.' And on this small sum the widow 
 had managed to live and keep her home, while Louie launched 
 
232 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 gloriously into new clothes, started a savings-bank book, and 
 snapped her fingers for good and all at Hannah, who put up with 
 her, however, in a sour silence because of Mr. Gurney's cheques. 
 
 ' And Margaret can't do anything for herself now ? ' asked 
 David. He had followed the story with eagerness. For years the 
 remembrance had rankled in his mind how during his last months 
 at Kinder, when 'Lias was dying, and the old pair were more in 
 want than ever of the small services he had been accustomed to 
 render them, he had forgotten and neglected his friends because 
 he had been absorbed in the excitements of * conversion,' so that 
 when Tom MuUins had told him in general terms that his sister 
 Louie was supporting both Margaret and herself, the news had 
 soothed a remorse. 
 
 ' I should just think not ! ' said Louie in answer to his question. 
 * She's gone most silly, and she hasn't got the right use of her legs 
 either. ' 
 
 ' Poor old thing ! ' said David softly, falling into a dream. He 
 was thinking of Margaret in her active, happy days when she 
 used to bake scones for him, or mend his clothes, or rate him for 
 ' worriting ' 'Lias. Then wakening up he drew the book he was 
 binding towards him again. ' She must have been precious glad 
 to have you to do for her, Louie,' he said contentedly. 
 
 ' Do for her ? ' Louie opened her eyes. ' As if I could be 
 worrited with her ! I had my work to do, thank you. There 
 was a niece used to come in and see to her. She used to get in 
 my way dreadful sometimes. She'd have fits of thinking she 
 could work the loom again, and I'd have to keep her away — 
 Tegular fngJiten her.' 
 
 David started. 
 
 ' Who'll work the loom now ? ' he asked ; his look and tone 
 altering to match hers. 
 
 'I'm sure I don't know,' said Louie, carelessly. 'Very like 
 she'll not get anyone. The work's been slack a long while.' 
 
 David suddenly drew back from his bookbinding. 
 
 ' When did you let her know, Louie— about me ? ' he asked 
 quickly. 
 
 ' Let her know ? Who was to let her know ? Your letter came 
 eight o'clock and our train started half -past ten. I'd just time to 
 pitch my things together and that was about all.' 
 
 ' And you never sent, and you haven't written ? ' 
 
 'You leave me alone,' said the girl, turning instantly sulky 
 under his tone and look. ' It's nowt to you what I do. ' 
 
 ' Why ! ' he said, his voice shaking, ' she'd be waiting and 
 waiting — and she's got nothing else to depend on. ' 
 
 ' There's her brother,' said Louie angrily, ' and if he won't 
 take her, there's the workhouse. They'll take her there fast 
 enough, and she won't know anything about it. ' 
 
 ' The ivorkhouse ! ' cried David, springing up, incensed past 
 bearing by her callous way. ' Margaret that took you in out of 
 the snow ! — you said it yourself. And you — you'd not lift a 
 
CHAP. IX YOUTH 233 
 
 finger— not you — you'd not even give her notice — "chuck her 
 into the workhouse — that's good enough for her ! " It's mle, — 
 that's what it is ! ' 
 
 He stood, choked by his own wrath, eyeing her fiercely — a, 
 young thunder god of disdain and condemnation. 
 
 Louie too got up — gathering up her work round her — and gave 
 him back his look with interest before she flung out of the 
 room. 
 
 * Keep a civil tongue in your head, sir, or I'll let you know,' 
 she cried. * I'll not be called over the coals by you nor nobody. 
 I'll do what I please, — and if you don't like it you can do the 
 other thing — so there — now you know ! ' 
 
 And with a nod of the utmost provocation and defiance she 
 banged the door behind her and went up to bed. 
 
 David flung down the pen with which he had been lettering 
 his books on the table, and, drawing a chair up to the fire, he sat 
 moodily staring into the embers. So it was all to begin again — 
 the long wrangle and jar of their childhood. Why had he broken 
 silence and taken this burden once more upon his shoulders ? He 
 had a moment of passionate regret. It seemed to him more than 
 he could bear. No gratitude, no kindness ; and this fierce 
 tongue ! 
 
 After a while he fetched pen and paper and began to write on 
 his knee, while his look kindled again. He wrote to Margaret, a 
 letter of boyish effusion and affection, his own conscience quick- 
 ened to passion by Louie's lack of conscience. He had never 
 forgotten her, he said, and he wished he could see her again. 
 She must write, or get some one to write for her— and tell him 
 what she was going to do now that Louie had left 4ier. He had 
 been angry with Louie for coming away without sending word. 
 But what he wanted to say was this : if Margaret could get no one 
 to work the loom, he, David, would pay her brother four shillings 
 a week, for six months certain, towards her expenses if he would 
 take her in and look after her. She must ask somebody to write 
 at once and say what was to be done. If her brother consented to 
 take her, David would send a post-office order for the first month 
 at once. He was doing well in his business, and there would be 
 no doubt about the payments. 
 
 He made his proposal with a haste and impulsiveness very 
 unlike the cool judgment he had so far shown in his business. It 
 never occurred to him to negotiate with the brother who might 
 be quite well able to maintain his sister without help. Besides 
 he remembered him as a liard man of whom both Margaret and 
 'Lias — soft, sensitive creatures — were both more or less afraid. 
 No, there should be no doubt about it — not a day's doubt, if he 
 could help it ! He could help, and he would ; and if they asked 
 him more he would give it. Nearly midnight I But if he ran 
 out to the General Post Office it would be in time. 
 
 When he had posted it and was walking home, his anger was 
 all gone. But in its stead was the smart of a baffled instinct — the 
 
234 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 hunger for sjinpatliy, for love, for that common everyday life of 
 the affections which had never been his, while it came so easily 
 to other people. 
 
 In his chafing distress he felt the curb of something unkno\\Ti 
 before ; or, rather, what had of late taken the pleasant guise of 
 kinship and natural affection assumed to-night another and a 
 sterner aspect, and in this strait of conduct, that sheer ' impera- 
 tive ' which we carry within us made itself for the first time heard 
 and realised. 
 
 ' I have done my duty and must abide by it. I must bear 
 with her and look after her. ' 
 
 Why? 
 
 ' Because my father laid it on me ? ' — 
 
 And because there is a life within our life which urges and 
 presses ? — because we are ' not our own ' ? But this Ig an answer 
 which implies a whole theology. And at this moment of his life 
 David had not a particle or shred of theology about him. Except, 
 indeed, that, like Voltaire, he was graciously inclined to think a 
 First Cause probable. 
 
 Next day this storm blew over, as storms do. Louie came 
 down early and made the porridge for breakfast. When David 
 appeared she carried things off with a high hand, and behaved 
 as if nothing had happened ; but anyone accustomed to watch 
 her would have seen a certain quick nervousness in her black, 
 wild bird's eyes. As for David, after a period of gruff ness 
 and silence, he passed by degrees into his usual manner. Louie 
 spent the day with Dora, and he went off to Cheadle to conclude 
 the purchase of that collection of American books he had 
 described to Louie. But first, on his way, he walked proudly 
 into Heywood's bank and opened an account there, receiving the 
 congratulations of an old and talkative cashier, who already knew 
 the lad and was interested in his prospects, with the coolness of 
 one who takes good fortune as his right. 
 
 In the afternoon he was busy in tlie shop — not too busy, how- 
 ever, to notice John. What ailed the lad ? While he was inside, 
 as soon as the door did but creak in the wind he sprang to open 
 it, but for the most part he preferred to stand outside watching 
 the stall and the street. When Louie appeared about five o'clock 
 — for her hours with Dora were not yet regular — he forthwith 
 became her slave. She set him to draw up the fire while she got 
 the tea, and then, without taking any notice of David, she 
 marched John upstairs to help her hang her curtains, lay her 
 carpet, and nail up the coloured fashion plates and newspaper 
 prints of royalties or beauties with which she was adorning the 
 bare walls of the attic. 
 
 When all her additions had been made to David's original 
 stock ; when the little deal dressing-table and glass had been 
 draped in the cheapest of muslins over the pinkest of calicoes ; 
 when the flowery curtains had been tied back with blue ribbons ; 
 
CHAP. IX YOUTH 235 
 
 when the china vases on the mantelpiece had been filled with 
 nodding plumes of dyed grasses, mostly of a rosy red ; and a 
 long glass in a somewhat damaged condition, but still presenting 
 enough surface to enable Miss Louie to study herself therein from 
 top to toe, had been propped against the wall ; there was and could 
 be nothing in the neighbourhood of Potter Street, so John re- 
 flected, as he furtively looked about him, to vie with the splendours 
 of Miss Grieve's apartment. There was about it a sensuousness, 
 a deliberate quest of luxury and gaiety, which a raw son of 
 poverty could feel though he could not put it into Avords. No 
 Manchester girl he had ever seen would have cared to spend her 
 money in just this way. 
 
 ' Now that's real nice, Mr. Dalby, and I'm just obliged to you,' 
 said Louie, with patronising emphasis, as she looked round upon 
 his labours. ' I do like to get a man to do things for you— he's 
 got some strength in him — not like a gell ! ' 
 
 And she looked down at herself and at the long, thin-fingered 
 hand against her dress, with affected contempt. John looked at 
 her too, but turned his head away again quickly. 
 
 ' And yet you're pretty strong too. Miss,' he ventured. 
 
 '\Yell, perhaps I am,' she admitted ; ' and a good thing too, 
 when you come to think of the rough time I had over there ' — 
 and she jerked her head behind her—' ever since Davy ran away 
 from me.' 
 
 ' Ran away from you, Miss ? ' 
 
 She nodded, pressing her lips together with the look of one 
 who keeps a secret from the highest motives. But she brought 
 two beautiful plaintive eyes to bear on John, and. he at once felt 
 sure that David's conduct had been totally inexcusable. 
 
 Then suddenly she broke into a laugh. She was sitting on 
 the edge of the bed, swinging her feet lightly backwards and 
 forwards. 
 
 ' Look here ! ' she said, dropping her voice, and looking round 
 at the door. ' Do you know a lot about Davy's affairs ?— you 're 
 a great friend of his, aren't you ? ' 
 
 ' I s'pose so,' said the lad, awkwardly. 
 
 ' Well, has he been making up to anybody that you know of ? ' 
 
 John's invisible eyebrows stretched considerably. He was so 
 astonished that he did not readily find an answer. 
 
 *Why, of course, I mean,' said Louie, impatiently, 'is he in 
 love with anybody ? ' 
 
 ' Not that I know of, Miss.' 
 
 'Well, then, there's somebody in love with Mm,' said Louie, 
 maliciously ; ' and some day, Mr. Dalby, if we get a chance, 
 perhaps I'll tell you all about it.' 
 
 The charming confidential smile she threw him so bewildered 
 the lad that he hardly knew where he was. 
 
 But an exasperated shout of ' John ' from the stairs recalled 
 him, and he rushed downstairs to help David deal with a cargo of 
 books just arrived. 
 
236 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book n 
 
 That evening David ran up to the Parlour for half an hour, to 
 have a talk with Daddy and find out what Dora thought of Louie. 
 He had sent a message by Louie about Reuben's revelations, and 
 it occurred to him that since Daddy had not been to look him up 
 since, that incalculable person might be offended that he had not 
 brought his great news in person. Besides, he had a very strong 
 curiosity t© know what had happened after all to Lucy Purcell, 
 and whether anything had been commonly observed of Purcell's 
 demeanour under the checkmate administered to him. For the 
 past few days he had been wholly absorbed in his own affaii-s, 
 and during the previous w^eek he had seen nothing of either Daddy 
 or Dora, except that at a casual meeting in the street with Daddy 
 that worthy had described his attack on Purcell with a gusto 
 worthy of his Irish extraction. 
 
 He found the restaurant just shutting, and Daddy apparently 
 on the wing for the ' White Horse ' parlour, to judge from tlie 
 relief which showed in Dora's worn look as she saw her father lay 
 down his hat and stick again and fall ' chaffing ' with David. 
 
 For, with regard to David's change of position, the landlord of 
 the Parlour was in a very testy frame of mind. 
 
 ' Six hundred pounds ! ' he growled, when the young fellow 
 Bitting cross-legged by the fire had made an end of describing to 
 them both his journey to London. ' H'm, your fun's over : any 
 fool can do on six hundred pounds ! ' 
 
 'Thank you. Daddy,' said the lad, with a sarcastic lip. 'As 
 for you, I wonder you have the face to talk ! Who's coining 
 money here, I should like to know ? ' 
 
 Dora looked up with a start. Her father met her look with a 
 certain hostility and an obstinate shake of his thin shoulders. 
 
 ' Davy, me boy, you're that consated by now, you'll not be for 
 taking advice. But I'll give it you, bedad, to take or to leave ! 
 jSTever pitch your tent, sir, where you can't strike it when you 
 want to ! But there's wliere your beastly money comes in. 
 Nobody need look to you now for any comprehension of the finer 
 sentiments of man.' 
 
 ' What do you mean. Daddy ? ' 
 
 * Never you mind,' said the old vagrant, staring sombrely at 
 the floor — the spleen in person. ' Only I want my freedom, I tell 
 you — and a bit of air, sometimes— and by gad I'll have 'em ! ' 
 
 And throwing back his grey head with a jerk he fixed an 
 angry eye on Dora. Dora had grown paler, but she said nothing ; 
 "her fingers went steadily on witli her work ; from early morning 
 now till late night neither they nor she were ever at rest. After 
 a minute's silence Lomax walked to the door, flung a good-night 
 behind him and disappeared. 
 
 Dora hastily drew her hand across her eyes, then threaded her 
 needle as though nothing had happened. But David was per- 
 plexed and sorry. How white and thin she looked, to be sure ! 
 That old lunatic must be worrying her somehow. 
 
 He moved his chair nearer to Dora. 
 
CHAP, rx YOUTH 237 
 
 ' Is there anything wrong, Miss Dora ? ' he asked her, dropping 
 his voice. 
 
 She looked up with a quick gratitude, his voice and expression 
 putting a new life into her. 
 
 ' Oh ! I don't know,' she ^aid, gently and sadly. ' Father's 
 been very restless these last few weeks. I can't keep him at 
 home. And I'm not always dull like this. I've done my best to 
 cheer him up. And I don't think there's much amiss with the 
 Parlour— yet — only the outgoings are so large every day. I'm 
 always feeart — ' 
 
 She paused, and a visible tremor ran through her. David's 
 quick eye understood the signs of strain and fatigue, and he felt 
 a brotherly pity for her— a softer, more normal feeling than 
 Louie had ever called out in him. 
 
 ' I say,' he said heartily, ' if there's anything I can do, you'll 
 let me know, won't you ? ' 
 
 She smiled at him, and then turned to her work again in a 
 hurry, afraid of her own eyes and lips, and what they might be 
 saying. 
 
 ' Oh ! I dare say I fret myself too much,' she said, with the 
 tone of one determined to be cheered. And, by way of protecting 
 her own quivering heart, she fell upon the subject of Louie. She 
 showed the brother some of Louie's first attempts— some of the 
 stitches she had been learning. 
 
 ' She's that quick ! ' she said, wondering. ' In a few days I'm 
 going to trust her with that,' and she pointed to a fine old piece 
 of Venetian embroidery, which had to be largely repaired before 
 it could be made up into an altar-cloth and presented to St. 
 Damian's by a rich and devoted member of the congregation. 
 
 ' Does she get in your way ? ' the brother inquired. 
 
 ' N-o,' she said in a low voice, paying particular attention to 
 a comphcated stitch. ' She'll get used to me and the work soon. 
 She'U make a first-rate hand if she's patient a bit. They'll be 
 glad to take her on at the shop.' 
 
 ' But you'll not turn her out ? You'll let her work here, along- 
 side of you ? ' said the young man eagerly. He had just met 
 Louie, in the dark, walking up Market Street with a seedy 
 kind of gentleman, who he had reason to know was a bad lot. 
 John was off his head about her, and no longer of much use to 
 anybody, and in these few days other men, as it seemed to him, 
 had begun to hang about. The difficulties of his guardianship 
 were thickening upon him, and he clung to Dora's help. 
 
 ' No ; I'll not turn her out. She may work here if she wants 
 to,' said Dora, with the same slowness. 
 
 And all the time she was saying to herself passionately that, if 
 Louie Grieve had not been his sister, she should never have set 
 foot in that room again ! In the two days they had been together 
 Louie had outraged almost every feeling^he other possessed. And 
 there was a burning dread in Dora's mind that even the secret of 
 her heart of hearts had been somehow discovered by the girl's 
 
238 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE boot it 
 
 hawk-like sense. But she had promised to help him, and she 
 would. 
 
 ' You must let me know what I owe you for teaching her and 
 introducing her,' said David firmly. ' Yes, you must, Miss Dora. 
 It's business, and you mustn't make any bones about it. A girl 
 doesn't learn a trade and get an opening found her for nothing. ' 
 
 ' Oh no, nonsense ! ' she said quickly, but with decision equal 
 to his own. 'I won't take anything.. She don't want much 
 teaching ; she's so clever ; she sees a thing almost before the 
 words are out of your mouth. Look here, Mr. Grieve, I want to 
 tell you about Lucy.' 
 
 She looked up at him, flushing. He, too, coloured. 
 
 ' Well,' he said ; ' that's what I wanted to ask you.' 
 
 She told him the whole story of Lucy's flight from her father, 
 of her illness and departure, of the probable stepmother. 
 
 ' Old brute ! ' said David between his teeth. ' I say, Miss 
 Dora, can nothing be done to make him treat her decently ? ' 
 
 His countenance glowed v^'ith indignation and disgust. Dora 
 shook her head sadly. 
 
 ' I don't see what anyone can do ; and the worst of it is she'll 
 be such a long while getting over it. I've had a letter from her 
 this morning, and she says the Hastings doctor declares she must 
 stay there a year in the warm and not come home at all, or she'll 
 be going off in a decline. I know Lucy gets nervous about 
 herself, but it do seem bad.' 
 
 David sat silent, lost in a medley of feelings, most of them 
 unpleasant. Now that Lucy Purcell was at the other end of 
 England, both her service to him and his own curmudgeon 
 behaviour to her loomed doubly large. 
 
 ' I say, will you give me her address ? ' he said at last. ' I've 
 got a smart book I've had bound for her. I'd like to send it her.' 
 
 Dora went to the table and wrote it for him. Then he got up 
 to go. 
 
 'Upon my word, you do look tired,' he broke out. 'Can't 
 you go to bed ? It is hard lines. ' 
 
 Which last words applied to that whole situation of hers with 
 her father which he was beginning dimly to discern. In his boy- 
 ish admiration and compassion he took both her hands in his. 
 Dora withdrew them quickly. 
 
 ' Oh, I'll pull through ! ' she said, simply, and he went. 
 
 When she had closed the door after him she stood looking at 
 the clock with her hands clasped in front of her. 
 
 ' How much longer will father be ? ' she said, sighing. ' Oh, I 
 think I told him all Lucy wanted me to say ; I think I did.' 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 Three or four months passed away. During that period David 
 had built up a shed in his back yard and had established a print- 
 ing-press there, with a respectable, though not extensive, fount 
 
CHAP. X YOUTH 239 
 
 of type — bought, all of it, secondhand, and a bargain. John and 
 he spent every available moment there, and during their first 
 experiments would often sit up half the night working off the 
 sheets of their earliest productions, in an excitement which took 
 no count of fatigue. They began with reprinting some scarce 
 local tracts, with which they did well. Then David diverged into 
 a Radical pamphlet or two on the subject of the coming Educa- 
 tion Bill, finding authors for them among the leading ministers 
 of the town ; and these timely wares, being freely pushed on the 
 stall, on the whole paid their expenses, with a little profit to 
 spare — the labour being reckoned at nothing. And now David 
 was beginning to cherish the dream of a new history of Man- 
 chester, for which among his own collections he already possessed 
 a great deal of fresh material. But that would take time and 
 money. He must push his business a bit further first. 
 
 That business, however, was developing quite as rapidly as the 
 two pairs of arms could keep pace with it. Almost everything 
 the young fellow touched succeeded. He had instinct, know- 
 ledge, a growing tact, and an indomitable energy, and these are 
 the qualities which make, which are in themselves, success. The 
 purchase of the collection at Cheadle, bearing on the early his- 
 tory of American states and towns, not only turned out well in 
 itself, but brought him to the notice of a big man in London, who 
 set the clever and daring beginner on several large quests both in 
 Lancashire and Yorkshire by which both profited considerably. 
 In another direction he was extending his stock of foreign scien- 
 tific and technical books, especially such as bore upon the indus- 
 tries of Northern England. Old Barbier, who took a warmer and 
 warmer interest in his pupil's progress, kept him constantly 
 advised as to French books through old friends of his own in 
 Paris, who were glad to do the exile a kindness. 
 
 ' But why not run over to Paris for yourself, form some con- 
 nections, and look about you ? ' suggested Barbier. 
 
 Why not, indeed ? The young man's blood, quick with curio- 
 sity and adventure, under all his tradesman's exterior, leapt at 
 the thought. But prudence restrained him for the present. 
 
 As for German books, he was struggling with the language, 
 and feeling his way besides through innumerable catalogues. 
 How he found time for all the miscellaneous acquisitions of these 
 months it would be difiicult to say. But whether in his free 
 times or in trade-hours he was hardly ever without a book or a 
 catalogue beside him, save when he was working the printing 
 press ; and, although his youth would every now and then break 
 out against the confinement he imposed upon it, and drive him 
 either to long tramps over the moors on days when the spring 
 stirred in the air, or to a spell of theatre-going, in which Louie 
 greedily shared, yet, on the whole, his force of purpose was 
 amazing, and the success which it brought with it could only be 
 regarded as natural and inevitable. He was beginning to be well 
 known to the old-established men in his own business, who could 
 
240 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 not but show at times some natural jealousy of so quick a rise. 
 The story of his relations to Pureell spread, and the two were 
 watched with malicious interest at many a book-sale, when the 
 nonchalant self-reliance and prosperous look of the younger 
 drove the elder man again and again into futile attempts to 
 injure and circumvent him. It was noticed that never till now 
 had Pureell lost his head with a rival. 
 
 Nevertheless, the lad had far fewer enemies than might have 
 been expected. His manner had always been radiantly self-con- 
 fident ; but there was about him a conspicuous element of quick 
 feeling, of warm humanity, which grew rather than diminished 
 with his success. He was frank, too, and did not try to gloss 
 over a mistake or a failure. Perhaps in his lordly way he felt he 
 could afford himself a few now and then, he was so much cle- 
 verer than his neighbours. 
 
 Upon no one did David's development produce more effect 
 than upon Mr. Ancrum. The lame, solitary minister, who only 
 got through his week's self-appointed tasks at a constant expense 
 of bodily torment, was dazzled and bewildered by the spectacle of 
 so much vitality spent with such ease and impunity. 
 
 ' How many years of Manchester must one give him ? ' said 
 Ancrum to himself one night, when he was making his way home 
 from a reading of the ' Electra ' with David. ' That six hundred 
 pounds has quickened the pace amazingly ! Ten yeai^, perhaps. 
 Then London, and anything you like. Bookselling slips into 
 publishing, and publishing takes a man into another class, and 
 within reach of a hundred new possibilities. Some day I shall be 
 bragging of having taught him ! Taught him ! He'll be turning 
 the tables on me precious soon. Caught me out twice to-night, 
 and got through the tough bit of the chorus much better than 
 I did. How does he do it?— and with that mountain of other 
 things on his shoulders ! There's one speck in the fruit, however, 
 as far as I can see — Miss Louie ! ' 
 
 From the first moment of his introduction to her, Ancrum had 
 taken particular notice of David's handsome sister, who, on her 
 side, had treated her old minister and teacher with a most 
 thoroughgoing indifference. He saw that now, after some three 
 months of life together, the brotlier and sister had developed 
 separate existences, which touched in two points only— a common 
 liking for Dora Lomax, and a common keenness for business. 
 
 Here, in this matter of business, they were really at one. 
 David kept nothing from her, and consulted her a good deal. 
 She had the same shrewd head that he had, and as it was her 
 money as well as his that was in question she was determined to 
 know and to understand what he was after. Anybody who had 
 come upon the pair on the nights when they made up their 
 accounts, their dark heads touching under the lamp, might have 
 gone away moralising on the charms of fraternal affection. 
 
 And all the while David had once more tacitly given up the 
 attempt either to love her or to control her. How indeed could 
 
CHAP. X YOUTH 241 
 
 he control her ? He was barely two years older, and she had a 
 will of iron. She made disreputable friends whom he loathed the 
 sight of. But all he could do was to keep them out of the house. 
 She led John by this time a dog's life. From the temptress she 
 had become the tease and tyrant, and the clumsy fellow, con- 
 sumed with feverish passion, slaved for her whenever she was 
 near him with hardly the reward of a kind look or a civil word in 
 a fortnight. David set his teeth and tried to recover possession 
 of his friend. And as long as they two were at the press or in 
 the shop together alone, John was often his old self, and would 
 laugh out in the old way. But no sooner did Louie appear than 
 he followed her about like an animal, and David could make 
 no more of him. Whenever any dispute, too, arose between the 
 brother and sister, he took her part, whatever it might be, with 
 an acrimony which pushed David's temper hard. 
 
 Yet, on the whole, so Ancrum thought, the brother showed a 
 wonderful patience. He was evidently haunted by a sense of 
 responsibility towards his sister, and, at the same time, both 
 tormented and humiliated by his incompetence to manage or 
 influence her. It was curious, too, to watch how by antagonism 
 and by the constant friction of their life together, certain quali- 
 ties in her developed certain others in him. Her callousness, for 
 instance, did but nurture a sensitive humanity in him. She 
 treated the lodgers in the first pair back with persistent indiffer- 
 ence and even brutality, seeing that Mrs. Mason was a young, 
 helpless creature approaching every day nearer to a confinement 
 she regarded with terror, and that a little common kindness from 
 the only other woman in the house could have softened her lot 
 considerably. But David's books were stacked about in awkward 
 and inconvenient places waiting for the Masons' departure, and 
 Louie had no patience with them — with the wife at any rate. It 
 once or twice occurred to David that if the husband, a good- 
 looking fellow and a very hard-worked shopman, had had more 
 hours at home, Louie would have tried her blandishments upon 
 him. 
 
 He on his side was goaded by Louie's behaviour into an 
 unusual complaisance and liberality towards his tenants. Louie 
 once contemptuously told him he would make a capital ' general 
 help.' He was Mrs. Mason's coal-carrier and errand-boy already. 
 
 In the same way Louie beat and ill-treated a half-starved 
 collie — one of the short-haired black sort familiar to the shepherd 
 of the north, and to David himself in his farm days — which would 
 haunt the shop and kitchen. Whereupon David felt all his heart 
 melt towards the squalid, unhandsome creature. He fed and 
 cherished it ; it slept on his bed by night and followed him by 
 day, he all the while protecting it from Louie with a strong hand. 
 And the more evil was the eye she cast upon the dog, who, accord- 
 ing to her, possessed all the canine vices, the more David loved 
 it, and the more Tim was fattened and caressed. 
 
 In another direction, too, the same antagonism appeared. 
 
242 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 The sister's license of speech and behaviour towards the men who 
 became her acquaintances provoked in the brother what often 
 seemed to Ancrum — who, of course, remembered Reuben, and 
 liad heard many tales of old James Grieve, the lad's grandfather 
 — a sort of Puritan reaction, the reaction of his race and stock 
 against 'lewdness.' Louie's complete independence, however, 
 and the distance she preserved between his amusements and hers, 
 left David no other weapon than sarcasm, which he employed 
 freely. His fine sensitive mouth took during these weeks a curve 
 half mocking, half bitter, which changed the whole expression of 
 the face. 
 
 He saw, indeed, with great clearness after a month or so that 
 Louie's wildness was by no means the wildness of an ignorant 
 innocent, likely to slip unawares into perdition, and that, while 
 she had a passionate greed for amusement and pleasure, and a 
 blank absence of principle, she was still perfectly alive to the 
 risks of life, and meant somehow both to enjoy herself and to 
 steer herself through. But this gradual perception — that, in spite 
 of her mode of killing spare time, she was not immediately likely 
 to take any fatal false step, as he had imagined in his first dread 
 — did but increase his inward repulsion. 
 
 A state of feeling which was the more remarkable because he 
 himself, in Ancrum's eyes, was at the moment in a temper of 
 moral relaxation and bewilderment ! His absorption in George 
 Sand, and through her in all the other French Romantics whose 
 books he could either find for himself or borrow from Barbier, 
 was carrying a ferment of passion and imagination through all 
 his blood. Most social arrangements, including marriage, 
 seemed to have become open questions to him. Why, then, this 
 tone towards Louie and her friends ? Was it that, apart from 
 the influence of heredity, the young fellow's moral perception at 
 this time was not ethical at all, but a?sthetic — a matter of taste, 
 of the presence or absence of certain ideal and poetic elements in 
 conduct ? 
 
 At any rate his friendship for old Barbier drew closer and 
 closer, and Ancrum, who had begun to feel a lively affection for 
 him, could see but little of him. 
 
 As to Barbier, it was a significant chance which had thrown 
 him across David's path. In former days this lively Frenchman 
 had been a small Paris journalist, whom the coup d'etat had 
 struck do\^'n with his betters, and who had escaped to England 
 with one suit of clothes and eight francs in his pocket. He re- 
 minded himself on landing of a cousin of his mother's settled as 
 a clerk in Manchester, found his way northwards, and had now, 
 for some seventeen years, been maintaining himself in the cotton 
 capital, mainly by teaching, but partly by a number of small arts 
 — ornamental calligraphy, ??ie?iz^-writing, and the like — too odd 
 and various for description. He was a fanatic, a Red, much 
 possessed by political hatreds which gave savour to an existence 
 otherwise dull and peaceable enough. Religious beliefs were 
 
CHAP. X YOUTH 243 
 
 very scarce with him, but he had a certain literary creed, the 
 creed of 1830, when he had been a scribbler in the train of Victor 
 Hugo, which he did his best to put into David. 
 
 He was a formidable-looking person, six feet in height, and 
 broad in proportion, with bushy white eyebrows, and a mouth 
 made hideous by two projecting teeth. In speech he hated Eng- 
 land and all her ways, and was for ever yearning towards the 
 misguided and yet unequalled country which had cast him out. 
 In heart he was perfectly aware that England is free as not even 
 Republican France is free ; and he was also sufficiently alive to 
 the fact that he had made himself a very tolerable niche in Man- 
 chester, and was pleasantly regarded there — at least, in certain 
 circles — as an oracle of French opinion, a commodity which, in a 
 great commercial centre, may at any time have a cash value. He 
 could, in truth, have long ago revisited la patrie had he had a 
 mind, for governments are seldom vindictive in the case of people 
 ■ who can clearly do them no harm. This, however, was not at all 
 his own honest view of the matter. In the mirror of the mind 
 he saw himself perpetually draped in the pathos of exile and the 
 dignity of persecution, and the phrases by which he was wont to 
 impress this inward vision on the brutal English sense had be- 
 come, in the course of years, an effective and touching habit with 
 him. 
 
 David had been Barbier's pupil in the first instance at one of 
 the classes of the Mechanics' Institute. Never in Barbier's 
 memory had any Manchester lad so applied himself to learn 
 French before. And when the boy's knowledge of the Encyclo- 
 paedists came out, and he one day put the master right in class 
 on some points connected with Diderot's relations to Rousseau, 
 the ex-journalist gaped with astonishment, and then went home 
 and read up his facts, half enraged and half enraptured. David's 
 zeal piqued him, made him a better Frenchman and a better 
 teacher than he had been for years. He was a vain man, and 
 David's capacities put him on his mettle. 
 
 Very soon he and the lad had become intimate. He had 
 described to David the first night of Hernani, when he had been 
 one of the long-haired band of rapins^ who came down in their 
 scores to the Theatre Francais to defend their chief, Hugo, 
 against the hisses of the Philistine. The two were making coffee 
 in Barbier's attic, at the top of a side street off the Oxford Road, 
 when these memories seized upon the old Romantic. He took up 
 the empty coffee-pot, and brandished it from side to side as 
 though it had been the sword of Hernani ; the miserable Academy 
 hugging its Moliere and Racine fled before him ; the world was 
 once more regenerate, and Hugo its high priest. Passages from 
 the different parts welled to his old lips ; he gave the play over 
 again — the scene between the lover and the husband, where the 
 husband lays down the strange and sinister penalty to which the 
 lover submits — the exquisite love-scene in the fifth act — and the 
 cry of agonised passion with which Dofia Sol defends her love 
 
244 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 against his executioner. All these things he declaimed, stump- 
 ing up and down, till the terrified landlady rose out of her bed to 
 remonstrate, and got the door locked in her face for her pains,; 
 and till the hoaryeois baby in the next room woke up and roared,' 
 and so put an abrupt end to the performance. Old Barbier sat 
 down swearing, poked the fire furiously, and then, taking out a 
 huge red handkerchief, wiped his brow with a trembling hand. 
 His stiff white hair, parted on either temple, bristled like a high 
 toupie over his round, black eyes, which glowed behind his spec- 
 tacles. And meanwhile the handsome boy sat opposite, glad to 
 laugh by way of reaction, but at bottom stirred by the same emo- 
 tion, and ready to share in the same adorations. 
 
 Gradually David learnt his way about this bygone world of 
 Barbier's recollection. A vivid picture sprang up in him of these 
 strange leaders of a strange band, these cadaverous poets and 
 artists of Louis Philippe's early days, — beings in love with Lord 
 Byron and suicide, having Art for God, and Hugo for prophet, 
 talking of Avere-wolves, vampires, cathedrals, sunrises, forests, 
 passion and despair, hatted like brigands, cloaked after Vandyke, 
 curled like Absalom, making new laws unto themselves in verse 
 as in morals, and leaving all petty talk of duty or common sense 
 to the Academy and the nursery. 
 
 George Sand walking the Paris quays in male dress — George 
 Sand at Fontainebleau roaming the midnight forest with Alfred 
 de Musset, or wintering with her dying musician among the 
 mountains of Palma ; Gerard de Nerval, wanderer, poet, and 
 suicide ; Alfred de Musset flaming into verse at dead of night 
 amid an answering and spendthrift blaze of wax candles ; 
 Baudelaire's blasphemies and eccentricities — these characters 
 and incidents Barbier wove into endless highly coloured tales, to 
 which David listened with perpetual relish. 
 
 ' Mon Dieu ! Mon Lieu ! What times ! What memories ! ' 
 the old Frenchman would cry at last, fairly re-transported to the 
 world of his youth, and, springing up, he would run to the little 
 cupboard by his bed head, where he kept a score or so of little 
 paper volumes — volumes which the tradesman David soon dis- 
 covered, from a curious study of French catalogues, to have a 
 fast-rising money value — and out would come Alfred de Musset's 
 ' Nuit de Mai, ' or an outrageous verse from Baudelaire, or an 
 liarmonious nothing from Gautier. David gradually learnt to 
 follow, to understand, to range all that he heard in a mental 
 setting of his own. The France of his imagination indeed was a 
 strange land ! Everybody in it was either girding at priests like 
 Voltaire, or dying for love like George Sand's Stenio. 
 
 But whether the picture was true to life or no, it had a very 
 strongly marked effect on the person conceiving it. Just as the 
 speculative complexion of his first youth had been decided by the 
 chance which brought him into daily contact with the French 
 eighteenth century— for no self-taught solitary boy of quick and 
 covetous mind can read Voltaire continuously without bearing the 
 
CHAP. X YOUTH 245 
 
 marks of him henceforward — so in the same way, when he passed, 
 as France had done before him, from the philosophers to the 
 Romantics, this constant preoccupation with the French literature 
 of passion in its romantic and idealist period left deep and lasting 
 results. 
 
 The strongest of these results lay in the realm of moral and 
 social sense. What struck the lad's raw mind with more and 
 more force as he gathered his French books about him was the 
 profound gulf which seemed to divide the average French concep- 
 tion of the relation between the sexes from the average English one. 
 In the French novels he read every young man had his mistress ; 
 every married woman her lover. Tragedy frequently arose out 
 of these relations, but that the relations must and did obtain, as 
 a matter of course, was assumed. For the delightful heroes and 
 heroines of a whole range of fiction, from ' Manon Lescaut ' down 
 to Murger's ' Vie do Boheme,' marriage did not apparently exist, 
 even as a matter of argument. And as to the duties of the 
 married woman, when she passed on to the canvas, the code was 
 equally simple. The husband might kill his wife's lover — that 
 was in the game ; but the young man's right to be was as good 
 as his own. ' Wo human being can cont7'ol love, and no one is to 
 blame either for feeling it or for losing it. What alone degrades 
 a woman is falsehood.'' So says the husband in George Sand's 
 ' Jacques ' when he is Just about to fling himself down an Alpine 
 precipice that his wife and Octave may have their w^ay undis- 
 turbed. And all the time, what poetry and passion in the 
 presentation of these things ! Beside them the mere remembrance 
 of English ignorance, prudishness, and conventionality would set 
 the lad swelling, as he read, with a sense of superior scorn, and 
 of wild sympathy for a world in which love and not law, truth 
 and not legal fiction, were masters of human relations. 
 
 Some little time after Reuben's visit to him he one day told 
 Barbier the fact of his French descent. Barbier declared that he 
 had always known it, had always realised something in David 
 distinct from the sluggish huckstering English temper. Why, 
 David's mother was from the south of France ; his own family 
 came from Carcassonne. No doubt the rich Gascon blood ran in 
 both their veins. Salut au compatriote ! 
 
 Thenceforward there was a greater solidarity between the two 
 than ever. Barbier fell into an incessant gossip of Paris — the 
 Paris of Louis Philippe— reviving memories and ways of speech 
 which had been long dead in him, and leaving on David's mind 
 the impression of a place where life was from morning till night 
 amusement, exhilaration, and seduction ; where, under the bright 
 smokeless sky, and amid the stateliest streets and public buildings 
 in Europe, men were always witty and women always attractive. 
 
 Meanwhile the course of business during the spring months 
 and the rise of his trade in foreign books rapidly brought the 
 scheme of a visit to France, which had been at first a mere dream 
 and fancy, within the region of practical possibility, and even 
 
246 THE HISTORY OF DAVID ^RIEVE book n 
 
 advantage, for the young bookseller. Two things he was set on. 
 If he went he was determined to go under such conditions as 
 would enable him to see French life — especially French artistic 
 and student life — from the inside. And he saw with some clear- 
 ness that he would have to take his sister with him. 
 
 Against the latter notion Barbier protested vehemently. 
 
 ' What do you want to tie yourself to a petticoat for ? If you 
 take the girl you will have to look after her. Paris, my boy, let 
 me inform you, is not the best place in the world for la jeune 
 personne; and the Paris rapin may be an amusing scoundrel, but 
 don't trust him with young women if you can help it. Leave 
 Mademoiselle Louie at home, and let her mind the shop. Get 
 Mademoiselle Dora or some one to stay with her, or send her to 
 Mademoiselle Dora. ' 
 
 So said the Frenchman with sharp dictatorial emphasis. What 
 a preposterous suggestion ! 
 
 ' I can't stop her coming,' said David, quietly — ' if she wants 
 to come — and she'll be sure to want. Besides, I'll not leave her 
 alone at home, and she'll not let me send her anywhere — you may 
 be sure of that. ' 
 
 The Frenchman stared and stormed. David fell silent. Louie 
 was what she was, and it was no use discussing her. At last 
 Barbier, being after all tolerably well acquainted with the lad's 
 relations to his sister, came to a sudden end of his rhetoric, and 
 began to think out something practicable. 
 
 That evening he wrote to a nephew of his living as an artist in 
 the Quartier Montmartre. Some months before Barbier's vanity 
 had been flattered by an adroit letter from this young gentleman, 
 written, if the truth were known, at a moment when a pecuniary 
 situation, pinched almost beyond endurance, had made it seem 
 worth while to get his uncle's address out of his widowed mother. 
 Barbier, a bachelor, and a man of some small savings, perfectly 
 understood why he had been approached, and had been none the 
 less extraordinarily glad to hear from the youth. He was a 
 rapin f well and good ; all the great men had been rajnns before 
 him. Very likely he had the rapin's characteristic vices and dis- 
 tractions. All the world knew what the life meant for nine men 
 out of ten. What was the use of preaching ? Youth was youth. 
 Clearly the old man — himself irreproachable — would have been 
 disappointed not to find his nephew a sad dog on personal 
 acquaintance. 
 
 ' Tell me, Xavier,' his letter ran, 'how to put a young friend 
 of mine in the way of seeing something of Paris and Paris life, 
 more than your fool of a tourist generally sees. He is a book- 
 seller, and will, of course, mind his trade ; but he is a young man 
 of taste and intelligence besides, and moTeover half French. It 
 would be a pity that he should visit Paris as any sacre British 
 Philistine does. Advise me where to place him. He would like to 
 see something of your artist's life. But mind this, young man, 
 he brings a sister with him as handsome as the deVil, and not 
 
CHAP. X YOUTH 247 
 
 much easier to manage : so if you do advise — no tricks — tell me of 
 something convenable. ' 
 
 A few days later Barbier appeared in Potter Street just after 
 David had put up the shutters, announcing that he had a proposal 
 to make, 
 
 David unlocked the shop-door and let him in. Barbier looked 
 round with some amazement on the small stuffy place, piled to 
 bursting by now with books of every kind, which only John's 
 herculean efforts could keep in passable order. 
 
 ' Why don't you house yourself better — hein f ' said the 
 Frenchman. ' A business growing like this, and nothing but a 
 den to handle it in ! ' 
 
 ' I shall be all right when I get my other room,' said David 
 composedly. * Couldn't turn out the lodger before. The woman 
 was only confined last week.' 
 
 And as he spoke the wailing of an infant and a skurrying of 
 feet were heard upstairs. 
 
 ' So it seems,' said Barbier, adjusting his spectacles in bewil- 
 derment. ' Jesus ! What an affair ! What did you permit it 
 for ? Why didn't you turn her out in time ? ' 
 
 ' I would have turned myself out first,' said David. He was 
 lounging, with his hands in his pockets, against the books ; but 
 though his attitude was nonchalant, his tone had a vibrating 
 energy. 
 
 ' Barbier ! ' 
 
 'Yes.' 
 
 ' What do women suffer for like that ? ' 
 
 The young man's eyes glowed, and his lips twitched a little, 
 as though some poignant remembrance were at his heart. 
 
 Barbier looked at him with some curiosity. 
 
 ' Ask le bon Dieii and Mother Eve, my friend. It lies between 
 them,' said the old scoffer, with a shrug. 
 
 David looked away in silence. On his quick mind, greedy of 
 all human experience, the night of Mrs. Mason's confinement, 
 with its sounds of anguish penetrating through all the upper 
 rooms of the thin, ill-built house, had left an ineffaceable impres- 
 sion of awe and terror. In the morning, when all was safely 
 over, he came down to the kitchen to find the husband — a man 
 some two or three years older than himself, and the smart fore- 
 man of an ironmongery shop in Deansgate— crouching over a bit 
 of fire. The man was too much excited to apologise for his 
 presence in the Grieves' room. David shyly asked him a question 
 about his wife. 
 
 ' Oh, it's all right, the doctor says. There's the nurse with 
 her, and your sister's got the baby. She'll do ; but, oh, my God ! 
 it's awful — iVs awful ! My poor Liz ! Give me a corner here, 
 will you ! I'm all upset like. ' 
 
 David had got some food out of the cupboard, made him eat 
 it, and chatted to him till the man was more himself again. But 
 
248 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 the crying of the new-born child overhead, together with the 
 shaken condition of this clever, self-reliant young fellow, so near 
 his own age, seemed for the moment to introduce the lad to new 
 and unknown regions of human feeling. 
 
 While these images were pursuing each other through David's 
 mind, Barbier was poking among his foreign books, which lay, 
 backs upwards, on the floor to one side of the counter. 
 
 ' Do you sell them — hein f ' he said, looking up and pointing 
 to them with his stick. 
 
 'Yes. Especially the scientific books. These are an order. 
 So is that batch. Napoleon III.'s " Caesar," isn't it? And those 
 over there are "on spec." Oh, I could do something if I knew 
 more ! There's a man over at Oldham. One of the biggest 
 weaving-sheds — cotton velvets — that kind of thing. He's awfully 
 rich, and he's got a French library ; a big one, I believe. He 
 came in here yesterday. I think I could make something out of 
 him ; but he wants all sorts of rum things — last-century memoirs, 
 out-of-the-way ones — everything about Montaigne — first editions 
 — Lord knows what ! I say, Barbier, I dare say he'd buy your 
 books. What '11 you let me have them for ? ' 
 
 ' Diantre I Not for your heart's blood, my young man. It 's 
 like your impudence to ask. You could sell more if you knew 
 more, you think ? Well now listen to me.' 
 
 The Frenchman sat down, adjusted his spectacles, and, taking 
 a letter from his pocket, read it with deliberation. 
 
 It was from the nephew, Xavier Dubois, in answer to his 
 uncle's inquiries. Nothing, the writer declared, could have been 
 more opportune. He himself was just off to Belgium, where a 
 friend had procured him a piece of work on a new Government 
 building. Why should not his uncle's friends inhabit his rooms 
 during his absence ? He must keep them on, and would find it 
 very convenient, that being so, that some one should pay the 
 rent. There was his studio, which was bare, no doubt, but quite 
 habitable, and a little cabinet de toilette, adjoining, and shut off, 
 containing a bed and all necessaries. Why should not the sister 
 take the bedroom, and let the brother camp somehow in the 
 studio ? He could no doubt borrow a bed from some friend before 
 they came, and with a large screen, which was one of the ' studio 
 properties,' a very tolerable sleeping room could be improvised, 
 and still leave a good deal of the studio free. He understood 
 that his uncle's friends were not looking for luxury. But le 
 striate necessaire he could provide. 
 
 Meanwhile the Englishman and his sister would find themselves 
 at once in the artists' circle, and might see as much or as little as 
 they liked of artistic life. He (Dubois) could of course give them 
 introductions. There was a sculptor, for instance, on the ground 
 floor, a man of phenomenal genius, Joli gargon besides, who 
 would certainly show himself aimahle for anybody introduced by 
 Dubois ; and on the floor above there was a landscape painter, 
 ancien prix de Rome, and his wife, who would also, no doubt, 
 
CHAP. X YOUTH 249 
 
 make themselves agreeable, and to whom the brother and sister 
 might go for all necessary information — Dubois would see to that. 
 Sixty francs a month paid the appartement ; a trifle for service 
 if you desired it — there was, however, no compulsion — to the 
 concierge would make you comfortable ; and as for your food, the 
 Quartier Montmartre abounded in cheap restaurants, and you 
 might live as you pleased for one franc a day or twenty. He 
 suggested that* on the whole no better opening was likely to be 
 found by two young persons of spirit, anxious to see Paris from 
 the inside. 
 
 'Now then,' said Barbier, taking off his spectacles with an 
 authoritative click, as he shut up the letter, ' decide-toi. Go ! — 
 and look about you for a fortnight. Improve your French ; get 
 to know some of the Paris bookmen'; take some commissions out 
 with you— buy there to the best advantage, and come back twenty 
 per cent, better informed than when you set out.' 
 
 He smote his hands upon his knees with energy. He had a 
 love of management and contrivance ; and the payment of 
 Eugene's rent for him during his absence weighed with his frugal 
 mind. 
 
 David stood twisting his mouth in silence a moment, his head 
 thrown back against the books. 
 
 'Well, I don't see why not,' he said at last, his eyes sparkling. 
 
 ' And take notice, my friend,' said Barbier, tapping the open 
 letter, ' the ancien prix de Rome has a wife. Where wives are 
 young women can go. Xavier can prepare the way, and, if you 
 play your cards well, you can get Mademoiselle Louie taken off 
 your hands while you go about.' 
 
 David nodded. He was sitting astride on the counter, his 
 face shining with the excitement he was now too much of a man 
 to show with the old freedom. 
 
 Suddenly there was a sound of wild voices from the inside 
 room. 
 
 ' Miss Grieve ! Miss Grieve ! don't you take that child away. 
 Bring it back, I say ; I'll go to your brother, I will ! ' 
 
 ' That's Mrs. Mason's nurse,' said David, springing off the 
 counter. ' What's up now ? ' 
 
 He threw open the door into the kitchen, just as Louie swept 
 into the room from the other side. She had a white bundle in her 
 arms, and her face was flushed with a sly triumph. After her 
 ran the stout woman who was looking after Mrs. Mason, purple 
 with indignation. 
 
 'Now look yo here, Mr. Grieve,' she cried at sight of David, 
 ' I can't stand it, and I won't. Am I in charge of Mrs. Mason or 
 am I not ? Here 's Miss Grieve, as soon as my back 's turned, as 
 soon as I've laid that blessed baby in its cot as quiet as a lamb — 
 and it 's been howling since three o'clock this morning, as yo 
 know — in she whips, claws it out of its cradle, and is off wi' it. 
 Lord knows where. Thank the Lord, Mrs. Mason's asleep ! If 
 she weren't, she'd have a fit. She's feart to death o' Miss Grieve. 
 
250 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 We noather on us know what to make on her. She's like a wild 
 thing soomtimes — not a human creetur at aw — Gie me that chilt, 
 I tell tha ! ' 
 
 Louie vouchsafed no answer. She sat down composedly before 
 the fire, and, cradling the still sleeping child on her knee, she 
 bent over it examining its waxen hands and tiny feet with an 
 eager curiosity. The nurse, who stood over her trembling with 
 anger, and only deterred from snatching the child away by the 
 fear of wakening it, might have been talking to the wall. 
 
 ' Now, look here, Louie, what d' you do that for ? ' said David, 
 remonstrating ; ' why can't you leave the child alone ? You'll be 
 putting Mrs. Mason in a taking, and that '11 do her harm.' 
 
 ' Nowt o' t' sort,' said Louie composedly, 'it 's that woman 
 there '11 wake her with screeching. She's asleep, and the baby's 
 asleep, and I'm taking care of it. Why can't Mrs. Bury go and 
 look after Mrs. Mason ? She hasn't swept her room this two days, 
 and it 's a sight to see. ' 
 
 Pricked in a tender point, Mrs. Bury broke out again into a 
 stream of protest and invective, only modified by her fear of 
 waking her patient upstairs, and interrupted by appeals to David. 
 But whenever she came near to take the baby Louie put her 
 hands over it, and her wide black eyes shot out intimidating 
 flames before which the aggressor invariably fell back. 
 
 Attracted by the fight, Barbier had come up to look, and now 
 stood by the shop-door, riveted by Louie's strange beauty. She 
 wore the same black and scarlet dress in which she had made her 
 first appearance in Manchester. She now never wore it out of 
 doors, her quick eye having at once convinced her that it was not 
 in the fashion. But the instinct which had originally led her to 
 contrive it w^as abundantly justified whenever she still conde- 
 scended to put it on, so startling a relief it lent to the curves of 
 her slim figure, developed during the last two years of growth to 
 all womanly roundness and softness, and to the dazzling colour of 
 her dark head and thin face. As she sat by the fire, the white 
 bundle on her knee, one pointed foot swinging in front of her, 
 now hanging over the baby, and now turning her bright danger- 
 ous look and compressed lips on Mrs. Bury, she made a peculiar 
 witch-like impression on Barbier which thrilled his old nerves 
 agreeably. It was clear, he thought, that the girl wanted a hus- 
 band and a family of her own. Otherwise why should she run 
 off with other people's children ? But he would be a bold man 
 who ventured on her ! 
 
 David, at last seeing that Louie was in the mood to tear the 
 babe asunder rather than give it up, with difficulty Induced Mrs. 
 Bury to leave her in possession for half an hour, promising that, 
 as soon as the mother woke, the child should be given back. 
 
 'If I've had enough of it,' Louie put in, as a saving clause, 
 luckily just too late to be heard by the nurse, who had sulkily 
 closed the door behind her, declaring that ' sich an owdacious chit 
 she never saw in her born days, and niver heerd on one oather.' 
 
CHAP. X YOUTH 251 
 
 David and Barbier went back into the shop to talk, leaving 
 Louie to her nursing. As soon as she was alone she laid back the ^ 
 flannel which lay round the child's head, and examined every 
 inch of its downy poll and puckered face, her warm breath 
 making the tiny lips twitch in sleep as it travelled across them. 
 Then she lifted the little nightgown and looked at the pink feet 
 nestling in their flannel wrapping. A glow sprang into her 
 cheek ; her great eyes devoured the sleeping creature. Its weak- 
 ness and helplessness, its plasticity to anything she might choose 
 to do with it, seemed to intoxicate her. She looked round her 
 furtively, then bent and laid a hot covetous kiss on the small 
 clenched hand. The child moved ; had it been a little older it 
 would have wakened ; but Louie, hastily covering it up, began to 
 rock it and sing to it. 
 
 The door into the shop was ajar. As David and Barbier were 
 hanging together over a map of Paris which David had hunted 
 out of his stores, Barbier suddenly threw up his head with a queer 
 look. 
 
 ' What's that she's singing ?' he said quickly. 
 
 He got up hastily, overturning his stool as he did so, and went 
 to the door to listen. 
 
 'I haven't heard that,' he said, with some agitation, 'since 
 my father's sister used to sing it me when I was a small lad, up 
 at Augoumat in the mountains near Puy ! ' 
 
 Sur le pont d 'Avignon 
 Tout le monde y danse en rond ; 
 Les beaux messieurs font comme ga, 
 Les beaux messieurs font comme 9a. 
 
 The words were but just distinguishable as Louie sang. They 
 were clipped and mutilated as by one who no longer understood 
 what they meant. But the intonation was extraordinarily 
 French, French of the South, and Barbier could hardly stand 
 still under it. 
 
 ' Where did you learn that ? ' he called to her from the door. 
 
 The girl stopped and looked at him with her bright bird-like 
 glance. But she made no reply. 
 
 ' Did your mother teach it you ? ' he asked, coming in. 
 
 * I suppose so,' she said indifferently. 
 
 ' Can you talk any French — do you remember it ? ' 
 
 'No.' 
 
 ' But you'd soon learn. You haven't got the English mouth, 
 that's plain. Do you know your brother thinks of taking you to 
 Paris ? ' 
 
 She started. 
 
 ' He don't,' she said laconically. 
 
 ' Oh, don't he. Just ask him then ? ' 
 
 Ten minutes later Louie had been put in possession of the 
 situation. As David had fully expected, she took no notice what- 
 ever of his suggestion that after all she might not care to come. 
 
252 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book n 
 
 They might be rough quarters, he said, and queer people about ; 
 and it would cost a terrible deal more for two than one. Should 
 he Got ask Dora Lomax to take her iu for a fortnight ? John, of 
 course, would look after the shop. He spoke under the pressure 
 of a sudden qualm, knowing it would be no use ; but his voice had 
 almost a note of entreaty in it. 
 
 ' When do you want to be starting ? ' she asked him sharply. 
 ' I'll not go to Dora's — so you needn't talk o' that. You can take 
 the money out of what you'll be owing me next month. ' 
 
 Her nostrils dilated as the quick breath passed through them. 
 Barbier was fascinated by the extraordinary animation of the 
 face, and could not take his eyes off her. 
 
 'Not for a fortnight,' said David reluctantly, answering her 
 question. ' Barbier's letter says about the tenth of May. There's 
 two country sales I must go to, and some other things to settle.' 
 
 She nodded. 
 
 'Well, then, I can get some things ready,' she said half to 
 herself, staring across the baby into the fire. 
 
 When David and Barbier were gone together ' up street,' still 
 talking over their plans, Louie leapt to her feet and laid the baby 
 down — carelessly, as though she no longer cared anything at all 
 about it — in the old-fashioned arm-chair wherein David spent so 
 many midnight vigils. Then locking her hands behind her, she 
 paced up and down the narrow room with the springing gait, the 
 impetuous feverish grace, of some prisoned animal. Paris ! Her 
 education was small, and her ignorance enormous. But in the 
 columns of a ' lady's paper ' she had often bought from the station 
 bookstall at Clough End she had devoured nothing more eagerly 
 than the Paris letter, with its luscious descriptions of ' Paris 
 fashions,' whereby even Lancashire women, even Clough End 
 mill-hands in their Sunday best, were darkly governed from afar. 
 All sorts of bygone dreams recurred to her — rich and subtle 
 combinations of silks, satins, laces, furs, imaginary glories cloth- 
 ing an imaginary Louie Grieve. The remembrance of them filled 
 her with a greed past description, and she forth-with conceived 
 Paris as a place all shops, each of them superior to the best in 
 St. Ann's Square — where one might gloat before the windows all 
 day. 
 
 She made a spring to the door, and ran upstairs to her own 
 room. There she began to pull out her dresses and scatter them 
 about the floor, looking at them w4th a critical discontented eye. 
 
 Time passed. She was standing absorbed before an old gown, 
 planning out its renovation, when a howl arose from downstairs. 
 She fled like a roe deer, and pounced upon the baby just in time 
 to checkmate Mrs. Bury, who w^as at her heels. 
 
 Quite regardless of the nurse's exasperation with her, first for 
 leaving the child alone, half uncovered, in a chilly room, and now 
 for again withholding it, Louie put the little creature against her 
 neck, rocking and crooning to it. The sudden warm contact 
 stilled the baby ; it rubbed its head into the soft hollow thus pre- 
 
CHAP. X YOUTH 253 
 
 sented to it, and its hungry lips sought eagerly for their natural 
 food. Tlie touch of them sent a delicious thrill through Louie ; 
 she turned her head round and kissed the tiny, helpless cheek 
 with a curious violence ; then, tired of Mrs. Bury, and anxious to 
 get back to her plans, she almost threw the child to her. 
 
 ' There— take it ! I'll soon get it again when I want to.' 
 
 And she was as good as her word. The period of convales- 
 cence was to poor Mrs. Mason — a sickly, plaintive creature at the 
 best of times— one long struggle and misery. Louie represented 
 to her a sort of bird of prey, who was for ever descending on her 
 child and carrying it off to unknown lairs. For neither mother 
 nor nurse had Louie the smallest consideration ; she despised and 
 tyrannised oyer them both. But her hungry fondness for the 
 baby grew with gratification, and there was no mastering her in 
 the matter. Warm weather came, and when she reached home 
 after her work, she managed by one ruse or another to get hold 
 of the child, and on one occasion she disappeared with it into the 
 street for hours. David was amazed by the whim, but neither he 
 nor anyone else could control it. At last, Mrs. Mason was more 
 or less hysterical all day long, and hardly sane when Louie was 
 within reach. As for the husband, who managed to be more at 
 home during the days of his wife's weakness than he had yet 
 been since David's tenancy began, he complained to David and 
 spoke his mind to Louie once or twice, and then, suddenly, he 
 ceased to pay any attention to his wife's wails. With preter- 
 natural quickness the wife guessed the reason. A fresh terror 
 seized her— terror of the girl's hateful beauty. She dragged her- 
 self from her bed, found a room, while Louie was at her work, 
 and carried off baby and husband, leaving no address. Luckily 
 for her, the impression of Louie's black eyes proved to have been 
 a passing intoxication, and the poor mother breathed and lived 
 again. 
 
 Meanwhile Louie's excitement and restlessness over the Paris 
 plan made her more than usually trying to Dora. During this 
 fortnight she could never be counted on for work, not even when 
 it was a question of finishing an important commission. She was 
 too full of her various preparations. Barbier offered her, for 
 instance, a daily French lesson. She grasped in an instant the 
 facilities which even the merest smattering of French would give 
 her in Paris ; every night she sat up over her phrase book, and 
 every afternoon she cut her work short to go to Barbier. Her 
 whole life seemed to be one flame of passionate expectation, 
 though what exactly she expected it would have been hard to 
 say. 
 
 Poor Dora ! She had suffered many things in much patience 
 all these weeks. Louie's clear, hard mind, her sensuous tempera- 
 ment, her apparent lack of all maidenly reserve, all girlish 
 softness, made her incomprehensible to one for whom life was an 
 iridescent web of ideal aims and obligations. The child of grace 
 was dragged out of her own austere or delicate thoughts, and 
 
254 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 made to touch, taste, and handle what the ' world,' as the Chris- 
 tian understands it, might be like. Like every other daughter of 
 the people, Dora was familiar enough with sin and weakness — 
 Daddy alone had made her amply acquainted with both at one 
 portion or another of his career. But just this particular temper 
 of Louie's, with its apparent lack both of passion and of moral 
 sense, was totally new to her, and produced at times a stifling 
 impression upon her, without her being able to explain to herself 
 with any clearness what was the matter. 
 
 Yet, in truth, it often seemed as if the lawless creature had 
 been in some sort touched by Dora, as if daily contact with a 
 being so gentle and so magnanimous had won even upon her. 
 That confidence, for instance, which Louie had promised John, 
 at Dora's expense, had never been made. When it came to the 
 point, some touch of remorse, of shame, had sealed the girl's 
 mocking lips. 
 
 One little fact in particular had amazed Dora. Louie insisted, 
 for a caprice, on going with her one night, in Easter week, to St. 
 Damian's, and thenceforward went often. What attracted her, 
 Dora puzzled herself to discover. When, however, Louie had 
 been a diligent spectator, even at early services, for some weeks, 
 Dora timidly urged that she might be confirmed, and that Father 
 Russell would take her into his class. Louie laughed immoderately 
 at the idea, but continued to go to St. Damian's all the same. 
 Dora could not bear to be near her in church, but however far 
 away she might place herself, she was more conscious than she 
 liked to be of Louie's conspicuous figure and hat thrown out 
 against a particular pillar which the girl affected. The sharp 
 uplifted profile with its disdainful expression drew her eyes 
 against their will. She was also constantly aware of the impres- 
 sion Louie made upon the crowd, of the way in which she was 
 stared at and remarked upon. Whenever she passed in or out of 
 the church, people turned, and the girl, expecting it, and totally 
 unabashed, flashed her proud look from side to side. 
 
 But once in her place, she was not inattentive. The dark 
 chancel with its flowers and incense, the rich dresses and slow 
 movements of the priests, the excitement of the processional 
 hymns — these things caught her and held her. Her look was 
 fixed and eager all the time. As to the clergy, Dora spoke to 
 Father's Russell's sister, and some efforts were made to get hold 
 of the new-comer. But none of them were at all successful. The 
 girl slipped through everybody's hands. Only in the case of one 
 of the curates, a man with a powerful, ugly head, and a penetrat- 
 ing personality, did she show any wavering. Dora fancied that 
 she put herself once or twice in his way, that something about 
 him attracted her, and that he might have influenced her. But 
 as soon as the Paris project rose on the horizon, Louie thought of 
 nothing else. Father Impey and St. Damian's, like everything 
 else, were forgotten. She never went near the church from the 
 evening David told her his news to the day they left Manchester. 
 
CHAP. X YOUTH 255 
 
 David ran in to say good-bye to Daddy and Dora on the night 
 before they were to start. Since the Paris journey had been in 
 the air, Daddy's friendliness for the young fellow had revived. 
 He was not, after all, content to sit at home upon his six hundred 
 pounds 'like a hatching hen,' and so far Daddy, whose interest 
 in him had been for the time largely dashed by his sudden acces- 
 sion to fortune, was appeased. 
 
 AVhen David appeared Lomax was standing on the rug, with a 
 book under his arm. 
 
 ' Well, good-bye to you, young man, good-bye to you. And 
 here's a book to take with you that you may read in the train. It 
 will stir you up a bit, give you an idea or two. Don't you come 
 back too soon. ' 
 
 ' Father,' remonstrated Dora, who was standing by, ' who's to 
 look after his business ? ' 
 
 ' Be quiet, Dora ! That book '11 show him what can be made 
 even of a beastly bookseller. ' 
 
 David took it from him, looked at the title, and laughed. He 
 knew it well. It was the 'Life and Errors of John Dunton, 
 Citizen of London,' the eccentric record of a seventeenth-century 
 dealer in books, who, like Daddy, had been a character and a 
 vagrant. 
 
 ' Och ! Don't I know it by heart ? ' said Daddy, with enthu- 
 siasm. ' Many a time it's sent me off tramping, when my poor 
 Isabella thought she'd got me tied safe by the heels in the chimney 
 corner. ' ' Though love is strong as death, and every good man 
 loves his wife as himself, yet — many's the score of times I've said 
 it off pat to Isabella — yet I cannot think of being confined in a 
 narrower study than the whole world." There's a man for you ! 
 He gets rid of one wife and saddles himself with another— sorrow 
 a bit will he stop at home for either of them ! ' ' Finding I am for 
 travelling, Valeria, to show the height of her love, is as willing I 
 should see Europe as Eliza was I should see America." Och ! 
 give me the book, you divil,' cried Daddy, growing more and 
 more Hibernian as his passion rose, ' and, bedad, but I'll drive it 
 into you.' 
 
 And, reaching over. Daddy seized it, and turned over the 
 pages with a trembling hand. Dora flushed, and the tears rose 
 into her eyes. She realised perfectly that this performance was 
 levelled at her at least as much as at David. Daddy.'s mad 
 irritability had grown of late with every week. 
 
 ' Listen to this, Davy ! ' cried Daddy, putting up his hand for 
 silence. ' ' ' When I have crossed the Hellespont, where poor 
 Leander was drowned, Greece, China, and the Holy Land are the 
 other three countries I'm bound to. And perhaps when my hand 
 is in — " ' 
 
 ' My hand is in ! ' repeated Daddy, in an ecstasy. ' What a 
 jewel of a man !' 
 
 ' I may step thence to the Indies, for I am a true lover of 
 travels, and, when I am once mounted, care not whether I meet 
 
256 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ii 
 
 the sun at his rising or going down, provided only I may but 
 ramble . . . ffe is, truly a scholar who is versed in the volume 
 of the Universe, who doth not so much read of Nature as study 
 Nature herself.' 
 
 ' Well said — well said indeed ! ' cried Daddy, flinging the book 
 down with a wild gesture which startled them both. ' Was that 
 the man, Adrian Lomax, to spend the only hours of the only life 
 he was ever likely to see — his first thought in the morning, and 
 his last thought at night — in tickling the stomachs of Manchester 
 clerks ? ' 
 
 His peaked chin and straggling locks fell forward on his 
 breast. He stared sombrely at the young people before him, in 
 an attitude which, as usual, was the attitude of an actor. 
 
 David's natural instinct was to jeer. But a glance at Dora 
 perplexed him. There was some tragedy he did not understand 
 under this poor comedy. 
 
 ' Don't speak back,"^' said Dora, hurriedly, under her breath, 
 as she passed him to get her frame. ' It only makes him worse. ' 
 
 After a few minutes' broken chat, which Daddy's mood made 
 it difficult to keep up, David took his departure. Dora followed 
 him downstairs. 
 
 ' You're going to be away a fortnight,' she said, timidly. 
 
 As she spoke, she moved her head backwards and forwards 
 against the wall, as though it ached, and she could not find a 
 restful spot. 
 
 ' Oh, we shall be back by then, never fear ! ' said David, 
 cheerfully. He was growing more and more sorry for her. 
 
 'I should like to see foreign parts,' she said wistfully. 'Is 
 there a beautiful church, a cathedral, in Paris ? Oh, there are a 
 great many in France, I know ! I've heard the people at St. 
 Damian's speak of them. I would like to see the services. But 
 they can't be nicer than ours.' 
 
 David smiled. 
 
 ' I'm afraid I can't tell you much about them, Miss Dora ; 
 they aren't in my line. Good-bye, and keep your heart up.' 
 
 He was going, but he turned back to say quickly — 
 
 ' Why don't you let him go off for a bit of a tramp ? It might 
 quiet him.' 
 
 ' I would ; I would,' she said eagerly ; ' but I don't know what 
 would come of it. We're dreadfully behindhand this month, and 
 if he were to go away, people would be down on us ; they'd think 
 he wanted to get out of paying.' 
 
 He stayed talking a bit, trying to advise her, and, in the first 
 place, trying to find out how wrong things were. But she had 
 not yet come to the point of disclosing her father's secrets. She 
 parried his questions, showing him all the while, by look and 
 voice, that she was grateful to him for asking — for caring. 
 
 He went at last, and she locked the door behind him. But 
 when that was done, she stood still in the dark, wringing her 
 hands in a silent passion of longing — longing to be with him, out- 
 
CHAP. X YOUTH 357 
 
 side, in the night, to hear his voice, to see his handsome looks 
 again. Oh ! the fortnight would be long. So long as he was 
 there, within a stone's throw, though he did not love her, and 
 she was sad and anxious, yet Manchester held her treasure, and 
 Manchester streets had glamour, had charm. 
 
 He walked to Piccadilly, and took a 'bus to Mortimer Street. 
 He must say good-bye also to Mr. Ancrum, who had been low and 
 ill of late. 
 
 ' So you are off, David ? ' said Ancrum, rousing himself from 
 what seemed a melancholy brooding over books that he was in 
 truth not reading. As David shook hands with him, the small 
 fusty room, the pale face and crippled form awoke in the lad a 
 sense of indescribable dreariness. In a flash of recoil and desire 
 his thought sprang to the journey of the next day — to the May 
 seas — the foreign land. 
 
 ' Well, good luck to you ! ' said the minister, altering his 
 position so as to look at his visitor full, and doing it with a slow- 
 ness which showed that all movement was an effort. ' Look after 
 your sister, Davy. ' 
 
 David had sat down at Ancrum's invitation. He said nothing 
 in answer to this last remark, and Ancrum could not decipher 
 him in the darkness visible of the ill-trimmed lamp. . 
 
 ' She's been on your mind, Davy, hasn't she ? ' he said, gently, 
 laying his blanched hand on the young man's knee. 
 
 ' Well, perhaps she has,' David admitted, with an odd note in 
 his voice. ' She's not an easy one to manage.' 
 
 ' No. But you've got to manage her, Davy. There's only you 
 and she together. It's your task. It's set you. And you're 
 young, indeed, and raw, to have that beautiful self-willed creature 
 on your hands.' 
 
 'Beautiful? Do you think she's that?' David tried to laugh it off. 
 
 The minister nodded. 
 
 ' You'll find it out in Paris even more than you have here. 
 Paris is a bad place, they say. So's London, for the matter of 
 that. Davy, before you go, I've got one thing to say to you. ' 
 
 ' Say away, sir.' 
 
 'You know a great deal, Davy. My wits are nothing to 
 yours. You'll shoot ahead of all your old friends, my boy, some 
 day. But there's one thing you know nothing about — absolutely 
 nothing — and you prate as if you did. Perhaps you must turn 
 Christian before you do. I don't know. At least, so long as 
 you're not a Christian you won't know what ive mean by it — 
 what the Bible means by it. It's one little word, Davy — sin.'' 
 
 The minister spoke with a deep intensity, as though his whole 
 being were breathed into what he said. David sat silent and 
 embarrassed, opposition rising in him to what he thought 
 ministerial assumption. 
 
 ' Well, I don't know what you mean,' he said, after a pause. 
 ' One needn't be very old to find out that a good many people and 
 
258 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE bk. ii, ch. x 
 
 things in the world are pretty bad. Only we Secularists explain 
 it differently from you. We put a good deal of it down to educa- 
 tion, or health, or heredity.' 
 
 ' Oh, I know— I know ! ' said the minister hastily, as though 
 shrinking from the conversation he had himself evoked. ' I'm 
 not fit to talk about it, Davy. I'm ill, I think ! But there were 
 those two things I wanted to say to you — your sister— and— ' 
 
 His voice dropped. He shaded his eyes and looked away from 
 David into the smouldering coals. 
 
 ' No — no,' he resumed almost in a whisper ; ' it's the will — it's 
 the will. It's not anything he says, and Christ— C/^ris^ 's the 
 only help.' 
 
 Again there was a silence. David studied his old teacher 
 attentively, as far as the half-light availed him. The young man 
 was simply angry with a rehgion which could torment a soul and 
 body like this. Ancrum had been ' down ' in this way for a long 
 time now. Was another of his black fits approaching ? If so, 
 religion was largely responsible for them ! 
 
 When at last David sighted his own door, he perceived a figure 
 lounging on the steps. 
 
 ' I say,' he said to himself with a groan, ' its John ! ' 
 
 ' What on earth do you want, John, at this time of night ? ' he 
 demanded. But he knew perfectly. 
 
 ' Look here ! ' said the other thickly, ' it's all straight. You're 
 coming back in a fortnight, and you'll bring her back too ! ' 
 
 David laughed impatiently. 
 
 ' Do you think I shall lose her in Paris or drop her in the 
 Channel?' 
 
 ' I don't know,' said Dalby, with a curiously heavy and indis- 
 tinct utterance. ' She's very bad to me. She won't ever marry 
 me ; I know that. But when I think I might never see her again 
 I'm fit to go and hang myself. ' 
 
 David began to kick the pebbles in the road. 
 
 ' You know what I think about it all,' he said at last, gloomily. 
 ' I've told you before now. She couldn't care for you if she tried. 
 It isn't a ha'p'orth of good. I don't believe she'll ever care for 
 anybody. Anyway, she'll marry nobody who can't give her 
 money and fine clothes. There ! You may put that in your pipe 
 and smoke it, for it's as true as you stand there.' 
 
 John turned round restlessly, laid his hands against the wall, 
 and his head upon them. 
 
 ' Well, it don't matter,' he said slowly, after a pause. ' I'll 
 be here early. Good night ! ' 
 
 David stood and looked after him in mingled disgust and pity. 
 
 ' I must pack him off,' he said, ' I must.' 
 
 Then he threw back his young shoulders and drew in the warm 
 spring air with a long breath. Away with care and trouble ! 
 Things would come right— must come right. This weather was 
 summer, and in forty-eight hours they would be in Paris ! 
 
BOOK III 
 
 STOBM AND STRESS 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 The brother and sister left Manchester about midday, and spent 
 the night in London at a little City hotel much frequented by 
 Nonconformist ministers, which Ancrum had recommended. 
 
 Then next day ! How little those to whom all the widest 
 opportunities of life come for the asking, can imagine such a zest, 
 such a freshness of pleasure ! David had hesitated long before 
 the expense of the day service via Calais ; they could have gone 
 by night third class "for half the money; or they could have 
 taken returns by one of the cheaper and longer routes. But the 
 eagerness to make the most of every hour of time and daylight 
 prevailed ; they were to go by Calais and come back by Dieppe, 
 seeing thereby as much as possible on the two journeys in addi- 
 tion to the fortnight in Paris. The mere novelty of going any- 
 thing but third class was full of savour ; Louie's self-conscious 
 dignity as she settled herself into her corner on leaving Charing 
 Cross caught David's eye ; he saw himself reflected and laughed. 
 
 It w^as a glorious day, the firstling of the summer. In the 
 blue overhead the great clouds rose intensely thunderously 
 white, and journeyed seaward under a light westerly wind. The 
 railway banks, the copses were all primroses ; every patch of 
 water Had in it the white and azure of the sky ; the lambs were 
 lying in the still scanty shadow of the elms ; every garden showed 
 its tulips and wallflowers, and the air, the sunlight, the vividness 
 of each hue and line bore with them an intoxicating joy, especi- 
 ally for eyes still adjusted to the tones and lights of Manchester 
 in winter. 
 
 The breeze carriea them merrily over a dancing sea. And 
 once on the French side they spent their first hour in crossing 
 from one side of their carriage to the other, pointing and calling 
 incessantly. For the first time since certain rare moments in 
 their childhood they were happy together and at one. Mother 
 Earth unrolled for them a corner of her magic show, and they 
 took it like children at the play, now shouting, now spell-bound. 
 
 David had George Sand's ' Mauprat ' on his knee, but he read 
 nothing the whole dav. Never had he used his eyes so intently, 
 so passionately. Nothing escaped them, neither the detail of 
 that strange and beautifiil fen from which Amiens rises— a coun- 
 try of peat and peat-cutters where the green plain is diapered 
 with innumerable tiny lakes edged with black heaps of turf and 
 daintily set with scattered trees— nor the delicate charm of the 
 iorest lands about Chantilly. So much thinner and gracefuller 
 
262 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 these woods were than English woods ! French art and skill were 
 here already in the wild country. Each tree stood out as though 
 it had been personally thought for ; every plantation was in regu- 
 lar lines ; each woody walk drove straight from point to point, 
 following out a plan orderly and intricate as a spider's web. 
 
 By this time Louie's fervour of curiosity and attention had 
 very much abated ; she grew tired and cross, and presently fell 
 asleep. But, with every mile less between them and Paris, 
 David's pulse beat faster, and his mind became more absorbed 
 in the flying scene. He hung beside the window, thrilling with 
 enchantment and delight, drinking in the soft air, the beauty of 
 the evening clouds, the wonderful greens and silvers and fiery 
 browms of the poplars. His mind was full of images— the deep 
 lily-sprinkled lake wherein Stenio, Lelia's poet lover, plunged and 
 died ; the grandiose landscape of Victor Hugo ; Rene sitting on 
 the cliff-side, and looking farewell to the white home of his child- 
 liood ;— of lines from ' Childe Harold ' and from Shelley. His 
 mind was in a ferment of youth and poetry, and the France he 
 saw w^as not the workaday France of peasant and high road and 
 factory, but the creation of poetic intelligence, of ignorance and 
 fancy. 
 
 Paris came in a flash. He had realised to the full the squalid 
 and ever-widening zone of London, had frittered away his ex- 
 pectations almost, in the passing it ; but here the great city had 
 hardly announced itself before they were in the midst of it, shot 
 out into the noise, and glare, and crowed of the Nord station. 
 
 They had no luggage to wait for, and David, trembling with 
 excitement so that he could hardly give the necessary orders, 
 shouldered the bags, got a cab and gave the address. Outside it 
 was still twilight, but the lamps were lit and the BouleV^rd into 
 which they presently turned seemed to brother and sister a blaze 
 of light. The young green of the trees glittered under the gas 
 like the trees of a pantomime ; the kiosks threw their lights out 
 upon the moving crowd ; shops and cafes were all shining and 
 alive ; and on either hand rose the long line of stately houses, 
 unbroken by any London or Manchester squalors and inequalities, 
 towering as it seemed into the skies, and making for the great 
 spectacle of life beneath them a setting more gay, splendid, and 
 complete than any Englishman in his own borders can ever see. 
 
 Louie had turned white with pleasure and excitement. All 
 her dreams of gaiety and magnificence, of which the elements had 
 been gathered from the illustrated papers and the Manchester 
 theatres, were more than realised by these Paris gas-lights, these 
 vast houses, these laughing and strolling crowds. 
 
 'Look at those people having their coffee out of doors,' she 
 cried to David, ' and that white and gold place behind. Good- 
 ness 1 what they must spend in gas ! And just look at those two 
 girls — look, quick — there, with the young man in the black 
 moustache — they are loud, but aren't their dresses just sw'eet ? ' 
 
 She craned her neck out of window, exclaiming — now at this, 
 
CHAP. I STORM AND STRESS 363 
 
 now at that — till suddenly they passed out of the Boulevard into 
 the comparative darkness of side ways. Here the height of the 
 houses produced a somewhat different impression ; Louie looked 
 out none the less keenly, but her chatter ceased. 
 
 At last the cab drew up with a clatter at the side of a par- 
 ticularly dark and narrow street, ascending somewhat sharply 
 to the north-west from the point where they stopped. 
 
 'Now for the concierge,'' said David, looking round him, 
 after he had paid the man. 
 
 And conning Barbier's directions in his mind, he turned into 
 the gateway, and made boldly for a curtained door behind which 
 shone a light. 
 
 The woman, who came out in answer to his knock, looked 
 him all over from head to foot, while he explained himself in his 
 best French. 
 
 ' Tiens,'' she said, indifferently, to a man behind her, ' it's 
 the people for No. 2Q—des Anglais — M. Paul te Va dit. Hand 
 me the key.' 
 
 The honJiomme addressed— a little, stooping, wizened creature, 
 with china-blue eyes, showing widely in his withered face under 
 the light of the paraffin-lamp his wife was holding — reached a 
 key from a board on the wall and gave it to her. 
 
 The woman again surveyed them both, the young man and 
 the girl, and seemed to debate with herself whether she should 
 take the trouble to be civil. Finally she said in an ungracious 
 voice — 
 
 'It's the fourth floor to the right. I must take you up, I 
 suppose.' 
 
 David thanked her, and she preceded them with the light 
 through a door opposite and up some stone stairs. 
 
 When they had mounted two flights, she turned abruptly on 
 the landing — 
 
 ' You take the appartement from M. Dubois ? ' 
 ' Yes,' said David, enchanted to find that, thanks to old 
 Barbier's constant lessons, he could both understand and reply 
 with tolerable ease ; ' for a fortnight. ' 
 
 ' Take care ; the landlord will be descending on you ; M. 
 Dubois never pays ; he may be turned out any day, and his 
 things sold. Where is Mademoiselle going to sleep ? ' 
 
 ' But in M. Dubois' appartement,'' said David, hoping this 
 time, in his dismay, that he did not understand ; ' he promised 
 to arrange everything.' 
 
 ' He "has arranged nothing. Do you wish that I should 
 provide some things ? You can hire some furniture from me. 
 And do you want service ? ' 
 
 The woman had a grasping eye. David's frugal instincts 
 took alarm. 
 
 ' Merci, Madame ! My sister and I do not require much. We 
 shall wait upon ourselves. If Madame will tell us the name of 
 some restaurant near — ' 
 
364 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 Instead, Madame made an angry sound and thrust the key 
 abruptly into Louie's hand, David being laden with the bags. 
 
 'Tlfere are two more flights,' she said roughly; 'then turn 
 to the left, and go up the staircase straight in front of you — first 
 door to the right. You've got eyes ; you'll find the way.' 
 
 ' Mais, Madame—^ cried David, bewildered by these direc- 
 tions, and trying to detain her. 
 
 But she was already half-way down the flight below them, 
 throwing back remarks which, to judge from their tone, were 
 not complimentary. 
 
 There was no help for it. Louie was dropping with fatigue,' 
 and beginning to be much out of temper. David with diflBculty 
 assumed a hopeful air, and up they w^ent again. Leading off the 
 next landing but one they found a narrow passage, and at the 
 end of it a ladder-like staircase. At the top of this they came 
 upon a corridor at right angles, in which the first door bore the 
 welcome figures ' 26.' 
 
 ' All right,' said David ; ' here we are. Now we'll just go in, 
 and look about us. Then if you'll sit and rest a bit, I'll run 
 down and see where we can get something to eat.' 
 
 ' Be quick, then— do,' said Louie. ' I'm just fit to drop.' 
 
 With a beating heart he put the key into the lock of the door. 
 It fitted, but he could not turn it. Both he and Louie tried in 
 vain. 
 
 ' What a nuisance ! ' said he at last. ' I must go and fetch 
 up that woman again. You sit down and wait.' 
 
 As he spoke there was a sound below of quick steps, and of a 
 voice, a woman's voice, humming a song. 
 
 ' Some one coming,' he said to Louie ; ' perhaps they under- 
 stand the lock.' 
 
 They ran down to the landing below to reconnoitre. There 
 was, of course, gas on the staircase, and as they hung over the 
 iron railing they saw mounting towards them a young girl. She 
 wore a light fawn-coloured dress and a hat covered with Parma 
 violets. Hearing voices above her, she threw her head back, 
 and stopped a moment. Louie's eye was caught by her hand 
 and its tiny wrist as it lay on the balustrade, and by the coils 
 and twists of her fair hair. David saw no details, only what 
 seemed to him a miracle of grace and colour, born in an instant, 
 out of the dark — or out of his own excited fancy ? 
 
 She came slowly up the steps, looking at them, at the tall 
 dark youth and the girl beside him. Then on the top step she 
 paused, instead of going past them. David took off his hat, but 
 all the practical quesTions he had meant to ask deserted him. 
 His French seemed to have flown. - 
 
 ' You are strangers, aren't you ? ' she said, in a clear, high, 
 somewhat imperious voice. * What number do you want ? ' 
 
 Her expression had a certain liaidenr, as of one defending 
 her native ground against intruders. Under the stimulus of it 
 David found his tongue. 
 
CHAP. I STORM AND STRESS 265 
 
 'Wo have taken M. Paul Dubois' rooms,' he said. ' We have 
 fouud his door, but the key the concierge gave us does not fit it.' 
 
 She laughed, a free, frank laugh, which had a certain wild 
 note in it. 
 
 ' These doors have to be coaxed,' she said ; ' they don't like 
 foreigners. Give it me. This is my way, too.' 
 
 Stepping past them, she preceded them up the narrow stairs, 
 and was just about to try the key in the lock, when a sudden 
 recollection seemed to flash upon her. 
 
 ' I know ! ' she said, turning upon them. ' Tenez—que je suis 
 hetel You are Dubois' English friends. He told me something, 
 and I had forgotten all about it. You are going to take his 
 rooms ? ' 
 
 ' For a week or two,' said David, irritated a little by the 
 laughing malice, the sarcastic wonder of her eyes, ' while he is 
 doing some work in Brussels. It seemed a convenient arrange- 
 ment, but if we are not comfortable we shall go elsewhere. If 
 you can open the door for us we shall be greatly obliged to you. 
 Mademoiselle. But if not I must go down for the concierge. We 
 have been travelling all day, and my sister is tired.' 
 
 ' Where did you learn such good French ?' she said carelessly, 
 at the same time leaning her weight against the door, and ma- 
 nipulating the key in such a way that the lock turned, and the 
 door flew open. 
 
 Behind it appeared a large dark space. The light from the 
 gas-jet in the passage struck into it, but beyond a chair and a tall 
 screen-like object in the middle of the floor, it seemed to David to 
 be empty. 
 
 'That's his atelier, of course,' said the unknown ; ' and mine 
 is next to it, at the other end. I suppose he has a cupboard to 
 sleep in somew^here. Most of us have. But I don't know any- 
 thing about Dubois. I don't like him. He is not one of my 
 friends.' 
 
 She spoke in a dry, masculine voice, which contrasted in the 
 sharpest way with her youth, her dress, her dainty smallness. 
 Then, all of a sudden, as her eves travelled over the English pair 
 standing bewildered on the threshold of Dubois' most uninviting 
 apartment, she began to laugh again. Evidently the situation 
 seemed to her extremely odd. 
 
 ' Did you ask the people downstairs to get anything ready for 
 you ? ' she inquired. 
 
 ' No,' said David, hesitating ; ' w^o thought we could manage 
 for ourselves. ' 
 
 • Well— perhaps— after the first,' she said, still laughmg. 
 ' But— I may as well warn you— the Merichat will be very uncivil 
 to you if you don't manage to pay her for something. Hadn't 
 you better explore ? That thing in the middle is Dubois' easel, of 
 course.' 
 
 David groped his way in, took some matches from his pocket, 
 found a gas-bracket with some difliculty, and lit up. Then he 
 
266 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book in 
 
 and Louie looked round them. They saw a gaunt high room, lit 
 on one side by a huge studio- window, over which various tattered 
 blinds were drawn ; a floor of bare boards, with a few rags of 
 carpet here and there ; in the middle, a table covered with 
 painter's apparatus of different kinds ; palettes, paints, rags, tin- 
 pots, and, thrown down amongst them, some stale crusts of 
 bread ; a large easel, with a number of old and dirty canvases 
 piled upon it ; two chairs, one of them without the usual comple- 
 ment of legs ; a few etchings and oil-sketches and fragments of 
 coloured stuffs pinned against the wall in wild confusion ; and, 
 spread out casually behind the easel, an iron folding-bedstead, 
 without either mattress or bed-clothes. In the middle of the 
 floor stood a smeared kettle on a spirit-stove, and a few odds and 
 ends of glass and china were on the mantelpiece, together with a 
 paraffin-lamp. Evary article in the room was thick in dust. 
 
 When she had, more or less, ascertained these attractive 
 details, Louie stood still in the middle of M. Dubois' apartment. 
 
 ' What did he tell all those lies for ? ' she said to David fiercely. 
 For in the very last communication received from him, Dubois 
 had described himself as having made all necessary preparations 
 ' etpoiir la toilette et pour le manger.'' He had also asked for the 
 rent in advance, which David with some demur had paid. 
 
 'Here's something,' cried David; and, turning a handle in 
 the wall, he pulled a flimsy door open and disclosed what seemed 
 a cupboard. The cupboard, however, contained a bed, some 
 bedding, blankets, and washing arrangements ; and David joy- 
 ously announced his discoveries. Louie took no notice of him. 
 She was tired, angry, disgusted. The illusion of Paris was, for 
 the moment, all gone. She sat herself down on one of the two 
 chairs, and, taking off her hat, she threw it from her on to the 
 belittercd table with a passionate gesture. 
 
 The French girl had so far stood just outside, leaning against 
 the doorway, and looking on with unabashed amusement while 
 they made their inspection. Now, however, as Louie uncovered, 
 the spectator at the door made a little, quick sound, and then ran 
 forward. 
 
 ' Mais, mon Dieu ! how handsome you are ! ' she said with a 
 whimsical eagerness, stopping short in front of Louie, and driving 
 her little hands deep into the pockets of her jacket. ' What a 
 head ! — what eyes ! Why didn't I see before ? You must sit to 
 me — 3'ou must! You will, won't you? I will pay you anything 
 you like ! You sha'n't be dull — somebody shall come and amuse 
 you. Voijons — monsieur f she called imperiously. 
 
 David came up. She stood with one hand on the table lean- 
 ing her light weight backward, looking at them with all her eyes 
 — the very embodiment of masterful caprice. 
 
 ' Both of them ! ' she said under her breath, ' superhe ! ' 
 Monsieur, look here. You and mademoiselle are tired. There is 
 nothing in these rooms. Dubois is a scamp without a sou. He 
 does no work, and he gambles on the Bourse. Everything he 
 
CHAP. II STORM AND STRESS 267 
 
 had he has sold by degrees. If he has gone to Brussels now to 
 work honestly, it is for the first time in his life. He lives on the 
 hope of getting money out of an uncle in England — that I know, 
 for he boasts of it to everybody. It is just like him to play a 
 practical joke on strangers. No doubt you have paid him 
 already — ii'est-ce pas ? I thought as much. Well, never mind I 
 My rooms are next door. I am Elise Delaunay. I work in 
 Taranne's atelier. I am an artist, pure and simple, and I live to 
 please myself and nobody else. But I have a chair or two, and 
 the woman downstairs looks after me because I make it worth her 
 while. Come with me. I will give you some supper, and I will 
 lend you a rug and a pillow for that^bed. Then to-morrow you 
 can decide what to do.' 
 
 David protested, stammering and smiling. But he had 
 flushed a rosy red, and there was no real resistance in him. 
 He explained the invitation to Louie, who had been looking 
 helplessly frotn one to the other, and she at once accepted it. 
 She understood perfectly that the French girl admired her ; her 
 face relaxed its frown ; she nodded to the stranger with a sort 
 of proud yielding, and then let herself be taken by the arm and 
 led once more along the corridor. 
 
 Elise Delaunay unlocked her own door. 
 
 ^Bienf she said, putting her head in first, 'Merichat has 
 earned her money. Now go in— go in ! — and see if I don't give 
 you some supper.' 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 She pushed them in, and shut the door behind them. They 
 looked round them in amazement. Here was an atelier precisely 
 corresponding in size and outlook to Dubois'. But to their tired 
 eyes the change was one from squalor to fairyland. The room 
 was not in fact luxurious at all. But there was a Persian rug 
 or two on the polished floor ; there was a wood fire burning on 
 the hearth, and close to it there was a low sofa or divaij covered 
 with pieces of old stuffs, and flanked by a table whereon stood a 
 little meal, a roll, some cut ham, part of a flat fruit tart from 
 the pdtissier next door, a coffee pot, and a spirit kettle ready for 
 lighting. There were two easels in the room ; one was laden 
 with sketches and photographs ; the other carried a half-finished 
 picture of a mosque interior in Oran— a rich splash of colour, 
 making a centre for all the rest. Everywhere indeed, on the 
 walls, on the floor, or standing on the chairs, were studies of 
 Algeria, done with an ostentatiously bold and rapid hand. On 
 the mantelpiece was a small reproduction in terra cotta of one of 
 Dalou's early statues, a peasant w^oman in a long cloak straining 
 her homely baby to her breast— true and passionate. Books lay 
 about, and in a corner was a piano, open, with a confusion of 
 tattered music upon it. And everywhere, as it seemed to Louie, 
 
288 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iil 
 
 were shoes ! — the daintiest and most fantastic shoes imaginable — 
 Turkish shoes, Pompadour shoes, old shoes and new shoes, shoes 
 with heels and shoes without, shoes lined with fur, and shoes 
 blown together, as one might think, out of cardboard and rib- 
 bons. The English girl's eyes fastened upon them at once. 
 
 'Ah, j^ou tink my shoes pretty,' said the hostess, speaking a 
 few words of English, 'c'est mon dada, voyez-voiis — via collec- 
 tion! — Tenez — I cannot say dat in English, Monsieur; explain 
 to your sister. My shoes are my passion, next to my foot. I 
 am not pretty, but my foot is ravishing. Dalou modelled it for 
 his Siren. That turned my head. Sit down, Mademoiselle — we 
 will find some plates.' 
 
 She pushed Louie into a corner of the divan, and then she 
 went over to a cupboard standing against the wall, and beckoned 
 to David. 
 
 ' Take the plates — and this potted meat. ISTow for the petit 
 vin my doctor cousin brought me last week from the family 
 estate. I have stowed it away somewhere. Ah ! here it is. 
 We are from the Gironde — at least my mother v\as. My father 
 was nobody — bourgeois from tip to toe, though he called himself 
 an artist. It was a mesalliance for her when she married him. 
 Oh, he led her a life ! — she died when I was small, and last year 
 lie died, eleven months ago. I did my best to cry. ImjDossihle ! 
 He had made Maman and me cry too much. And now I am 
 perfectly alone in the world, and perfectly well-behaved. 
 Monsieur Prudhomme may talk — I snap my finger at him. 
 You will have your ideas, of course. No matter ! If you 
 eat my salt, you will liardly be able to speak ill of me.' 
 
 'Mademoiselle ! ' cried David, inwardly cursing his shyness — 
 a shyness new to him — and his complete apparent lack of any- 
 thing, to say, or the means of saying it. 
 
 ' Oh, don't protest ! — after that journey you can't afford to 
 waste your breath. Move a little, Monsieur — let me open the 
 other door of the cupboard — there are some chocolates worth 
 eating on that* back shelf. Do you admire my ar moire f It is 
 old Breton— it belonged to my grandmother, who was from 
 Morbihan. She brought her linen in it. It is cherry wood, 
 you see, mounted in silver. You may search Paris for another 
 like it. Look at that flower v.-ork on the panels. It is not 
 ha7ial at all — it has character — there is real design in it. Now 
 take the chocolates, and these sardines — put them down over 
 there. As for me, I make the coffee.' 
 
 She ran over to the spirit lamp, and set it going ; she 
 measured out the coffee; then sitting down on the floor, she 
 took the bellows and blew up the logs. 
 
 'Tell me your name, Monsieur?' she said suddenly, looking 
 round. 
 
 David gave it in full, his own name and Louie's. Then he 
 walked up to her, making an effort to be at his ease, and said 
 something about their French descent. His mode of speaking 
 
CHAP. II STORM AND o'TRESS 269 
 
 was slow and bookish — correct, but wanting in life. After this 
 year's devotion to French books, after all his compositions with 
 Barbier, he had supposed himself so familiar with French ! 
 "With the woman from the loge, indeed, he could have talked at 
 large, had she been conversational instead of rude. But here, 
 with this little glancing creature, he felt himself plunged in a 
 perfect quagmire of ignorance and stupidity. When he spoke of 
 being half French, she became suddenly grave, and studied him 
 with an intent piercing look. 'No,' she said slowly, 'no, at 
 bottom you are not French a bit, you are all English, I feel it. 
 I should fight you — a outrance ! (t7'iw— what a strange name ! 
 It's a bird's name. You are not like it— you do not belong to it. 
 But David ! — ah, that is better. Voyons ! ' 
 
 She sprang up, ran over to the furthest easel, and, routing 
 about amongst its disorder of prints and photographs, she hit 
 upon one, which she held up triumphantly. 
 
 ' There, Monsieur I^there is your prototype. That is David — 
 the young David— scourge of the Philistine. You are bigger and 
 broader. I would rather fight him than you— but it is like you, 
 all the same. Take it.' 
 
 And she held out to him a photograph of the Donatello David 
 at Florence — the divine young hero in his shepherd's hat, fresh 
 from the slaying of the oppressor. 
 
 He looked at it, red and wondering, then shook his head. 
 
 ' What is it ? Who made it, Mademoiselle ? ' 
 
 'Donatello — oh, I never saw it. I was never in Italy, but a 
 friend gave it me. It is like you, I tell you. But, what use is 
 that ? You are English — yes, you are, in spite of your mother. 
 It is very well to be called David — you may be Goliath all the 
 time 1 ' 
 
 Her tone had grown hard and dry — insulting almost. Her 
 look sent him a challenge. 
 
 He stared at her dumbfounded. All the self-confidence with 
 which he had hitherto governed his own world had deserted him. 
 He was like a tongue-tied child in her hands. 
 
 She enjoyed her mastery, and his discomfiture. Her look 
 changed and melted in an instant. 
 
 ' I am rude,' she said, 'and you can't answer me back — not 
 yet — for a day or two. Pardon! Monsieur David — Mademoi- 
 selle — will you come to supper ? ' 
 
 She put chairs and waved them to their places with the joyous 
 animation of a child, waiting on them, fetching this and that, 
 with the quickest, most graceful motions. She had brought from 
 the armoire some fine white napkins, and now she produced a 
 glass or two and made her guests provide themselves with the red 
 wine which neither had ever tasted before, and over which Louie 
 made an involuntary face. Then she began to chatter and to 
 eat — both as fast as possible — now laughing at her own English 
 or at David's French, and now laying down her knife and fork 
 that she might look at Louie, with an intent professional look 
 
270 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 which contrasted oddly with the wild freedom of her talk and 
 movements. 
 
 Suddenly she took up a wineglass and held it out to David 
 with a piteous childish gesture. 
 
 ' Fill it, Monsieur, and then drink— drink to my good luck. I 
 wish for something— with my life — my soul; but there are people 
 who hate me, who would delight to see me crushed. And it will 
 be three weeks— three long long weeks, almost — before I know.' 
 
 She was very pale, the tears had sprung to her eyes, and the 
 hand holding the glass trembled. David flushed and frowned in 
 the vain desire to understand her. 
 
 ' What am I to do ? ' he said, taking the glass mechanically, 
 but making no use of it. 
 
 'Drink! — drink to my success. I have two pictures, Mon- 
 sieur, in the Salon ; you know what that means ? the same as 
 your Academie? Parfaitement ! ah! you understand. One is 
 well hung, on the line ; the other has been shamefully treated — 
 but shamefully ! And all the world knows why. I have some 
 enemies on the jury, and they delight in a mean triumph over 
 me — a triumph which is a scandal. But I have friends, too — 
 good friends — and in three weeks the rewards will be voted. 
 You understand ? the medals, and the mentions honorables. As 
 for a medal — no ! I am only two years in the atelier ; I am not 
 unreasonable. But a mention ! — ah ! Monsieur David, if they 
 don't give it me I shall be very miserable.' 
 
 Her voice had gone through a whole gamut of emotion in this 
 speech — pride, elation, hope, anger, offended dignity — sinking 
 finally to the plaintive note of a child asking for consolation. 
 
 And luckily David had followed her. His French novels had 
 brought him across the Salon and the jury system ; and Barbier 
 had told him tales. His courage rose. He poured the wine into 
 the glass with a quick, uncertain hand, and raised it to his lips. 
 
 ' A la gloire de Mademoiselle ! ' he cried, tossing it down with 
 a gesture almost as free and vivid as her own. 
 
 Her eye followed him with excitement, taking in every detail 
 of the action — the masculine breadth of chest, the beauty of the 
 dark head and short upper lip. 
 
 ' Very good — very good 1 ' she said, clapping her small hands. 
 ' You did that admirably — you improve — n'est-ce pas, Made- 
 moiselle ? ' 
 
 But Louie only stared blankly and somewhat haughtily in re- 
 turn. She was beginning to be tired of her silent role, and of the 
 sort of subordination it implied. The French girl seemed to 
 divine it, and her. 
 
 'She does not like me,' she said, with a kind of wonder 
 under her breath, so that David did not catch the words. ' The 
 other is quite different.' 
 
 Then, springing up, she searched in the pockets of her jacket 
 for something — lips pursed, brows knitted, as though the quest 
 were important. 
 
CHAP. It STORM AND STRESS 271 
 
 * Where are my cigarettes ? ' she demanded sharply. ' Ah ! 
 here they are. Mademoiselle — Monsieur.' 
 
 Louie laughed rudely, pushing them back without a word. 
 Then she got up, and began boldly to look about her. The shoes 
 attracted her, and some Algerian scarves and burnouses that 
 were lying on a distant chair. She went to turn them over. 
 
 Mademoiselle Delaunay looked after her for a moment — with 
 the same critical attention as before — then with a shrug she 
 threw herself into a corner of the divan, drawing about her a bit 
 of old embroidered stuff which lay there. It was so flung, 
 however, as to leave one dainty foot in an embroidered silk 
 stocking visible beyond it. The tone of the stocking was re- 
 peated in the bunch of violets at her neck, and the purples of the 
 flowers told with charming effect against her white skin and the 
 pale fawn colour of her dress and hair. David watched her 
 with intoxication. She could hardly be taller than most children 
 of fourteen, but her proportions were so small and delicate that 
 her height, whatever it was, seemed to him the perfect height 
 for a woman. She handled her cigarette with mannish airs ; 
 unless it were some old harridan in a collier's cottage, he had 
 never seen a woman smoke before, and certainly he had never 
 guessed it could become her so well. Not pretty ! He was in no 
 mood to dissect the pale irregular face with its subtleties of line 
 and expression ; but, as she sat there smoking and chatting, she 
 was to him the realisation — the climax of his dream of Paris. 
 All the lightness and grace of that dream, the strangeness, the 
 thrill of it seemed to have passed into her. 
 
 ' Will you stay in those rooms ? ' she inquired, slowly blowing 
 away the curls of smoke in front of her. 
 
 David replied that he could not yet decide. He looked as he 
 felt — in a difficulty. 
 
 ' Oh ! you will do well enough there. But your sister — 
 Teiiez ! There is a family on the floor below — an artist and his 
 wife. I have known them take pensionnaires. They are not 
 the most distinguished persons in the w^orld — mais enfin ! — it is 
 not for long. Your sister might do worse than board with them.' 
 
 David thanked her eagerly. He would make all inquiries. 
 He had in his pocket a note of introduction from Dubois to 
 Madame Cervin, and another, he believed, to the gentleman on 
 the ground floor — to M. Montjoie, the sculptor. 
 
 ' Ah ! M. Montjoie ! ' 
 
 Her brows went up, her grey eyes flashed. As for her tone 
 it was half amused, half contemptuous. She began to speak, 
 moved restlessly, then apparently thought better of it. 
 
 ' After all,' she said, in a rapid undertone, ' qiCest-ce que cela 
 me fait f Allans. Why did you come here at all, instead of to 
 an hotel, for so short a time ? ' 
 
 He explained as well as he was able. 
 
 'You wanted to see something of French life, and French 
 artists or writers?' she repeated slowly, 'and you come with 
 
27^ THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book in 
 
 introductions from Xavier Dubois ! C'est drole, ga. Have you 
 studied art ? ' 
 
 He laughed. 
 
 ' No — except in books.' 
 
 ' What books ? ' 
 
 ' Novels— George Sand's.' 
 
 It was her turn to laugh now. 
 
 ' You are really too amusing ! No, Monsieur, no ; you inte- 
 rast me. I have the best will in the world towards you ; but I 
 cannot ask Consuelos and Teverinos to meet you. Pas possible. 
 1 regret — ' 
 
 She fell into silence a moment, studying him with a merry 
 look. Then she broke out again. 
 
 ' Are you a connoisseur in pictures. Monsieur ? ' 
 
 He had reddened already under her persiflage. At this he 
 grew redder still. 
 
 ' I have never seen any. Mademoiselle,' he said, almost pite- 
 ously ; ' except once a little exhibition in Manchester.' 
 
 ' Nor sculpture?' 
 
 ' No,' he said honestly ; ' nor sculpture.' 
 
 It seemed to him he was being held under a microscope, so 
 keen and pitiless were her laughing eyes. But she left him no 
 time to resent it. 
 
 ' So you are a blank page, Monsieur — virgin soil— and you 
 confess it. You interest me extremely. I should even like to 
 teach you a little. I am the most ignorant person in the world. 
 I know nothing about artists in books. Mais Je suis artiste, 
 moi ! fille d'artiste. I could tell you tales — ' 
 
 She threw her graceful head back against the cushion behind 
 her, and smiled again broadly, as though her sense of humour 
 were irresistibly tickled by the situation. 
 
 Then a whim seized her, and she sat up, grave and eager. 
 
 * I have drawn since I was eight years old,' she said ; ' would 
 you like to hear about it ? It is not romantic — not the least in 
 the world— but it is true.' 
 
 And with what seemed to his foreign ear a marvellous swift- 
 ness and fertility of phrase, she poured out her story. After her 
 mother died she had been sent at eight years old to board at a 
 farm near Rouen by her father, who seemed to have regarded his 
 daughter now as plaything and model, now as an intolerable 
 drag on the freedom of a vicious career. And at the farm the 
 child's gift declared itself. She began with copying the illustra- 
 tions, the saints and holy families in a breviary "belonging to one 
 of the farm servants ; she went on to draw the lambs, the carts, 
 the horses, the farm buildings, on any piece of white wood she 
 could find littered about the yard, or any bit of paper saved from 
 a parcel, till at last the old cure took pity upon her and gave her 
 some chalks and a drawing-book. At fourteen her father, for a 
 caprice, reclaimed her, and she found herself alone with him in 
 Paris. To judge from the hints she threw out, her life during 
 
CHAP. II STORM AND STRESS 273 
 
 the next few years had been of th^ roughest and wildest, pro- 
 tected only by her indomitable resolve to learn, to make herself 
 an artist, come what would. ' I meant to be famous, and I 
 mean it still ! ' she said, with a passionate emphasis which made 
 David open his eyes. Her father refused to believe in her gift, 
 and was far too self-indulgent and brutal to teach her. But 
 some of his artist friends were kind to her, and taught her 
 intermittently ; by the help of some of them she got permission, 
 although under age, to copy in the Louvre, and with hardly any 
 technical knowledge worked there feverishly from morning to 
 night ; and at last Taranne — the great Taranne, from whose 
 atelier so many considerable artists had gone out to the conquest 
 of the public — Taranne had seen some of her drawings, heard 
 her story, and generously taken her as a pupil. 
 
 Then emulation took hold of her — the 'fierce desire to be first 
 in all the competitions of the atelier. David had the greatest 
 difiQculty in following her rapid speech, with its slang, its techni- 
 cal idioms, its extravagance and variety ; but he made out that 
 she had been for a long time deficient in sound training, and that 
 her rivals at the atelier had again and again beaten her easily in 
 spite of her gift, because of her weakness in the grammar of her 
 art. 
 
 ' And whenever they beat me I could have killed my conquer- 
 ors ; and whenever I beat them, I despised my judges and wanted 
 to give the prize away. It is not my fault. Je suis faite comme 
 ga — voila ! I am as vain as a peacock ; yet when people admire 
 anything I do, I think them ioo\&— fools ! I am jealous and 
 proud and absurd— so they all say ; yet a word, a look from a 
 real artist— from one of the great men who kiiow — can break me, 
 make me cry. Bemelez ga, Mo7isieur, si voiis pouvez ! ^ 
 
 She stopped, out of breath. Their eyes were on each other. 
 The fascination, the absorption expressed in the Englishman's 
 look startled her. She hurriedly turned away, took up her ciga- 
 rette again, and nestled into the cushion. He vainly tried to 
 clothe some of the quick comments running through his mind in 
 adequate French, could find nothing but the most commonplace 
 phrases, stammered out a few, and then blushed afresh. In her 
 pity for him she took up her story again. 
 
 After her father's sudden death, the shelter, such as it was, 
 of his name and companionship was withdrawn. What was she 
 to do ? It turned out that she possessed a small rente which had 
 belonged to her mother, and which her father had never been 
 able to squander. Two relations from her mother's country near 
 Bordeaux turned up to claim her, a country doctor and his sister 
 —middle-aged, devout— to her wild eyes at least, altogether for- 
 bidding. 
 
 ' They made too much of their self-sacrifice in taking me to 
 live with them,' she said with her little ringing laugh. ' I said 
 to them — "My good uncle and aunt, it is too much — no one 
 could have the right to lay such a burden upon you. Go home 
 
274 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 and forget me. I am incorrigible. I am an artist. I mean to 
 live by myself, and work for myself. I am sure to go to the bad 
 — good morning." They went home and told the rest of my 
 mother's people that I was insane. But they could not keep my 
 money from me. It is just enough for me. Besides, I shall be 
 selling soon, — certainly I shall be selling ! I have had two or 
 three inquiries already about one of the exhibits in the Salon. 
 Now then — talk, Monsieur David ! ' and she emphasised the 
 words by a little frown ; ' it is your turn,' 
 
 And gradually by skill and patience she made him talk, made 
 him give her back some of her confidences. It seemed to amuse 
 her greatly that he should be a bookseller. She knew no 
 booksellers in Paris ; she could assure him they were all pure 
 bourgeois, and there was not one of them that could be likened 
 to Donatello's David. Manchester she had scarcely heard of ; 
 she shook her fair head over it. But when he told her of his 
 French reading, w^hen he w^axed eloquent about Rousseau and 
 George Sand, then her mirth became uncontrollable. 
 
 ' You came to France to talk of Rousseau and George Sand ? ' 
 she asked him with dancing eyes — ^ Mon Dieu ! mon Dieu ! what 
 do you take us for ? 
 
 This time his vanity was hurt. He asked her to tell him what 
 she meant — why she laughed at him. 
 
 'I will do better than that,' she said ; 'I will get some friend 
 of mine to take you to-morrow to "Les Trois Rats.'' ' 
 
 'What is "Les Trois Rats"?' he asked, half wounded and 
 half mystified. 
 
 ' " Les Trois Rats," Monsieur, is an artist's cafe. It is famous, 
 it is characteristic ; if you are in search of local colour you must 
 certainly go there. When you come back you will have some 
 fresh ideas, I promise you.' 
 
 He asked if ladies also w^ent there. 
 
 ' Some do ; I don't. Conventions mean nothing tome, as you 
 perceive, or I should have a companion here to play propriety. 
 But like you, perhaps, I am Romantic. I believe in the grand 
 style. I have ideas as to how men should treat me. I can read 
 Octave Feuillet. I have a terrible weakness for those cavaliers 
 of his. And garbage makes me ill. So I avoid the " Trois Rats." ' 
 
 She fell silent, resting her little chin on her hand. Then with 
 a sudden sly smile she bent forward and looked him in the eyes. 
 
 'Are you pious, Monsieur, like all the English? There is 
 some religion left in your country, isn't there ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, certainly,' he admitted, ' there was a good deal.' 
 
 Then, hesitating, he described his own early reading of Vol- 
 taire, watching its effect upon her, afraid lest here too he should 
 say something fatuous, behind the time, as he seemed to have 
 been doing all through. 
 
 ' Voltaire ! ' — she shrugged her little shoulders — ' Voltaire to 
 me is just an old perruqiie — a prating philanthropical person 
 who talked about le hon Dieu, and wrote just wdiat every 
 
CHAP. II STORM AND STRESS 275 
 
 bourgeois can understand. If he had had his will and swept 
 away the clergy and the Church, how many fine subjects we 
 artists should have lost ! ' 
 
 He sat helplessly staring at her. She enjoyed his perplexity 
 a minute ; then she returned to the charge. 
 
 ' Well, my credo is very short. Its first article is art — and 
 its second is art — and its third is art ! ' 
 
 Her words excited her. The delicate colour flushed into her 
 cheek. She flung her head back and looked straight before her 
 with half-shut eyes. 
 
 ' Yes — I believe in art — and expression — and colour — and le 
 vrai. Velazquez is my God, and — and he has too many prophets 
 to mention ! I was devout once for three months — since then I 
 have never had as much faith of the Church sort as would lie 
 on a ten-sous piece. But ' — with a sudden whimsical change of 
 voice— 'I am as credulous as a Breton fisherman, and as super- 
 stitious as a gipsy ! Wait and see. Will you look at my 
 pictures ? ' 
 
 She sprang up and showed her sketches. She had been a 
 winter in Algiers, and had there and in Spain taken a passion 
 for the East, for its colour, its mystery, its suggestions of cruelty 
 and passion. She chattered away, explaining, laughing, 
 haranguing, and David followed her submissively from thing 
 to thing, dumb with the interest and curiosity of this new world 
 and language of the artist. 
 
 Louie meanwhile, who| after the refreshment of supper, had 
 been forgetting both her fatigue and the other two in the enter- 
 tainment provided her by the shoes and the Oriental dresses, 
 had now found a little inlaid coffer on a distant table, full of 
 Algerian trinkets, and was examining them. Suddenly a loud 
 crash was heard from her neighbourhood. 
 
 Elise Delaunay stood still. Her quick speech died on her 
 lips. She made one bound forward to Louie ; then, with a cry, 
 she turned deathly pale, tottered, and would have fallen, but 
 that David ran to her. 
 
 'The glass is broken,' she said, or rather gasped; ' she has 
 broken it — that old Venetian glass of Maman's. Oh ! my 
 pictures ! — my pictures ! How can I undo it ? Je suis perdue ! 
 Oh go ! — go ! — ^0— both of you ! Leave me alone ! Why did I 
 ever see you ? ' 
 
 She was beside herself with rage and terror. She laid hold 
 of Louie, who stood in sullen awkwardness and dismay, and 
 pushed her to the door so suddenly and so violently that the 
 stronger, taller girl yielded without an attempt at resistance. 
 Then holding the door open, she beckoned imperiously to David, 
 while the tears streamed down her cheeks. 
 
 ' Adieu, Monsieur — say nothing — there is nothing to be said 
 -go!' 
 
 He went out bewildered, and the two in their amazement 
 walked mechanically to their own door. 
 
276 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 * She is mad ! ' said Louie, her eyes blazing, when they 
 paused and looked at each other. ' She must be mad. What 
 did she say ? ' 
 
 ' What happened ?' was all he could reply. 
 
 'I threw down that old glass — it wasn't my fault — I didn't 
 see it. It was standing on the floor against a chair. I moved 
 the chair back just a trifle, and it fell. A shabby old thing — I 
 could have paid for another easily. Well, I'm not going there 
 again to be treated like that. ' 
 
 The girl was furious. All that chafed sense of exclusion and 
 slighted importance which had grown upon her during David's 
 tete-a-tete with their strange hostess came to violent expression 
 in her resentment. She opened the door of their room, saying 
 that whatever he might do she was going to bed and to sleep 
 somewhere, if it was on the floor. 
 
 David made a melancholy light in the squalid room, and 
 Louie went about her preparations in angry silence. When she 
 had withdrawn into the little cupboard-room, saying carelessly 
 that she supposed he could manage with one of the bags and his 
 great coat, he sat down on the edge of the bare iron bedstead, 
 and recognised with a start that he was quivering all over — with 
 fatigue, or excitement ? His chief feeling perhaps was one of 
 utter discomfiture, flatness, and humiliation. 
 
 He had sat there in the dark without moving for some 
 minutes, when his ear caught a low uncertain tapping at the 
 door. His heart leapt. He sprang up and turned the key in an 
 instant. 
 
 There on the landing stood Elise Delaunay, her arms filled 
 with what looked like a black bearskin rug, her small tremulous 
 face and tear- wet eyes raised to his. 
 
 ^Pardon, Monsieur,' she said hurriedly. 'I told you I was 
 superstitious — well, now you see. Will you take this rug ? — one 
 can sleep anywhere with it though it is so old. And has your 
 sister what she wants ? Can I do anything for her ? No ! 
 Alors—1 must talk to you about her in the morning. I have 
 some more things in my head to say. Pardon! — et honsoir.'' 
 
 She pushed the rug into his hands. He was so moved that 
 he let it drop on the floor unheeding, and as she looked at him, 
 half audacious, half afraid, she saw a painful struggle, as of 
 some strange new birth, pass across his dark young face. They 
 stood so a moment, looking at each other. Then he made a 
 quick step forward with some inarticulate words. In an instant 
 she was halfway along the corridor, and, turning back so that 
 her fair hair and smiling ej^es caught the light she held, she said 
 to him with the queenliest gesture of dismissal : 
 
 *" Au 7'evoir, Monsieur David, sleep well.' 
 
CHAP. Ill STORM AND STRESS 277 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 David woke early from a restless sleep. He sprang up and 
 dressed. Never had the May sun shone so brightly ; never had 
 life looked more alluring. 
 
 In the first place he took care to profit by the hints of the 
 night before. He ran down to make friends with Madame 
 Merichat — a process which was accomplished without much diffi- 
 culty, as soon as a franc or two had passed, and arrangements 
 had been made for the passing of a few more. She was to take 
 charge of the apparte merit, and provide them with their morning 
 coftee and bread. And upon this her grim countenance cleared. 
 She condescended to spend a quarter of an hour gossiping with 
 the Englishman, and she promised to stand as a buffer between 
 him and Dubois' irate landlord. 
 
 ' A job of work at Brussels, you say, Monsieur ? Bien ; I will 
 tell i\iQ proprietaire. He won't believe it— Monsieur Dubois tells 
 too many lies ; but perhaps it will keep him quiet. He will think 
 of the return — of the money in the pocket. He will bid me 
 inform him the very moment Monsieur Dubois shows his nose, 
 that he may descend upon him, and so you will be let alone. ' 
 
 He mounted the stairs again, and stood a moment looking 
 along the passage with a quickening pulse. There was a sound 
 of low singing, as of one crooning over some occupation. It 
 must be she ! Then she had recovered her trouble of the night 
 before— her strange trouble. Yet he dimly remembered that in 
 the farm-houses of the Peak also the breaking of a looking-glass 
 had been held to be unlucky. And, of course, in interpreting the 
 omen she had thought of her pictures and the .jury. 
 
 How could he see her again? Suddenly it occurred to him 
 that she had spoken of taking a holiday since the Salon opened. 
 A holiday which for her meant 'copying in the Louvre.' And 
 where else, pray, does the tourist naturally go on the first morn- 
 ing of a visit to Paris ? 
 
 The young fellow went back into his room with a radiant face, 
 and spent some minutes, as Louie had not yet appeared, in 
 elaborating his toilette. The small cracked glass above the 
 mantelpiece was not flattering, and David was almost for the first 
 time anxious about and attentive to what he saw there. Yet, on 
 the whole, he was pleased with his short serge coat and his new 
 tie. He thought they gave him something of a student air, and 
 would not disgrace even liei' should she deign to be seen in his 
 company. As he laid his brush down he looked at his own brown 
 hand, and remembered hers with a kind of wonder — so small and 
 white, the wrist so delicately rounded. 
 
 When Louie emerged she was not in a good temper. She 
 declared that she had hardly slept a wink ; that the bed was not 
 fit to sleep on ; that the cupboard was alive with mice, and smelt 
 intolerably. David first endeavoured to appease her with the 
 
278 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 coffee and rolls whicli had just arrived, and then he broached the 
 plan of sending her to board with the Cervins, which Mademoi- 
 selle Delaunayhad suggested. What did she think? It would 
 cost more, perhaps, but he could afford it. On their way out he 
 would deliver the two notes of introduction, and no doubt they 
 could settle it directly if she liked. 
 
 Louie yawned, put up objections, and refused to see anything 
 in a promising light. Paris was horrid, and the man who had let 
 them the rooms ought to be ' had up. ' As for people who couldn't 
 talk any English she hated the sight of them. 
 
 The remark from an Englishwoman in France had its humour. 
 But David did not see that point of it. He flushed hotly, and 
 with difficulty held an angry tongue. However, he was pos- 
 sessed with an inward dread— the dread of the idealist who sees 
 his pleasure as a beautiful whole— lest they should so quarrel as 
 to spoil the visit and the new experience. Under this curb he 
 controlled himself, and presently, with more savoir vivre than he 
 was conscious of, proposed that they should go out and see the 
 shops. 
 
 Louie, at the mere mention of shops, passed into another 
 mood. After she had spent some time on dressing they saUied 
 forth, David delivering his notes on the way down. Both noticed 
 that the house was squalid and ill-kept, but apparently full of 
 inhabitants. David surmised that they were for the most part 
 struggling persons of small means and extremely various occupa- 
 tions. There were three ateliers in the building, the two on their 
 own top floor, and M. Montjoie's, which was apparently built out 
 at the back on the ground floor. The first floor was occupied by 
 a dressmaker, the _propr^Vto^r6'5 best tenant, according to Madame 
 Merichat. Above her was a clerk in the Ministry of the Interior, 
 with his wife and two or three children ; above them again the 
 Cervins, and a couple of commercial travellers, and so on. 
 
 The street outside, in its general aspect, suggested the same 
 small, hard-pressed professional life. It was narrow and dull ; it 
 mounted abruptly towards the hill of Montmartre, with its fort 
 and cemetery, and, but for the height of the houses, which is in 
 itself a dignified architectural feature, would have been no more 
 inspiriting than a street in London. 
 
 A few steps, however, brought them on to the Boulevard 
 Montmartre, and then, taking the Rue Lafitte, they emerged upon 
 the Boulevard des Italiens. 
 
 Louie looked round her, to this side and that, paused for a 
 moment, bewildered as it w^ere by the general movement and 
 gaiety of the scene. Then a lingerie shop caught her eye, and 
 she made for it. Soon the last cloud had cleared from the girl's 
 brow. She gave herself with ecstasy to the shops, to the people. 
 What jew^ellery, what dresses, what delicate cobwebs of lace and 
 ribbon, what miracles of colour in the florists' windows, what 
 suggestions of wealth and lavishness everywhere ! Here in this 
 world of costly contrivance, of an eager and inventive luxury, 
 
CHAP. Ill STORM AND STRESS 279 
 
 Louise Suveret's daughter felt herself at last at home. She had 
 never set foot in it before ; yet already it was familiar, and she 
 was part of it. 
 
 Yes, she was as well dressed as anybody, she concluded, except 
 perhaps the ladies in the closed carriages whose dress could only 
 be guessed at. As for good looks, there did not seem to be much 
 of them in Paris. She called the Frenchwomen downright plain. 
 They knew how to put on their clothes ; there was style about 
 them, she did not deny that ; but she was prepared to maintain 
 that there was hardly a decent face among them. 
 
 Such air, and such a sky ! The trees w^ere rushing into leaf ; 
 summer dresses were to be seen everywhere ; the shops had swung 
 out their awnings, and the day promised a summer heat still 
 tempered by a fresh spring breeze. For a time David was content 
 to lounge along, stopping when his companion did, lost as she 
 was in the enchantment and novelty of the scene, drinking in 
 Paris as it were at great gulps, Saying to himself they would 
 be at the Opera directly, then the Theatre-Frangais, the Louvre, 
 the Tuileries, the Place de la Concorde ! Every book that had 
 ever passed through his hands containing illustrations and de- 
 scriptions of Paris he had read with avidity. He, too, like Louie, 
 though in a different way, was at home in these streets, and hardly 
 needed a look at the map he carried to find his way. Presently, 
 when he could escape from Louie, he would go and explore to his 
 heart's content, see all that the tourist sees, and then penetrate 
 further, and judge for himself as to those sweeping and icono- 
 clastic changes which, for its own tyrant's purposes, the Empire 
 had been making in the older city. As he thought of the Emperor 
 and the government his gorge rose within him. Barbier's talk 
 had insensibly determined ail his ideas of the imperial regime. 
 How much longer would France suffer the villainous gang who 
 ruled her ? He began an inward declamation in the manner of 
 Hugo, exciting himself as he walked — while all the time it was 
 the spring of 1870 which was swelling and expanding in the veins 
 and branches of the plane trees above him — May was hurrying 
 on, and Worth lay three short months ahead ! 
 
 Then suddenly into the midst of his political musings and his 
 traveller's ardour the mind thrust forward a disturbing image— 
 the figure of a little fair-haired artist. He looked round impa- 
 tiently. Louie's loiterings began to chafe him. 
 
 'Come along, do,' he called to her, waking up to the time; 
 ' we shall never get there. ' 
 
 ' Where ? ' she demanded. 
 
 ' Why, to the Louvre. ' 
 
 ' What's there to see there ? ' 
 
 ' It's a great palace. The Kings of France used to live there 
 once. Now they've put pictures and statues into it. You must 
 see it, Louie— everj^body does. Come along.' 
 
 ' I'll not hurry,' she said perversely. ' I don't care that about 
 silly old pictures.' 
 
280 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 And she went back to her shop-gazing. David felt for a 
 moment precisely as he had been used to feel in the old days on 
 the Scout, when he had tried to civilise her on the question of 
 books. And now as then he had to wrestle with her, using the 
 kind of arguments he felt might have a chance with her. At last 
 she sulkily gave way, and let him lead on at a quick pace. In 
 the Rue Saint-Honore, indeed, she was once more almost unman- 
 ageable ; but at last they were safely on the stairs of the Louvre, 
 and David's brow smoothed, his eye shone again. He mounted 
 the interminable steps with such gaiety and eagerness that Louie's 
 attention was drawn to him. 
 
 ' Whatever do you go that pace for ? ' she said crossly. ' It's 
 enough to kill anybody going up this kind of thing V 
 
 'It isn't as bad as the Downfall,' said David, laughing, 'and 
 I've seen you get up that fast enough. Come, catch hold of my 
 umbrella and I'll drag you up.' 
 
 Louie reached the top, out of breath, turned into the first 
 room to the right, and looked scornfully round her. 
 
 ' Well I never ! ' she ejaculated. ' What's the good of this ? ' 
 
 Meanwhile David shot on ahead, beckoning to her to follow. 
 She, however, would take her own pace, and walked sulkily 
 along, looking at the people who were not numerous enough to 
 please her, and only regaining a certain degree of serenity when 
 she perceived that here as elsewhere people turned to stare after her. 
 
 David meanwhile threw wondering glances at the great 
 Veronese, at Raphael's archangel, at the towering Vandyke, at 
 the ' Virgin of the Rocks.' But he passed them by quickly. Was 
 she here ? Could he find her in this wilderness of rooms ? His 
 spirits wavered between delicious expectancy and the fear of 
 disappointment. The gallery seemed to him full of copyists 
 young and old: beardless rapins laughing and chatting with 
 fresh maidens ; old men sitting crouched on high seats with vast 
 canvases before them ; or women, middle-aged and plain, with 
 knitted shawls round their shoulders, at work upon the radiant 
 Greuzes and Lancrets ; but that pale golden head— nowhere ! 
 
 At last ! 
 
 He hurried forward, and there, in front of a Velazquez, he 
 found her, in the company of two young men, who were leaning 
 over the back of her chair criticising the picture on her easel. 
 
 ' Ah, Monsieur David ! ' 
 
 She took up the brush she held with her teeth for a moment, 
 and carelessly held him out two fingers of her right hand. 
 
 ' Monsieur— make a diversion— tell the truth— these gentle- 
 men here have been making a fool of me.' 
 
 And throwing herself back with a little laughing, coquettish 
 gesture, she made room for him to look. 
 
 ' Ah, but I forgot ; let me present you. M. Alphonse, this is 
 an Englishman ; he is new to Paris, and he is an acquaintance of 
 mine. You are not to play any joke upon him. M. Lenain, this 
 gentleman wishes to be made acquainted with art ; you will 
 
CHAP, in STORM AND STRESS 281 
 
 undertake his education— you will take him to-night to "Les 
 Trois Rats." I promised for you.' 
 
 She threw a merry look at the elder of her two attendants, who 
 ceremoniously took off his hat to David and made a polite speech, 
 in which the word enchante recurred. He was a dark man, with 
 a short black beard, and full restless eye ; some ten years older 
 apparently than the other, who was a dare-devil boy of twenty. 
 ' Allonsf tell me what you think of my picture, M. David.' 
 The three waited for the answer, not without malice. David 
 looked at it perplexed. It was a copy of the black and white 
 Infanta, with the pink rosettes, which, like everything else that 
 France possesses from the hand of Velazquez, is to the French 
 artist of to-day among the sacred things, the flags and battle-cries 
 of his art. Its strangeness, its unlikeness to anything of the pic- 
 ture kind that his untrained provincial eyes had ever lit upon, 
 tied his tongue. Yet he struggled with himself. 
 
 ' Mademoiselle, I cannot explain— I cannot find the words. It 
 seems to me ugly. The child is not pretty nor the dress. But—' 
 He stared at the picture, fascinated— unable to express him- 
 self, and blushing under the shame of his incapacity. 
 The other three watched him curiously. 
 
 ' Taranne should get hold of him,' the elder artist murmured 
 to his companion, with an imperceptible nod towards the English- 
 man. ' The models lately have been too common. There was a 
 rebellion yesterday in the ateliei' defemmes; one and all declared 
 the model was not worth drawing, and one and all left.' 
 
 ' Minxes ! ' said the other coolly, a twinkle m his wild eye. 
 ' Taranne will have to put his foot down. There are one or two 
 demons among them ; one should make them know their place.' 
 
 Lenain threw back his head and laughed— a great, frank 
 laugh, which broke up the ordinary discontent of the face agree- 
 ably. The speaker, M. Alphonse Duchatel, had been already 
 turned out of two ateliers for a series of the most atrocious 
 charges on record. He was now with Taranne, on trial, the 
 authorities keeping a vigilant eye on him. 
 
 Meanwhile Elise, still leaning back with her eyes on her pic- 
 ture, was talking fast to David, who hung over her, absorbed. 
 She was explaining to him some of the Infanta's qualities, point- 
 ing to this and that with her brush, talking a bright, untrans- 
 latable artist's language which dazzled him, filled him with_ an 
 exciting medley of new impressions and ideas, while iiU the time 
 his quick sense responded with a delightful warmth and eagerness 
 to the personality beside him— child, prophetess, egotist, all m 
 one— noticing each characteristic detail, the drooping, melancholy 
 trick of the eyes, the nervous delicacy of the small hand nolding 
 the brush. , . ^, , . 
 
 ' BsiYid— David f I'm tired of this, I tell you ! I m not going 
 to stay, so I thought Fd come and tell you. Good-bye I ' 
 
 He turned abruptly, and saw Louie standing defiantly a tew 
 paces behind him. 
 
283 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE boor hi 
 
 * What do you want, Louie ? ' he said impatiently, going up to 
 her. It was no longer the same man, the same voice. 
 
 ' I want to go. I hate this ! ' 
 
 * I'm not ready, and you can't go by yourself. Do you see '— 
 (in an undertone)—' this is Mademoiselle Delaunay ? ' 
 
 'That don't matter,' she said sulkily, making no movement. 
 ' If you ain't going, I am.' 
 
 By this time, however, Elise, as well as the two artists, had 
 perceived Louie's advent. She got up from her seat with a slight 
 sarcastic smile, and held out her hand. 
 
 ' Boiijour, Mademoiselle ! You forgave me for dat I did last 
 night ? I ask your pardon — oh, de tout moii coeur ! ' 
 
 Even Louie perceived that the tone was enigmatical. She 
 gave an inward gulp of envy, however, excited by the cut of the 
 French girl's black and white cotton. Then she dropped Elise's 
 hand, and moved away. 
 
 ' Louie ! ' cried David, pursuing her in despair ; ' now just 
 wait half an hour, there's a good girl, while I look at a few things, 
 and then afterwards I'll take you to the street where all i\iQ best 
 shops are, and you can look at them as much as you like.' 
 Louie stood irresolute. 
 
 ' What is it ? ' said Elise to him in French. ' Your sister wants 
 to go ? Why, you have only just come ! ' 
 
 'She finds it dull looking at pictures,' said David, with an 
 angry brow, controlling himself with difficulty. ' She must have 
 the shops.' 
 
 Elise shrugged her shoulders and, turning her head, said a 
 few quick words that David did not follow to the two men behind 
 her. They all laughed. The artists, however, were both much 
 absorbed in Louie's appearance, and could not apparently take 
 their eyes off her. 
 
 ' Ah ! ' said Elise, suddenly. 
 
 She had recognised some one at a distance, to whom she 
 nodded. Then she turned and looked at the English girl, laughed, 
 and caught her by the wrist. 
 
 ' Monsieur David, here are Monsieur and Madame Cervin. 
 Have you thought of sending your sister to them ? If so, I will 
 present you. Why not? They would amuse her. Madame 
 Cervin would take her to all the shops, to the races, to the Bois. 
 Que sais-je f ' 
 
 All the while she was looking from one to the other. David's 
 face cleared. He thought he saw a way out of this impasse. 
 ' Louie, come here a moment. I want to speak to you.' 
 And he carried her off a few yards, while the Cervins came up 
 and greeted the group round the Infanta. A powerfully built, 
 thickset man, in a grey suit, who had been walking with them, 
 fell back as they joined Elise Delaunay, and began to examine a 
 Pieter de Hooghe with minuteness. 
 
 Meanwhile David wrestled with his sister. She had much 
 better let Mademoiselle Delaunay arrange with these people. 
 
CHAP. Ill STORM AND STRESS 283 
 
 Then Madame Cervin could take her about wherever she wanted 
 to go. He would make a bargain to that effect. As for him, ho 
 must and would see Paris — pictures, churches, public buildings. 
 If the Louvre bored her, everything would bore her, and it was 
 impossible either that he should spend his time at her apron- 
 string, flattening his nose against the shop- windows, or that she 
 should go about alone. He was not going to have her taken for 
 ' a bad lot,' and treated accordingly, he told her frankly, with an 
 imperious tightening of all his young frame. He had discovered 
 some time since that it was necessary to be plain with Louie. 
 
 She hated to be disposed of on any occasion, except by her own 
 will and initiative, and she still made difficulties for the sake of 
 making them, till he grew desperate. Then, when she had pushed 
 his patience to the very last point, she gave way. 
 
 ' You tell her she's to do as I want her,' she said, threaten- 
 ingly. ' I won't stay if she doesn't. And I'll not have her paid 
 too much. ' 
 
 David led her back to the rest. 
 
 ' My sister consents. Arrange it if you can, Mademoiselle,' 
 he said imploringly to Elise. 
 
 A series of quick and somewhat noisy colloquies followed, 
 watched with disapproval by the gardien near, w^ho seemed to be 
 once or twice on the point of interfering. 
 
 Mademoiselle Delaunay opened the matter to Madame Cervin, 
 a short, stout woman, with no neck, and a keen, small eye. 
 Money was her daily and hourly preoccupation, and she could 
 have kissed the hem of Elise Delaunay's dress in gratitude for 
 these few francs thus placed in her way. It was some time now 
 since she had lost her last l)oarder, and had not been able to obtain 
 another. She took David aside, and, while her look sparkled with 
 covetousness, explained to him volubly all that she would do for 
 Louie, and for how much. And she could talk some English too 
 —certainly she could. Her education had been excellent, she was 
 thankful to say. 
 
 ' Mon Dieu, qu'elle est belle ! ' she wound up. ' Ah, Monsieur, 
 you do very right to entrust your sister to me. A young fellow 
 like you— no !— that is not convenable. But I— I will be a dragon. 
 Make your mind quite easy. With me all will go well. ' 
 
 Louie stood in an impatient silence while she was being thus 
 talked over, exchanging looks from time to time with the two 
 artists, who had retired a little behind Mademoiselle Delaunay's 
 easel, and from that distance were perfectly competent to let the 
 bold-eyed English girl know what they thought of her charms. 
 
 At last the bargain w^as concluded, and the Cervins walked 
 away with Louie in charge. They were to take her to a restaurant, 
 then show her the Rue Royale and the Rue de la Paix, and, finally 
 — David making no demur whatever about the expense— there 
 was to be an afternoon excursion through the Bois to Long- 
 champs, where some of the May races were being run. 
 
 As they receded, the man in grey, before the Pieter de Hooghe, 
 
284 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ill 
 
 looked up, smiled, dropped his eyeglass, and resumed his place 
 beside Madame Cervin. She made a gesture of introduction, and 
 he bowed across her to the young stranger. 
 
 For the first time Elise perceived him. A look of annoyance 
 and disgust crossed her face. 
 
 ' Do you see, ' she said, turning to Lenain ; ' there is that 
 animal, Montjoie ? He did well to keep his distance. What do 
 the Cervins want with him ? ' 
 
 The others shrugged their shoulders. 
 
 ' They say his Maenad would be magnificent if he could keep 
 sober enough to finish her,' said Lenain ; ' it is his last chance ; 
 he will go under altogether if he fails ; he is almost done for 
 already.' 
 
 ' And what a gift I ' said Alphonse, in a lofty tone of critical 
 regret. ' He should have been a second Barye. Ah, la vie 
 Paris ietuie — la maudite vie Parisienne ! '' 
 
 Again Lenain exploded. 
 
 'Come and lunch, you idiot,' he said, taking the lad's arm; 
 ' for whom are you posing ? ' 
 
 But before they departed, they inquired of David in the 
 politest w^ay what they could do for him. He was a stranger to 
 Mdlle. Delaunay's acquaintance ; they were at his service. 
 Should they take him somewhere at night ? David, in an effusion 
 of gratitude, suggested ' Les Trois Rats. ' He desired greatly to 
 see the artist world, he said. Alphonse grinned. An appoint- 
 ment was made for eight o'clock, and the two friends walked off. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 David and Elise Delaunay thus found themselves left alone. She 
 stood a moment irresolutely before her canvas, then sat down 
 again, and took up her brushes. 
 
 ' I cannot thank you enough. Mademoiselle,' the young fellow 
 began shyly, while the hand which held his stick trembled a 
 little. ' We could never have arranged that affair for ourselves.' 
 
 She coloured and bent over her canvas. 
 
 'I don't know w^hy I troubled myself,' she said, in a curious 
 irritable way. 
 
 ' Because you are kind ! ' he cried, his charming smile break- 
 ing. ' Because you took pity on a pair of strangers, like the 
 guardian angel that you are ! ' 
 
 The effect of the foreign language on him leading him to a 
 more set and literary form of expression than he would have 
 naturally used, was clearly marked in the little outburst. 
 
 Elise bit her lip, frowned and fidgeted, and presently looked 
 him straight in the face. 
 
 ' Monsieur David, warn your sister that that man with the 
 Cervins this morning — the man in grey, the sculptor, M. Mont- 
 joie — is a disreputable scoundrel that no decent woman should 
 know.' 
 
CHAP. IV STORM AND STRESS 285 
 
 David was taken aback. 
 
 ' And Madame Cervin — ' 
 
 Elise raised her shoulders. 
 
 ' I don't offer a sokition,' she said ; ' but I have warned you.' 
 
 'Monsieur Cervin has a somewhat strange appearance,' said 
 David, hesitating. 
 
 And, in fact, while the negotiations had been going on there 
 had stood beside the talkers a shabby, slouching figure of a man, 
 with longish grizzled hair and a sleepy eye— a strange, remote 
 creature, who seemed to take very little notice of what was 
 passing before him. From various indications, however, in the 
 conversation, David had gathered that this looker-on must be the 
 f OTrmer prix de Rome. 
 
 Elise explained that Monsieur Cervin was the wreck of a 
 genius. In his youth he had been the chosen pupil of Ingres and 
 Hippolyte Flandrin, had won the 2Mx de Home, and after his 
 three years in the Villa Medicis had come home to take up what 
 was expected to be a brilliant career. Then for some mysterious 
 reason he had suddenly gone under, disappeared from sight, and 
 the waves of Paris had closed over him. AVhen he reappeared he 
 was broken in health, and married to a retired modiste, upon 
 whose money he was living. He painted bad pictures inter- 
 mittently, but spent most of his time in hanging about his old 
 haunts— the Louvre, the Salon, the various exhibitions, and the 
 dealers, where he was commonly regarded by the younger artists 
 who were on speaking terms with him as a tragic old bore, with 
 a head of his own worth painting, however, if he could be got to 
 sit^ — for an augur or a chief priest. 
 
 ' It was absinthe that did it,' said Elise calmly, taking a fresh 
 charge into her brush, and working away at the black trimmings 
 of the Infanta's dress. ' Every day, about four, he disappears 
 into the Boulevard. Generally, Madame Cervin drives him like a 
 sheep ; but when four o'clock comes she daren't interfere with 
 him. If she did, he would be unmanageable altogether. So he 
 takes his two hours or so, and when he comes back there is not 
 much amiss with him. Sometimes he is excited, and talks quite 
 brilliantly about the past— sometimes he is nervous and depressed, 
 starts at a sound, and storms about the noises in the street. Then 
 she hurries him off to bed, and next morning he is quite meek 
 again, and tries to paint. But his hand shakes, and he can't see. 
 So he gives it up, and calls to her to put on her things. Then 
 they wander about Paris, till four o'clock comes round again, and 
 he gives her the slip— always with some elaborate pretence or 
 other. Oh ! she takes it quietly. Other vices might give her 
 more trouble.' 
 
 The tone conveyed the affectation of a complete knowledge of 
 the world, which saw no reason whatever to be ashamed of itself. 
 The girl was just twenty, but she had lived for years, first with a 
 disreputable father, and tnen in a perpetual camaraderie, within 
 the field of art, with men of all sorts and kinds. There are 
 
286 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book rn 
 
 certain feminine blooms which a milieu like this effaces with 
 deadly rapidity. 
 
 For the first time David was jarred. The idealist in him 
 recoiled. His conscience, too, was roused about Louie. He had 
 handed her over, it seemed, to the custody of a drunkard and his 
 wife, who had immediately thrown her into the company of a man 
 no decent woman ought to know. And Mademoiselle Delaunay 
 had led him into it. The guardian angel speech of a few 
 moments before rang in his ears uncomfortably. 
 
 Moreover, whatever rebellions his young imagination might 
 harbour, whatever license in his eyes the great passions might 
 claim, he had maintained for months and years past a practical 
 asceticism, which had left its mark. The young man who had 
 starved so gaily on sixpence a day that he might read and learn, 
 had nothing but impatience and disgust for the glutton and the 
 drunkard. It was a kind of physical repulsion. And the woman's 
 light indulgent tone seemed for a moment to divide them. 
 
 Elise looked round. Why this silence in her companion ? 
 
 In an instant she divined him. Perhaps her own conscience 
 was not easy. Why had she meddled in the young Englishman's 
 affairs at all ? For a whim ? Out of a mere good-natured wish to 
 rid him of his troublesome sister ; or because his handsome looks, 
 his naivete, and his eager admiration of herself amused and 
 excited her, and she did not care to be baulked of them so soon ? 
 At any rate, she found refuge in an outburst of temper. 
 
 ' Ah ! ' she said, after a moment's pause and scrutiny. ' I see ! 
 You think I might have done better for your sister than send her 
 to lodge with a drunkard— that I need not have taken so much 
 trouble to give you good advice for that ! You repent your little 
 remarks about guardian angels ! You are disappointed in me !— 
 you distrust me ! ' 
 
 She turned back to her easel and began to paint with head- 
 long speed, the small hand flashing to and fro, the quick breath 
 rising and falling tempestuously. 
 
 He was dismayed— afraid, and he began to make excuses both 
 for himself and her. It would be all right ; he should be close 
 by, and if there were trouble he could take his sister away. 
 
 She let her brushes fall into her lap with an exclamation. 
 
 ' Listen ! ' she said to him, her eyes blazing— why, he could not 
 for the life of him understand. ' There will be no trouble. What 
 I told you means nothing open— or disgusting. Your sister will 
 notice nothing unless you tell her. But I was candid with you— 
 I always am. I told you last night that I had no scruples. You 
 thought it was a woman's exaggeration ; it was the literal truth I 
 If a man drinks, or is vicious, so long as he doesn't hurl the fur- 
 niture at my head, or behave himself offensively to me, what does 
 it matter to me ! If he drinks so that he can't paint, and he 
 wants to paint, well ! — then he seems to me another instance of 
 the charming way in which a kind Providence has arranged this 
 world. I am sorry for him, tout bonnement ! If I could give the 
 
CHAP. IV STORM AND STRESS 287 
 
 poor devil a hand out of the mud, I would ; if not, well, then, no 
 sermons ! I take him as I find him ; if he annoys me, I call in 
 the police. But as to hiding my face and canting, not at all I 
 That is your English way— it is the way of our bourgeoisie. It is 
 not mine. I don't belong to the respectables — I would sooner 
 kill myself a dozen times over. I can't breathe in their company. 
 I know how to protect myself ; none of the men I meet dare to 
 insult me ; that is my idiosyncrasy— everyone has his own. But 
 I have my ideas, and nobody else matters a fig co me.— So now, 
 Monsieur, if you regret our forced introduction of last night, let 
 me wish you a good morning. It will be perfectly easy for your 
 sister to find some excuse to leave the Cervins. I can give you 
 the addresses of several cheap hotels where you and she will be 
 extremely comfortable, and where neither I nor Monsieur Cervin 
 will annoy you ! ' 
 
 David stared at her. He had grown very pale. She, too, was 
 white to the lips. The violence and passion of her speech had 
 exhausted her ; her hands trembled in her lap. A wave of emo- 
 tion swept through him. Her words were insolently bitter. 
 Why, then, this impression of something wounded and young and 
 struggling — at war with itself and the world, proclaiming loneli- 
 ness and SeJmsucht, while it flung anger and reproach ? 
 
 He dropped on one knee, hardly knowing what he did. Most 
 of the students about had left their work for a while ; no one was 
 in sight but a gardien, whose back was turned to them, and a 
 young man in the remote distance. He picked up a brush she 
 had let fall, pressed it into her reluctant hand, and laid his fore- 
 head against the hand for an instant. 
 
 'You misunderstand me,' he said, with a broken, breathless 
 utterance. ' You are quite wrong — quite mistaken. There are 
 not such thoughts in me as you think. The world matters noth- 
 ing to me, either. I am alone, too ; I have always been alone. 
 You meant everything that was heavenly and kind — you must 
 have meant it. I am a stupid idiot I But I could be your friend 
 • — if you would permit it.' 
 
 He spoke with an extraordinary timidity and slowness. He 
 forgot all his scruples, all pride— everything. As he knelt there, 
 so close to her delicate slimness, to the curls on her white neck, 
 to the quivering lips and great, defiant eyes, she seemed to him 
 once more a being of another clay from himself — beyond any criti- 
 cism his audacity could form. He dared hardly touch her, and in 
 his heart there swelled the first irrevocable wave of young passion. 
 
 She raised her hand impetuously and began to paint again. 
 But suddenly a tear dropped on to her knee. She brushed it 
 away, and her wild smile broke. 
 
 ' Bah I ' she said, ' what a scene, what a pair of children ! 
 What was it all about ? I vow I haven't an idea. You are an 
 excellent farceur^ Monsieur David I One can see well that you 
 have read George Sand.' 
 
 He sat down on a little three-legged stool she had brought 
 
388 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 with 'her, and held her box open on his knee. In a minute or 
 two they were talking as though nothing had happened. She 
 was giving him a fresh lecture on Velazquez, and he had resumed 
 his rOle of pupil and listener. But their eyes avoided each other, 
 and once when, in taking a tube from the box he held, her fingers 
 brushed against his hand, she flushed involuntarily and moved 
 her chair a foot further away. 
 
 ' Who is that ? ' she asked, suddenly looking round the corner 
 of her canvas. ' Mon Dieu ! M. Regnault ! How does he come 
 here ? They told me he was at Granada.' 
 
 She sat transfixed, a joyous excitement illuminating every 
 feature. And there, a few yards from them, examining the Rem- 
 brandt ' Supper at Emmaus ' with a minute and absorbed atten- 
 tion, was the young man he had noticed in the distance a few 
 minutes before. As Ehse spoke, the new-comer apparently heard 
 his name, and turned. He put up his eyeglass, smiled, and took 
 off his hat. 
 
 * Mademoiselle Delaunay ! I find you where I left you, at the 
 feet of the master ! Always at work ! You are indefatigable. 
 Taranne tells me great things of you. "Ah," he says, "if the 
 men would work like the women ! " I assure you, he makes us 
 smart for it. May I look ? Good — very good ! a great improve- 
 ment on last year- stronger, more knowledge in it. That hand 
 wants study — but you will soon put it right. Ah, Velazquez 1 
 That a man should be great, one can bear that, but so great ! It 
 is an offence to the rest of us mortals. But one cannot realise 
 him out of Madrid. I often sigh for the months I spent copying 
 in the Museo. There is a repose of soul in copying a great 
 master — don't you find it ? One rests from one's own efforts 
 awhile — the spirit of the master descends into yours, gently, 
 profoundly.' 
 
 He stood beside her, smiling kindly, his hat and gloves in his 
 hands, perfectly dressed, an air of the great world about his look 
 and bearing which differentiated him wholly from all other 
 persons whom David had yet seen in Paris. In physique, too, 
 he was totally unlike the ordinary Parisian type. He was a young 
 athlete, vigorous, robust, broad-shouldered, tanned by sun and 
 wind. Only his blue eye— so subtle, melancholy, passionate- 
 revealed the artist and the thinker. 
 
 Elise was evidently transported by his notice of her. She 
 talked to him eagerly of his pictures in the Salon, especially of a 
 certain 'Salome,' which, as David presently gathered, was the 
 sensation of the year. She raved about the qualities of it— the 
 words colour, poignancy, force recurring in the quick phrases. 
 
 ' No one talks of your success now. Monsieur. It is another 
 word. C'est la gloire elle-meme qui vous parle a Voreille ! ' 
 
 As she let fall the most characteristic of all French nouns, a 
 slight tremor passed across the young man's face. But the look 
 which succeeded it was one of melancholy ; the blue eyes took a 
 steely hardness. 
 
CHAP. IT STORM AND STRESS 389 
 
 ' Perhaps a lying spirit, Mademoiselle. And what matter, so 
 long as everything one does disappoints oneself ? What a tyrant 
 is art !— insatiable, adorable ! You know it. We serve our king 
 on our knees, and he deals us the most miserly gifts.' 
 
 ' It is the service itself repays,' she said, eagerly, her chest 
 heaving. 
 
 ' True ! — most true ! But what a struggle always ! — no rest — 
 ao content. And there is no other way. One must seek, grope, 
 toil— then produce rapidly— in a flash — throw what you have 
 done behind you— and so On to the next problem, and the next. 
 There is no end to it— there never can be. But you hardly came 
 here this morning, I imagine. Mademoiselle, to hear me prate ! I 
 wish you good day and good-bye. , I came over for a look at the 
 Salon, but to-morrow I go back to Spain. I can't breathe now 
 for long away from my sun and my South ! Adieu, Mademoi- 
 selle. I am told your prospects, when the voting comes on, are 
 excellent. May the gods inspire the jury ! ' 
 
 He bowed, smiled, and passed on, carrying his lion-head and 
 kingly presence down the gallery, which had now filled up again, 
 and where, so David noticed, person after person turned as he 
 came near with the same flash of recognition and pleasure he had 
 seen upon Elise's face. A wild jealousy of the young conqueror 
 invaded the English lad. 
 
 ' Who is he ? ' he asked. 
 
 Elise, womanlike, divined him in a moment. She gave him a 
 sidelong glance and went back to her painting. 
 
 ' That,' she said quietly, ' is Henri Regnault. Ah, you know 
 nothing of our painters. I can't make you understand. For me 
 he is a young god— there is a halo round his head. He has grasped 
 his fame— the fame we poor creatures are all thirsting for. It 
 began last year with the Prim— General Prim on horseback— oh, 
 magnificent !— a passion !— an energy ! This year it is the 
 "Salome." About— Gautier— all the world— have lost their 
 heads over it. If you go to see it at the Salon, you will have to 
 wait your turn. Crowds go every day for nothing else. Of 
 course there are murmurs. They say the study of Fortuny has 
 done him harm. Nonsense ! People discuss him because he is 
 becoming a master — no one discusses the nonentities. They have 
 no enemies. Then he is sculptor, musician, athlete— well-born 
 besides— all the world is his friend. But with it all so simple- 
 ton camarade even for poor scrawlers like me. Je V adore I ' 
 
 'So it seems,' said David. 
 
 The girl smiled over her painting. But after a bit she looked 
 Lip with a seriousness, nay, a bitterness, in her siren's face, which 
 Hstonished him. 
 
 ' It is not amusing to take you in~you are too ignorant. 
 What do you suppose Henri Regnault matters to me ? His world 
 is as far above mine as Velazquez' art is above my art. But how 
 can a foreigner understand our shades and grades ? Nothing but 
 sticcess, but la gloire, could ever lift me into his world. Then 
 
290 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 indeed I should be everybody's equal, and it would matter to 
 nobody that I had been a Bohemian and a dedassee,' 
 
 She gave a little sigh of excitement, and threw her head back 
 to look at her picture, David watched her. 
 
 'I thought,' he said ironically, 'that a few minutes ago you 
 were all for Bohemia. I did not suspect these social ambitions.' 
 
 'All women have them— all artists deny them,' she said, 
 recklesslv. ' There, explain me as you like, Monsieur David. 
 But don't read my riddle too soon, or I shall bore you. Allow 
 me to ask you a question.' 
 
 She laid down her brushes and looked at him with the utmost 
 gravity. His heart beat— he bent forward. 
 
 ' Are you ever hungry, Monsieur David ? ' 
 
 He sprang up, half enraged, half ashamed. 
 
 ' Where can we get some food ? ' 
 
 'That is my affair,' she said, putting up her brushes. 'Be 
 humble. Monsieur, and take a lesson in Paris.' 
 
 And out they went together, he beside himself with the delight 
 of accompanying her, and proudly carrying her box and satchel. 
 How her little feet slipped in and out of her pretty dress— how, 
 as they stood on the top of the great flight of stairs leading down 
 into the court of the Louvre, the wind from outside blew back 
 the curls from her brow, and ruffled the violets in her hat, the 
 black lace about her tiny throat. It was an enchantment to 
 follow and to serve her. She led him through the Tuileries 
 Gardens and the Place de la Concorde to the Ohamps-Elys6es. 
 The fountains leapt in the sun ; the river blazed between the great 
 white buildings of its banks ; to the left was the gilded dome of 
 the Invalides, and the mass of the Corps Legislatif , while in front 
 of them rose the long ascent to the Arc de I'Etoile set in vivid 
 green on either hand. Everywhere was space, glitter, magnifi- 
 cence. The gaiety of Paris entered into the Englishman, and 
 took possession. 
 
 Presently, as thev wandered up the Champs-Elysees, they 
 passed a great building to the left. Elise stopped and clasped 
 her hands in front of her with a little nervous, spasmodic gesture. 
 
 ' That,' she said, ' is the Salon. My fate lies there. When we 
 have had some food, I will take you in to see.' 
 
 She led him a little further up the Avenue, then took him 
 aside through cunningly devised labyrinths of green till they 
 came upon a little cafe restaurant among the trees, where people 
 sat under an awning, and the wind drove the spray of a little 
 fountain hither and thither among the bushes. It was gay, 
 foreign, romantic, unlike anything David had ever seen in his 
 northern world. He sat down, with Barbier's stories running in 
 his head. Mademoiselle Delaunay was George Sand— inde- 
 pendent, gifted, on the road to fame like that great declassee of 
 old ; and he was her friend and comrade, a humble soldier, a 
 camp follower, in the great army of letters. 
 
 Their meal was of the lightest. This descent on the Champs- 
 
CH.AJ'. IV STORM ANIJ STRESS 291 
 
 Elysees had been a freak on Elise's part, who wished to do nothing 
 so banal as take her companion to the Palais Royal. But the 
 restaurant she had chosen, though of a much humbler kind than 
 those whiCh the rich tourist commonly associates with this part of 
 Paris, was still a good deal more expensive than she had rashly 
 supposed. She opened her eyes gravely at the charges ; abused 
 herself extravagantly for a lack of savoir vivre ; and both with 
 one accord declared it was too hot to eat. But upon such eggs 
 and such green peas as they did allow themselves— a portion of 
 each, scrupulously shared— David at any rate, in his traveller's 
 ardour, was prepared to live to the end of the chapter. 
 
 Afterwards, over the coffee and the cigarettes, Elise taking 
 her part in both, they lingered for one of those hours which make 
 the glamour of youth. Confidences flowed fast between them. 
 His French grew suppler and more docile, answered more truly to 
 the individuality behind it. He told her of his bringing up, of 
 his wandering with the sheep on the mountains, of his reading 
 among the heather, of 'Lias and his visions, of Hannah's cruelties 
 and Louie's tempers— that same idyll of peasant life to which 
 Bora had listened months before. But how differently told ! 
 Each different listener changes the tale, readjusts the tone. But 
 here also the tale pleased. Elise, for all her leanings towards new 
 schools in art, had the Romantic's imagination and the Romantic's 
 relish for things foreign and unaccustomed. The English boy 
 and his storv seemed to her both charming and original. Her 
 artist's eye followed the lines of the ruffled black head and noted 
 the red-brown of the skin. She felt a wish to draw him— a wish 
 which had entirely vanished in the case of Louie. 
 
 ' Your sister has taken a dislike to me,' she said to him once, 
 coolly. ' And as for me, I am afraid of her. Ah ! and she broke 
 my glass ! ' 
 
 She shivered, and a look of anxiety and depression invaded 
 her small face. He guessed that she was thinking of her pictures, 
 and began timidly to speak to her about them. When they re- 
 turned to the world of art, his fluency left him ; he felt crushed 
 beneath the weight of his own ignorance and her accomplishment. 
 
 ' Come and see them ! ' she said, springing up. ' I am tired of 
 my Infanta. Let her be awhile. Come to the Salon, and I will 
 show you " Salome." Or are you sick of pictures ? What do you 
 want to see ? (7a m'est egal. I can always go back to my work.' 
 
 She spoke with a cavalier lightness which teased and piqued him, 
 
 *I wish to go where you go,' he said flushing, 'to see what 
 you see.' 
 
 She shook her little head. 
 
 ' No compliments, Monsieur David. We are serious persons, 
 you and I. Well, then, for a couple of hours, soyons camarades I ' 
 
 Of those hours, which prolonged themselves indefinitely, 
 David's after remembrance was somewhat crowded and indistinct. 
 He could never indeed think of Regnault's picture without a 
 
393 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 shudder, so poignant was the impression it made upon him under 
 the stimulus of Elise's nervous and passionate comments. It 
 represented tne daughter of Herodias resting after the dance, 
 with the dish upon her knee which was to receive the head of 
 the saint. Her mass of black hair— the first strong impression of 
 the picture— stood out against the pale background, and framed 
 the smiling sensual face, broadly and powerfully made, like the 
 rest of the body, and knowing neither thought nor qualm. The 
 colour was a bewilderment of scarlets and purples, of yellow and 
 rose-colour, of turtle-greys and dazzling flesh-tints— bathed the 
 whole of it in the searching light of the East. The strangeness, 
 the science of it, its extraordinary brilliance and energy, combined 
 with its total lack of all emotion, all pity, took indelible hold of 
 the English lad's untrained provincial sense. He dreamt of it for 
 nights afterwards. 
 
 For the rest — what whirl and confusion ! He followed Elise . 
 through suffocating rooms, filled with the liveliest crowd he had 
 ever seen. She was constantly greeted, surrounded, carried off 
 to look at this and that. Her friends and acquaintances, indeed, 
 whether men or women, seemed all to treat her in much the same 
 way. There was complete, and often noisy, freedom of address 
 and discussion between them. She called all the men by their 
 surnames, and she was on half mocking, half caressing terms 
 with the women, who seemed to David to be generally art 
 students, of all ages and aspects. But nobody took any liberties 
 with her. She had her place, and that one of some predominance. 
 Clearly she had already the privileges of an eccentric, and a 
 certain cool ascendency of temperament. Her little' figure 
 fluttered hither and thither, gathering a train, then shaking it 
 off again. Sometimes and her friends, finding the heat 
 
 intolerable, and wanting space for talk, would overflow into the 
 great central hall, with its cool palms and statues ; and there 
 David would listen to torrents of French artistic theory, anecdote, 
 and blague^ till his head whirled, and French cleverness — con- 
 veyed to him in what, to the foreigner, is the most exquisite and 
 'the most tantalising of all tongues— seemed to hii superhuman. 
 As to what he saw, after ' Salome,' he remembered vividly 
 only three pictures — Elise Delaunay's two — a portrait and a 
 workshop interior — before which he stood, lost in naive wonder 
 at her talent ; and the head of a woman, with a thin pale face, 
 reddish-brown hair, and a look of pantherish grace and force, 
 which he was told was the portrait of an actress at the Odeon 
 who was making the world stare — Mademoiselle Bernhardt. For 
 the rest he had the vague, distracting impression of a new world 
 —of nude horrors and barbarities of all sorts — of things licentious 
 or cruel, which yet, apparently, were all of as much value in the 
 artist's eye, and to be discussed with as much calm or eagerness, 
 as their neighbours. One moment he loathed what he saw, and 
 threw himself upon his companion, with the half -coherent protests 
 of an English idealism, of which she scarcely understood a word ; 
 
CHAP. IV STORM AND STRESS 293 
 
 the next he lost himself in some landscape which had torn the 
 very heart out of an exquisite mood of nature, or in some scene 
 of peasant life— so true and living that the scents of the fields and 
 the cries of the animals were once more about him, and he lived 
 his childhood over again. 
 
 Perhaps the main idea which the experience left with him was 
 one of a goading and intoxicating freedom. His country lay in 
 the background of his mind as the symbol of all dull convention 
 and respectability. He was in the land of intelligence, where 
 nothing is prejudged, and all experiments are open. 
 
 When they came out, it was to get an ice in the shade, and 
 then to wander to and fro, watching the passers-by— the young 
 men playing a strange game with disks under the trees— the 
 nurses and children — the ladies in the carriages — and talking, 
 with a quick, perpetual advance towards intimacy, towards 
 emotion. More and more there grew upon her the charm of a 
 certain rich poetic intelligence there was in him, stirring beneath 
 his rawness and ignorance, struggling through the fetters of 
 language ; and in response, as the evening wore on, she threw off 
 her professional airs, and sank the egotist out of sight. She 
 became simpler, more childish; her variable, fanciful youth 
 answered to the magnetism of his. 
 
 At last he said to her, as they stood by the Arc de FEtoile, 
 looking down towards Paris : 
 
 ' The sun is jiTst going down— this day has been the happiest 
 of my life ! ' 
 
 The low intensity of the tone startled her. Then she had a 
 movement of caprice, of superstition. 
 
 ^ Alors—assez ! Monsieur David, stay where you are. Not 
 another step ! — Adieu ! ' 
 
 Astonished and dismayed, he turned involuntarily. But, in 
 the crowd of people passing through the Arch, she had slipped 
 from him, and he had lost her beyond recovery. Moreover, her 
 tone was peremptory— he dared not pursue and anger her. 
 
 Minutes passed while he stood, spell- and trance-bound, in the 
 shadow of the Arch. Then, with the long and labouring breath, 
 the sudden fatigue of one who has leapt in a day from one plane 
 of life to another — in whom a passionate and continuous heat of 
 feeling has for the time burnt up the nervous power — he moved 
 on eastwards, down the Champs-Elys6es. The sunset was behind 
 him, and the trees threw long shadows across his path. Shade 
 and sun spaces alike seemed to him full of happy crowds. The 
 beautiful city laughed and murmured round him. Nature and 
 man alike bore witness with his own rash heart that all is divinely 
 well with the world — let the cynics and the mourners say what 
 they will. His hour had come, and without a hesitation or a 
 dread he rushed upon it. Passion and youth— ignorance and 
 (jesire — have never met in madder or more reckless dreams than 
 those which filled the mind of David Grieve as he wandered 
 blindly home. 
 
394 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 As David climbed the garret stairs to his room, the thought 
 of Louie flashed across his mind for the first time since the morn- 
 ing. He opened the door and looked round. Yes ; all her 
 things were gone. She had taken up her abode with the Cervins. 
 
 A certain anxiety and discomfort seized him ; before going 
 out to the Boulevard to snatch some food in preparation for his 
 evening at the ' Trois Rats ' he descended to the landing below 
 and rang the Cervins' bell. 
 
 A charwoman, dirty and tired with much cleaning, opened to 
 him. 
 
 No, Madame was not at home. No one was at home, and the 
 dinner was spoiling. Had they not been seen all day ? Certainly. 
 They had come in about six o'clock avec tine jeune 2:)ersonne and 
 M. Montjoie. She thought it probable that they were all at that 
 moment down below, in the studio of M. Montjoie. 
 
 David already knew his way thither, and was soon standing 
 outside the high black door with the pane of glass above it to 
 which Madame Merichat had originally directed him. While he 
 waited for an answer to his ring he looked about him. He was 
 in a sort of yard which was almost entirely filled up by the sculp- 
 tor's studio, a long structure lighted at one end as it seemed from 
 the roof, and at the other by the usual nortlT window. At the 
 end of the yard rose a huge many-storied building which seemed 
 to be a factory of some sort. David's Lancashire eye distin- 
 guished machinery through the monotonous windows, and the 
 figures of the operatives ; it took note also of the fact that the 
 rooms were lit up and work still going on at seven o'clock. All 
 around were the ugly backs of tall houses, every window flung 
 open to this May heat. The scene was squalid and triste save 
 for the greenish blue of the evening sky, and the flight of a few 
 pigeons round the roof of the factory. 
 
 A man in a blouse came at last, and led the way in when 
 David asked for Madame Cervin. They passed through the inner 
 studio full of a confusion of clay models and casts to which the 
 dust of months gave the look and relief of bronze. 
 
 Then the further door opened, and he saw beyond a larger 
 and emptier room ; sculptor's work of different kinds, and in 
 various stages on either side ; casts, and charcoal studies on the 
 walls, and some dozen people scattered in groups over the floor, 
 all looking towards an object on which the fading light from the 
 upper part of the large window at the end was concentrated. 
 
 What was that figure on its pedestal, that white image which 
 lived and breathed ? Louie ? 
 
 The brother stood amazed beside the door, staring while the 
 man in the blouse retreated, and the persons in the room were 
 too much occupied with the spectacle before them to notice the 
 new-comer's arrival. 
 
CHAP. V STORM AND STRESS 295 
 
 Louie stood upon a low pedestal, which apparently revolved 
 with the model, for as David entered, Montjoie, the man in the 
 grey suit, with the square, massive head, who had joined the 
 party in the Louvre, ran forward and moved it round slightly. 
 She was in Greek dress, and some yards away from her was the 
 clay study— a msenad with vine wreath, tambourine, thyrsus, and 
 floating hair— for which she was posing. 
 
 Even David was dazzled by the image thus thrown out before 
 him. With her own dress Louie Grieve seemed to have laid 
 aside for the moment whatever common or provincial elements 
 there might be in her strange and startling beauty. Clothed in 
 the clinging folds of the Greek chiton ; neck, arms, and feet bare; 
 the rounded forms of the limbs showing under the soft stuff ; the 
 face almost in profile, leaning to the shoulder, as though the 
 delicate ear were listening for the steps of the wine god ; a 
 wreath of vine leaves round the black hair which felUin curly 
 masses about her, sharpening and framing the rosy whiteness of 
 the cheek and neck ; one hand lightly turned back behind her, 
 showing the palm, the other holding a torch ; one foot poised 
 on tiptoe, and the whole body lightly bent forward, as though for 
 instant motion :— in this dress and this attitude, worn and sus- 
 tained with extraordinary intelligence and audacity, the wild 
 hybrid creature had risen, as it were, for the first time, to the 
 full capacity of her endowment — had eclipsed and yet revealed 
 herself. 
 
 The brother stood speechless, looking from the half- completed 
 study to his sister. How had they made her understand ?— where 
 had she got the dress ? And such a dress ! To the young fellow, 
 who in his peasant and tradesman experience had never even 
 seen a woman in the ordinary low dress of society, it seemed in- 
 credible, outrageous. And to put it on for the purpose of posing 
 as a model in a room full of strange men— Madame Cervin was 
 the only woman present— his cheek burnt for his sister ; and for 
 the moment indignation and bewilderment held him paralysed. 
 
 In front of him a little way, but totally unaware of the stran- 
 ger's entrance, were two men whispering and laughing together. 
 One held a piece of paper on a book, and was making a hurried 
 sketch of Louie. Every now and then he drew the attention of 
 his companion to some of the points of the model. David caught 
 a careless phrase or two, and understood just enough of their 
 student's slang to suspect a good deal worse than was actually 
 said. 
 
 Meanwhile Montjoie was standing against an iron pillar, 
 studying intently every detail of Louie's pose, both hands arched 
 over his eves. 
 
 ' Peste I did one ever see so many points combined ? ' he 
 threw back to a couple of men behind him. ' Too thin — the arms 
 might be bettc* -and the hands a little common. But for the 
 ememhle—mon Bieul we should make Carpeaux's atelier look 
 alive — Jiein .^ ' 
 
296 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ill 
 
 ' Take care ! ' laughed a man who was leaning against a cast 
 a few fget away, and smoking vigorously. ' She likes it, she has 
 never done it before, but she likes it. Suppose Carpeaux gets 
 hold of her. You may repent showing her, if you want to keep 
 her to yourself.' 
 
 'Ah, that right knee wants throwing forward a trifle,' said 
 Montjoie in a preoccupied tone, and going up to Louie, he spoke 
 a few words of bad English. 
 
 ' Allow me, mademoiselle — put your hand on me — ainsi — vile 
 I change dis pretty foot.' 
 
 Louie looked down bewildered, then at the other men about 
 her, with her great eyes, half exultant, half inquiring. She 
 understood hardly anything of their French. One of them 
 laughed, and, running to tbe clay Maenad, stooped down and 
 touched the knee and ankle, to show her what was meant. Louie 
 instinctively put her hand on Montjoie's shoulder to steady her- 
 self, and he proceeded to move the bare sandalled foot. 
 
 One of the men near him made a remark which David caught. 
 He suddenly strode forward. 
 
 ' Sir ! Have the goodness to tell me how you wish my sister 
 to stand, and I will explain to her. She is not your model ! ' 
 
 The sculptor looked up startled. Everybody stared at the 
 intruder, at the dark English boy, standing with a threatening 
 eye, and trembling with anger, beside his sister. Then Madame 
 Cervin, clasping her little fat hands with an exclamation of 
 dismay, rushed up to the group, while Louie leapt down from her 
 pedestal and went to David. 
 
 ' What are you interfering for ? ' she said, pushing Madame 
 Cervin aside and looking him full in the eyes, her own blazing, 
 her chest heaving. 
 
 ' You are disgracing yourself,' he said to her with the same 
 intensity, fast and low, under his breath, so as to be heard only 
 by her. ' How can you expose yourself as a model to these men 
 whom you never saw before ? Let them find their own models ; 
 they are a pack of brutes ! ' 
 
 But even as he spoke he shrank before the concentrated wrath 
 of her face. 
 
 ' I will make you pay for it ! ' she said. ' I will teach you to 
 domineer.' 
 
 Then she turned to Madame Cervin. 
 
 ' Come and take it oflf, please ! ' she said imperiously. * It's 
 no good while he is here.' 
 
 As she crossed the room with her free wild step, her white 
 draperies floating, Montjoie, who had been standing pulling at 
 his moustaches, and studying the brother from under his heavy 
 brows, joined her, and, stooping, said two or three smiling words 
 in her ear. She looked up, tossed her head and laughed — a laugh 
 half reckless, half farouche; two or three of the other men 
 hurried after them, and presently they made a knot in the further 
 room, Louie calmly waiting for* Madame Cervin, and sitting on 
 
CHAP. V STORM AND STRESS 297 
 
 the pedestal of a bronze group, her beautiful head and white 
 shoulders thrown out against the metal. Montjoie's artist friends 
 — of the kind which haunt a man whose mcetirs are gradually 
 bringing his talent to ruin— stood round her, smoking and talk- 
 ing and staring at the English girl between whiles. The arrogance 
 with which she bore their notice excited them, but they could 
 not talk to her, for she did not understand them. Only Montjoie 
 had a few words of English. Occasionally Louie bent forward 
 and looked disdainfully through the door. When would David 
 be done prating ? 
 
 For he, in fact, was grappling with Madame Cervin, who was 
 showing great adroitness. This was what had happened accord- 
 ing to her. Monsieur Montjoie— a man of astonishing talent, an 
 artist altogether superior— was in trouble about his statue— could 
 not find a model to suit him— was in despair. It seemed that he 
 had heard of mademoiselle's beauty from England, in some way, 
 before she arrived. Then in the studio he had shown her the 
 Greek dress. 
 
 ' There were some words between them — some compli- 
 ments, Monsieur, I suppose— and your sister said she would pose 
 for him. I opposed myself. I knew well that mademoiselle was 
 a young person tout-h-fait comme il faut, that monsieur her 
 brother might object to her making herself a model for M. 
 Montjoie. Mais, mon Dieu r and the ex-modiste shrugged her 
 round shoulders—' mademoiselle has a will of her own.' 
 
 Then she hinted that in an hour's acquaintance mademoiselle 
 had already shown herself extremely difficult to manage— mon- 
 sieur would probably understand that. As for her, she had done 
 everything possible. She had taken mademoiselle upstairs and 
 dressed her with her own hands— she had been her maid and 
 companion throughout. She could do no more. Mademoiselle 
 would go her own way. 
 
 'Who were all these men?' David inquired, still hot and 
 frowning. 
 
 Madame Cervin rose on tiptoe and poured a series of voluble 
 biographies into his ear. According to her everybody present 
 was a person of distinction ; was at any rate an artist, and a man 
 of talent. But let monsieur decide. If he was dissatisfied, let 
 him take his sister away. She had been distressed, insulted, by 
 his behaviour. Madem'oiselle's box had been not yet unpacked. 
 Let him say the word and it should be taken upstairs again. 
 
 And she drew away from him, bridling, striking an attitude 
 of outraged dignity beside her husband, who had stood behind 
 her in a slouching abstracted silence during the whole scene— 
 so far as her dwarf stature and vulgar little moon-face permitted. 
 ' We are strangers here, Madame,' cried David. ' I asked you 
 to take care of my sister, and I find her like this, before a crowd 
 of men neither she nor I have ever seen before ! ' 
 
 Madame Cervin swept her hand grandiloquently round. 
 ' Monsieur has his remedy ! Let him take his sister.' 
 
398 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book m 
 
 He stood silent in a helpless and obvious perplexity. What, 
 saddle himself afresh after these intoxicating hours of liberty 
 and happiness? Fetter and embarrass every moment? Shut 
 himself out from freedom — from her f 
 
 Besides, already his first instinctive rage was disappearing. 
 In the confusion of this new world he could no longer tell 
 whether he was right or ridiculous. Had he been playing the 
 Philistine, mistaking a mere artistic convention for an outrage ? 
 And Louie was so likely to submit to his admonitions ! 
 
 Madame Cervin watched him with a triumphant eye. "When 
 he began to stammer out what was in effect an apology, she 
 improved the opportunity, threw off her suave manners, and let 
 him understand with a certain plain brutality that she had taken 
 Louie's measure. She would do her best to keep the girl in order 
 — it was lucky for him that he had fallen upon anybody so 
 entirely respectable as herself and her husband — but she would 
 use her own judgment ; and if monsieur made scenes, she would 
 just turn out her boarder, and leave him to manage as he could. 
 
 She had the whip-hand, and she knew it. He tried to 
 appease her, then discovered that he must go, and went with a 
 hanging head. 
 
 Louie took no notice of him nor he of her, as he passed 
 through the inner studio, but Montjoie came forward to meet 
 the English lad, bending his great head and shoulders with a 
 half-ironic politeness. Monsieur Grieve he feared had mistaken 
 the homage rendered by himself and his friends to his sister's 
 beauty for an act of disrespect — let him be reassured ! Such 
 beauty was its own defence. No doubt monsieur did not under- 
 stand artistic usage. He, Montjoie, made allowance for the fact, 
 otherwise the young man's behaviour towards himself and his 
 friends would have required explanation. 
 
 The two stood together at the door — David proudly crimson, 
 seeking in vain for phrases that would not come — Montjoie cool 
 and malicious, his battered weather-beaten face traversed by 
 little smiles. Louie was looking on with scornful amusement, 
 and the group of artists round her could hardly control their 
 mirth. 
 
 He shut the door behind him with the feeling of one who has 
 cut a ridiculous figure and beaten a mean retreat. Then, as he 
 neared the bottom of the stairs, he gave himself a great shake, 
 with the gesture of one violently throwing off a weight. Let 
 those who thought that he ought to control Louie, and could 
 control her, come and see for themselves ! He had done what 
 he thought was for the best— his quick inner sense carefully 
 refrained from attaching any blame whatever to Mademoiselle 
 Delaunay — and now Louie must go her own gait, and he would 
 go his. He had said his say— and she should not spoil this 
 hoarded, this long-looked-for pleasure. As he passed into the 
 street, on his way to the Boulevard for some food, his walk and 
 bearing had in them a stern and passionate energy. 
 
CHAP. T STORM AND STRESS 299 
 
 He had to hurry back for his appointment with Mademoiselle 
 Delaunay's friends of the morning. As he turned into the Rue 
 Chantal he passed a flower-stall aglow with roses from the south 
 and sweet with narcissus and mignonette. An idea struck him, 
 and he stopped, a happy smile softening away the still lingering 
 tension of the face. For a few sous he bought a buiieh of yellow- 
 eyed narcissus and stepped gaily home with them. He had 
 hardly time to put them in water and to notice that Madame 
 Merichat had made Dubois' squalid abode look much more 
 habitable than before, when there was a knock at the door and 
 his two guides stood outside. 
 
 They carried him off at once. David found more of a tongue 
 than he had been master of in the morning, and the three talked 
 incessantly as they wound in and out of the streets which cover 
 the face of the hill of Montmartre, ascending gradually towards 
 the place they were in search of. David had heard something of 
 the history of the two from Elise Delaunay. Alphonse was a lad 
 of nineteen brimming over with wild fun and mischief, and per- 
 petually in disgrace with all possible authorities ; the possessor 
 nevertheless of a certain delicate and subtle fancy which came 
 out in the impressionist landscapes— many of them touched with 
 a wild melancholy as inexplicable probably to himself as to other 
 people— which he painted in all his spare moments. The tall 
 black-bearded Lenain was older, had been for years in Taranne's 
 atelier, was an excellent draughtsman, and was now just be- 
 ginning seriously upon the painting of large pictures for exhibi- 
 tion. In his thin long face there was a pinched and anxious 
 look, as though in the artist's inmost mind there lay hidden the 
 presentiment of failure. 
 
 They talked freely enough of Elise Delaunay, David alter- 
 nately wincing and craving for more. What a clever little devil 
 it was ! She was burning herself away with ambition and work ; 
 Taranne flattered her a good deal ; it was absolutely necessary, 
 otherwise she would be for killing herself two or three times a 
 week. Oh ! she might get her mention at the Salon. The 
 young Solons sitting in judgment on her thought on the whole 
 she deserved it ; two of her exhibits were not bad ; but there 
 was another girl in the atelier, Mademoiselle Breal, who had 
 more interest in high places. However, Taranne would do what 
 he could ; he had always made a favourite of the little Elise ; 
 and only he could manage her when she was in one of her im- 
 practicable fits. 
 
 Then AJphonse put the Englishman through a catechism, and 
 at the end of it they both advised him not to trouble his head 
 about George Sand. That was all dead and done with, and 
 Balzac not much less. He might be great, Balzac, but who 
 could be at the trouble of reading him nowadays ? Lenain, who 
 was literary, named to him with enthusiasm Flaubert's ' Madame 
 Bovary ' and the brothers Goncourt. As for Alphonse, who was 
 capable, however, of occasional excursions into poetry, and could 
 
300 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book m 
 
 quote Musset and Hugo, the feuilletons in the ' Gaulois ' or the 
 'Figaro' seemed, on the whole, to provide him with as much 
 fiction as he desired. He was emphatically of opinion that the 
 artist wants no books ; a little poetry, perhaps, did no harm ; 
 but literature in painting was the very devil. Then perceiving 
 that between tliem they had puzzled their man, Alphonse would 
 have proceeded to ' cram ' him in the most approved style, but 
 that Lenain interposed, and a certain cooling of the Englishman's 
 bright eye made success look unpromising. Finally the wild 
 fellow clapped David on the back and assured him that * Les 
 Trois Rats ' would astonish him. ' Ah ! here we are.' 
 
 As he spoke they turned a corner, and a blaze of light burst 
 upon them, coming from what seemed to be a gap in the street 
 face, a house whereof the two lower stories were wall- and 
 windowless, though not in the manner of the ordinary cafe, 
 seeing that the open parts were raised somewhat above the 
 pavement. 
 
 ' The patron saint ! ' said Alphonse, stopping with a grin and 
 pointing. Following the finger with his eye David caught a fan- 
 tastic sign swinging above him : a thin iron crescent, and sitting 
 up between its two tips a lean black rat, its sharp nose in the air, 
 its tail curled round its iron perch, while two other creatures of 
 the same kind crept about him, the one clinging to the lower tip 
 of the crescent, the other peering down from the top on the king- 
 rat in the middle. Below the sign, and heavily framed by the 
 dark overhanging cave, the room within was clearly visible from 
 the street. From the background of its black oak walls and fur- 
 niture emerged figures, lights, pictures, above all an imposing 
 clieminee advancing far into the floor, a high, fantastic structure 
 also of black oak like the panelling of the room, but overrun with 
 chains of black rats, carved and combined with a wild diablerie^ 
 and lit by numerous lights in branching ironwork. The dim gro- 
 tesque shapes of tiie pictures, the gesticulating, shouting crowd 
 in front of them, the mediaevalism of the room and of that 
 strange sign dangling outside : these things took the English 
 lad's excited fancy and he pressed his way in behind his com- 
 panions. He forgot what they had been telling him ; his pulse 
 beat to the old romantic tune ; poets, artists, talkers — here he 
 was to find them. 
 
 David's two companions exchanged greetings on all sides, 
 laughing and shouting like the rest. With difficulty they found 
 a table in a remote corner, and, sitting down, ordered coffee. 
 
 ' Alphonse ! mon cher ! ' 
 
 A young man sitting at the next table turned round upon 
 them, slapped Alphonse on the shoulder, and stared hard at 
 David. He had fine black eyes in a bronzed face, a silky black 
 beard, and long hair a la lion, that is to say, thrown to one side 
 of the head in a loose mane-like mass. 
 
 'I have just come from the Salon. Not bad — Regnault? 
 Hein f ' 
 
CHAP. V STORM AND STRESS. 301 
 
 ^ N'on—il arrivera, celui-la,'' said the other calmly. 
 
 ' As for the other things from the Villa Medici fellows,' said 
 the first speaker, throwing his arm round the back of his chair, 
 and twisting it round so as to front them, ' they make me sick. 
 I should hardly do my fire the injustice of lighting it with some 
 of them.' 
 
 'All the same,' replied Alphonse stoutly, 'that Campagna 
 scene of D.'s is well done.' 
 
 ' Literature, mon cher I literature ! ' cried the unknown, ' and 
 what the deuce do we want with literature in painting?' 
 
 He brought his fist down violently on the table. 
 
 ' Conim,' said Alphonse scornfully. ' Don't excite yourself. 
 But the story in D.'s picture doesn't matter a halfpenny. Who 
 cares what the figures are doing? It's the brush work and the 
 values I look to. How did he get all that relief— that brilliance? 
 No sunshine— no local colour— and the thing glows like a Rem- 
 brandt ! ' 
 
 The boy's mad blue eyes took a curious light, as though some 
 inner enthusiasm had stirred. 
 
 '- Peuh I we all know you, Alplionse. Say what you like, you 
 want something else in a picture than painting. That'll damn 
 you, and make your fortune some day, I warn you. Now /have 
 got a picture on the easel that will make the bouryeois skip.' 
 
 And the speaker passed a large tremulous hand through his 
 waves of hair, his lip also quivering with the nervousness of a 
 man overworked and overdone. 
 
 'You'll not send it to the Salon, I imagine,' said another man 
 beside him, dryly. He was fair, small and clean-shaven, wore 
 spectacles, and had the look of a clerk or man of business. 
 
 ' Yes, I shall . ' cried the other violentlv — his name was 
 Dumesnil— ' I'll fling it at their heads. That's \all our school can 
 do— make a scandal.' 
 
 'Well, that has even been known to make money,' said the 
 other, fingering his watch-chain with a disagreeable little smile. 
 
 ' Money ! ' shouted Dumesnil, and swinging round to his own 
 table again he poured out hot denunciations of the money-grab- 
 bing reptiles of to-day who shelter themselves behind the sacred 
 name of art. Meanwhile the man at whom it was all levelled 
 sipped his coffee quietly and took no notice. 
 
 ' Ah, a song ! ' cried Alphonse. ' Lenain, vois-tu ? It's that 
 little devil Perinot. He's been painting churches down near 
 Toulouse, his own country. Saints by the dozen, like this,' and 
 Alphonse drooped his eyes and crossed his limp hands, taking off 
 the frescoed mediaeval saint for an instant, as only the Parisian 
 gamiji csLU do such things. .'You should see him with a cure. 
 However, the cxres don't follow him here, more's the pity. Ah ! 
 tres hien — tres hieii ! ' 
 
 These plaudits were called out by some passages on the 
 guitar with which the singer was prefacing his song. His chair 
 had been mounted on to a table, so that all the world could see 
 
302 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE £ook tli 
 
 and hear, A hush of delighted attention penetrated the room ; 
 and outside, in the street, David could see dark forms gathering 
 on the pavement. 
 
 The singer was a young man, undersized and slightly 
 deformed, with close-cut hair, and a large face, droll, pliant 
 and ugly as a gutta-percha mask. Before he opened his lips 
 the audience laughed. 
 
 David listened with all his ears, feeling through every fibre 
 the piquant strangeness of the scene — alive with the foreigner's 
 curiosity, and with youth's pleasure in mere novelty. And what 
 clever fellows, what dash, what camaraderie ! That old imagi- 
 native drawing towards France and the French was becoming 
 something eagerly personal, combative almost, — and in the 
 background of his mind throughout was the vibrating memory 
 of the day just past — the passionate sense of a new life. 
 
 The song was tumultuously successful. The whole crowded 
 salle, while it was going on, was one sea of upturned faces, and it 
 was accompanied at intervals by thunders of applause, given out 
 by means of sticks, spoons, fists, or anything else that might come 
 handy. It recounted the adventures of an artist and his model. 
 As it proceeded, a slow crimson rose into the English lad's cheek, 
 overspread his forehead and neck. He sat staring at the singer, 
 or looking round at the absorbed attention and delight of his 
 companions. By the end of it David, his face propped on his 
 hands, was trying nervously to decipher the names and devices 
 cut in the wood of the table on which he leant. His whole being 
 was in a surge of physical loathing — the revulsion of feeling was 
 bewildering and complete. So this was what Frenchmen thought 
 of women, what they could say of them, when the mask was off, 
 and they were at their ease. The witty brutality, the naked 
 coarseness of the thing scourged the boy's shrinking sense. 
 Freedom, passion — yes ! but this ! In his wild recoil he stood 
 again under the Arc de Triomphe watching her figure disappear. 
 Ah ! pardon ! That he should be listening at all seemed to a 
 conscience, an imagination quickened by first love, to be an 
 outrage to women, to love, to her ! 
 
 Yet — how amusing it was ! how irresistible, as the first 
 shock subsided, was the impression of sparkling verse, of an 
 astonishing mimetic gift in the singer ! Towards the end he 
 had just made up his mind to go on the first pretext, when he 
 found himself, to his own disgust, shaking with laughter. 
 
 He recovered himself after a while, resolved to stay it out, 
 and betrayed nothing. The comments made -by his two com- 
 panions on the song — consisting mainly of illustrative anecdote 
 — were worthy of the occasion. David sat, however, without 
 flinching, his black eyes hardening, laughing at intervals. 
 
 Presently the room rose en bloc, and there was a move 
 towards the staircase. 
 
 'The manager, M. Edmond, has come,' explained Alphonse ; 
 ' they are going upstairs to the concert-room. They will have a 
 
CHAP. V STORM AND STRESS 303 
 
 recitation perhaps, — onibres chinoises, — music. Come and look 
 at the drawings before we go.' 
 
 And he took his charge round the walls, which were papered 
 with drawings and sketches, laughing and explaining. The 
 drawings were done, in the main, according to him, by the 
 artists on the staffs of two illustrated papers which had their 
 headquarters at the ' Trois Rats.' David was especially seized 
 by the innumerable sheets of animal sketches — series in which 
 some episode of animal life was carried through from its begin- 
 ning to a close, sometimes humorous, but more often tragic. In 
 a certain number of them there was a free imagination, an irony, 
 a pity, which linked them together, marked them as the con- 
 ceptions of one brain. Alphonse pointed to them as the work of 
 a clever fellow, lately dead, who had been launched and supported 
 by the ' Trois Rats ' and its frequenters. One series in particular, 
 representing a robin overcome by the seduction of a glass of 
 absinthe and passing through all the stages of delirium tremens, 
 had a grim inventiveness, a fecundity of half humorous, half 
 pathetic fancy, wiiich held David's eye' riveted. 
 
 As for the ballet-girl, she was everywhere, with her sisters, 
 the model and the grisette. And the artistic ability shown in 
 the treatment of her had nowhere been hampered by any 
 Philistine scruple in behalf of decency. 
 
 Upstairs there was the same mixed experience. David found 
 himself in a corner with his two acquaintances, and four or five 
 others, a couple of journalists, a musician and a sculptor. The 
 conversation ranged from art to religion, from religion to style, 
 from style to women, and all with a perpetual recurrence either 
 to the pictures and successes of the Salon, or to the liaisons of 
 well-known artists. 
 
 <Why do none of us fellows in the press pluck up courage 
 and tell H. what we really think about those Homeric machines 
 of his which he turns out year after year?' said a journalist, 
 who was smoking be*de him, an older man than the rest of 
 them. 'I have a hundred things I want to say — but H. is 
 popular — I like him himself — and I haven't the nerve. But 
 what the devil do we want with the Greeks — they painted their 
 world — let us paint ours ! Besides, it is an absurdity. I thought 
 as I was looking at H.'s things this morning of what Preault 
 used to say of Pradier : "• II partait tons les matins pour la 
 Grece et arrivait tons les soirs Rue de Breclay Pose your 
 goddesses as you please — they are grisettes all the same.' 
 
 'All very well for you critics,' growled a man smoking a 
 long pipe beside him ; ' but the artist must live, and the bourgeois 
 will have subjects. He won't have anything to do with your 
 "notes" — and "impressions" — and "arrangements." "When 
 you present him with the view, served hot, from your four- 
 pair back — he buttons up his pockets and abuses you. He 
 wants his stories and his sentiment. And where the deuce is 
 i'le sentiment to be got ? I should be greatly obliged to anyone 
 
304 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 who would point me to a little of the commodity. The Greeks 
 are already ridiculous, — and as for religion — ' 
 
 The speaker threw back his head and laughed silently. 
 
 'Ah ! I agree with you,' said the other emphatically; 'the 
 religious pictures this year are really too bad. Christianity is 
 going too fast — for the artist.' 
 
 ' And the sceptics are becoming bores,' cried the painter ; 
 'they take themselves too seriously. It is, after all, only 
 another dogmatism. One should believe in nothing — not even 
 in one's doubts.' 
 
 ' Yes,' replied the journalist, knocking out his pipe, with a 
 sardonic little smile — ' strange fact ! One may swim in free 
 thought and remain as hanal as a bishop all the time. ' 
 
 'I say,' shouted a fair-haired youth opposite, 'who has seen 
 C.'s Holy Family ? Who knows where he got his Madonna ? ' 
 
 Nobody knew, and the speaker had the felicity of imparting 
 an entirely fresh scandal to attentive ears. The mixture in the 
 story of certain brutalities of modern manners with names and 
 things still touching or sacred for the mass of mankind had the 
 old Voltairean flavour. But somehow, presented in this form 
 and at this moment, David no longer found it attractive. He 
 sat nursing his knee, his dark brows drawn together, studying 
 the story-teller, whose florid Norman complexion and blue eyes 
 were already seared by a vicious experience. 
 
 The tale, however, was interrupted and silenced by the first 
 notes of a piano. The room was now full, and a young actor 
 from the Gymnase company was about to give a musical sketch. 
 The subject of it was ' St. Francis and Santa Clara.' 
 
 This performance was perhaps more wittily broad than any- 
 thing which had gone before. The audience was excessively 
 amused by it. It was indeed the triumph of the evening, and 
 nothing could exceed the grace and point of the little speech in 
 which M. Edmond, the manager of the cafe, thanked the accom- 
 plished singer afterwards. 
 
 While it was going on, David, always with that poignant, 
 shrinking thought of Elise at his heart, looked round to see if 
 there were any women present. Yes, there were three. Two 
 were young, outrageously dressed, with sickly pretty tired faces. 
 The third was a woman in middle life, with short hair parted at 
 the side, and a strong, masculine air. Her dress was as nearly as 
 .possible that of a man, and she was smoking vigorously. The 
 rough bonhomie of her expression and her professional air re- 
 minded David once more of George Sand. An artist, he sup- 
 posed, or a writer. 
 
 Suddenly, towards the end of the sketch, he became conscious 
 of a tall figure behind the singer, a man standing with his hat 
 in his hand, as though he had just come in, and were just going 
 away. His fine head was thrown back, his look was calm, David 
 thought disdainful. Bending forward he recognised M. Regnault, 
 the hero of the morning. 
 
CHAP. V STORM AND STRESS 305 
 
 Regnault had come in unperceived while the dramatic piece 
 was going on ; but it was no sooner over than he was discovered, 
 and the whole salle rose to do him honour. The generosity, the 
 extravagance of the ovation offered to the young painter by this 
 hundred or two of artists and men of letters were very striking 
 to the foreign eye. David found himself thrilling and applauding 
 with the rest. The room had passed in an instant from cynicism 
 to sentiment. , A moment ago it had been trampling to mud the 
 tenderest feeling of the past ; it was now eagerly alive with the 
 feeling of the present. 
 
 The new-comer protested that he had only dropped in, being 
 in the neighbourhood, and must not stay. He was charming to 
 them all, asked after this man's picture and that man's statue, 
 talked a little about the studio he was organising at Tangiers, 
 and then, shaking hands right and left, made his way through 
 the crowd. 
 
 As he passed David, his quick eye caught the stranger and he 
 paused. 
 
 ' Were you not in the Louvre this morning with Mademoiselle 
 Delaunay ? ' he asked, lowering his voice a little ; ' you are a 
 stranger ? ' 
 
 'Yes, an Englishman,' David stammered, taken by surprise. 
 Regnault's look swept over the youth's face, kindling in an 
 instant with the artist's delight in beautiful line and tint. 
 
 ' Are you going now ? ' 
 
 ' Yes,' said David hurriedly. ' It must be late ? ' 
 
 ' Midnight, past. May I walk with you ? ' 
 
 David, overwhelmed, made some hurried excuses to his two 
 companions, and found himself pushing his way to the door, an 
 unnoticed figure in the tumult of Regnault's exit. 
 
 When they got into the street outside, Regnault walked fast 
 southwards for a minute or so without speaking. Then he 
 stopped abruptly, with the gesture of one shaking off a weight. 
 
 ' Pah ! this Paris chokes me.' 
 
 Then, walking on again, he said, half-coherently, and to 
 himself : 
 
 ' So vile, — so small, — so foul ! And there are such great 
 things in the world. Beasts I— pigs ! — and yet so generous, so 
 struggling, such a hard fight for it. So gifted, — many of them ! 
 What are you here for ? ' 
 
 And he turned round suddenly upon his companion. David, 
 touched and captured he knew not how by the largeness and 
 spell of the man's presence, conquered his shyness and explained 
 himself as intelligibly as he could : 
 
 An English bookseller, making his way in trade, yet drawn to 
 France by love for her literature and her past, and by a blood- 
 tie which seemed to have in it mystery and pain, for it could 
 hardly be spoken of-— the curious little story took the artist's 
 fancy. Regnault did his best to draw out more of it, helped the 
 young fellow with his French, tried to get at his impress.ions, and 
 
306 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 clearly enjoyed the experience to which his seeking artist's sense 
 had led him. 
 
 ' What a night ! ' he said at last, drawing a full draught of 
 the May into his great chest. ' Stop and look down those streets 
 in the moonlight. What surfaces, — what gradations, — what a 
 beauty of multiplied lines, though it is only a piece of vulgar 
 Haussmann ! Indoors I can't breathe — but out of doors and at 
 night this Paris of ours, — ah ! she is still heRutiful— beautiful/ 
 Now one has shaken the dust of that place off, one can feel it. 
 What did you think of it ? — tell me.' 
 
 He stooped and looked into his companion's face. David was 
 tall and lithe, but Regnault was at least half a head taller and 
 broader in proportion. 
 
 David walked along for a minute without answering. He too, 
 and even more keenly than Regnault, was conscious of escape 
 and relief. A force which had, as it were, taken life and feeling 
 by the throat had relaxed its grip. He disengaged himself with 
 mingled loathing and joy. But in his shyness he did not know 
 how to express himself, fearing, too, to wound the Frenchman. 
 At last he said slowly : 
 
 ' I never saw so many clever people together in my life.' 
 
 The words were bald, but Regnault perfectly understood 
 what was meant by them, as well as by the troubled conscious- 
 ness of the black eyes raised to his. He laughed — shortly and 
 bitterly. 
 
 ' No, we don't lack brains, we French. All the same I tell 
 you, in the whole of that room there are about half-a-dozen peo- 
 ple,— oh, not so many ! — not nearly so many ! — who will ever 
 make a mark, even for their own generation, who will ever strike 
 anything out of nature that is worth having — wrestle with her to 
 any purpose. Why ? Because they have every sort of capacity — 
 every sort of cleverness — and no character I ' 
 
 David walked beside him in silence. He thought suddenly of 
 Regnault's own picture — its strange cruelty and force, its crafts- 
 man's brilliance. And the recollection puzzled him. 
 
 Regnault, however, had spoken with passion, and as though 
 out of the fulness of some sore and lorg-familiar pondering. 
 
 'You never saw anything like that in England,' he resumed 
 c[uickly. 
 
 David hesitated. 
 
 ' No, I never did. But I am a provincial, and I have seen 
 nothing at all. Perhaps in London — ' 
 
 ' No, you would see nothing like it in London,' said Regnault 
 decidedly. ' Bah ! it is not that you are more virtuous than we 
 are. Who believes such folly? But your vice is grosser, 
 stupider. Lucky for you ! You don't sacrifice to it the best 
 young brain of the nation, as we are perpetually doing. Ah, 
 mon Dieu ! ' he broke out in a kind of despair, ' this enigma of 
 art ! — of the artist ! One flounders and blunders along. I have 
 been floundering and blundering with the rest, — playing tricks— 
 
CHAi\ V STORM AND STRESS 307 
 
 following this man and that— till suddenly— a door opens— and 
 one sees the real world through for the first time ! ' 
 
 He stood still in his excitement, a smile of the most exquisite 
 quality and sweetness dawning on his strong young face, 
 
 'And then,' he went on, beginning to walk again, and talking 
 much more to the night than to his companion, ' one learns that 
 the secret of life lies in feeling— in the heart, not in the head. 
 And no more limits than before !— all is still open, divinely open. 
 Range the whole world— see everything, learn everything— till at 
 the end of years and years you may perhaps be found worthy to 
 be called an artist ! But let art have her ends, all the while, 
 shining beyond the means she is toiling through — her ends of 
 beauty or of power. To spend herself on the mere photography 
 of the vile and the hideous ! what waste— what sacrilege ! ' 
 
 They had reached the Place de la Concorde, which lay bathed 
 in moonlight, the silver fountains plashing, the trees in the 
 Champs-Elysees throwing their sharp yet delicate shadows on the 
 intense whiteness of the ground, the buildings far away rising 
 softly into the softest purest blue. Regnault stopped and looked 
 round him with enchantment. As for David, he had no eyts 
 save for his companion. His face was full of a quick responsive 
 emotion. After an experience which had besmirched every ideal 
 and bemocked every faith, the young Frenchman's talk had 
 carried the lad once more into the full tideof poetry and romance. 
 ' The secret of life lies in feeling, in the heart, not the head '— 
 ah, that he understood ! He tried to express his assent, his 
 homage to the speaker ; but neither he nor the artist understood 
 very clearly what he was saying. Presently Regnault said in 
 another tone : 
 
 ' And they are such good fellows, many of them. Starving 
 often— but nothing to propitiate the bourgeois, nothing to com-, 
 promise the "dignity of art." A man will paint to please him- 
 self all day, paint, on a crust, something that won't and can't 
 sell, that the world in fact would be mad to buy ; then in the 
 evening he will put his canvas to the wall, and paint sleeve-links 
 or china to live. And so generous to each other : they will give 
 each other all they have— food, clothes, money, knowledge. That 
 man who gave that abominable thing about St. Francis— I know 
 him, he has a little apartment near the Quai St. -Michel, and an 
 invalid mother. He is a perfect angel to her. I could take ofl! 
 my hat to him whenever I think of it.' 
 
 His voice dropped again. Regnault was pacing along across 
 the Place, his arms behind him, David at his side. When he 
 resumed, it was once more in a tone of despondency. 
 
 ' There is an ideal ; but so twisted, so corrupted ! What is 
 wanted is not less intelligence but more—movQ knowledge, more 
 experience— something beyond this fevering, brutalising Pans, 
 which is all these men know. They have got the poison of the 
 Boulevards in their blood, and it dulls their eye and hand. They 
 want scattering to the wilderness ; they want the wave of life to 
 
308 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 come and lift them past the mud they are dabbling in, with its 
 hideous wrecks and debris, out and away to the great sea, to the 
 infinite beyond of experience and feehng ! you, too, feel with 
 jue ? — you, too, see it like that ? Ah ! when one lias seen and 
 felt Italy — the East, — the South— lived heart to heart with a wild 
 nature, or with the great embodied thought of the past, — lived at 
 large, among great things, great sights, great emotions, then 
 there comes purification ! There is no other way out — no, none ! ' 
 
 So for another hour Regnault led the English boy up and 
 down and along the quays, talking in the frankest openest way 
 to this acquaintance of a night. It was as though he were 
 wrestling his own way through his own life-problem. Very often 
 David could hardly follow. The joys, the passions, the tempta- 
 tions of the artist, struggling with the life of thought and aspira- 
 tion, the craving to know everything, to feel everything, at war 
 with the hunger for a moral unity and a stainless self-respect — 
 there was all this in his troubled, discursive talk, and there was 
 besides the magic touch of genius, youth, and poetry. 
 
 ' Well, this is strange ! ' he said at last, stopping at a point 
 between the Louvre on the one hand and the Institute on the 
 other, the moonlit river lying between. — ' My friends come to me 
 at Rome or at Tangiers, and they complain of me, "Regnault, 
 you have grown morose, no one can get a word out of you" — and 
 they go away w^ounded— I have seen it often. x\nd it was always 
 true. For months I have had no words. I have been in the 
 dark, wrestling with my art and with this goading, torturing 
 w'orld, which the artist with his puny forces has somehow to tame 
 and render. Then— the other day — ah ! well, no matter ! — but 
 the dark broke, and there w^as light ! and when I saw your face, 
 your stranger's face, in that crowd to-night, listening to those 
 things, it drew me. I wanted to say my say. I don't make 
 excuses. Very likely we shall never meet again — but for this 
 hour we have been friends. Good night '.—good night ! Look, 
 — the dawn is coming ! ' 
 
 And he pointed to where, behind thetow^ers of ISTotre-Dame, the 
 first whiteness of the coming day was rising into the starry blue. 
 
 They shook hands. 
 
 ' You go back to England soon ? ' 
 
 ' In a— a — week or two.' 
 
 'Only believe this — we have things better worth seeing than 
 " Les Trois*Rats "—things that represent us better. That is what 
 the foreigner is always doing ; he spends his time in wondering 
 at our monkey tricks ; there is no nation can do them so well as 
 we ; and the great France — the undying France !— disappears in 
 a splutter of blague /' 
 
 He leant over the parapet, forgetting his companion, his eyes 
 fixed on the great cathedral, on the slender shaft of the Sainte 
 ChapcUe, on the sky filling with light. 
 
 Then suddenly ^he turned round, laid a quick hand on his 
 companion's shoulder- 
 
CHAP. VI STORM AND STRESS 309 
 
 ' If you ever feel inclined to write to me, tlie Ecole des Beaux- 
 Arts will tind me. Adieu.' 
 
 And drawing his coat round him in the chilliness of the dawn, 
 he walked off quickly across the bridge. 
 
 David also hurried away, speeding along the deserted pave- 
 ments till again he was in his own dark street. The dawn was 
 growing from its first moment of mysterious beauty into a grey 
 disillusToning light. But he felt no reaction. He crept up the 
 squalid stairs to his room. It was heavy with the scent of the 
 
 narcissus. -^^■ , -, 
 
 He took them, and stole along the passage to Elise s door. 
 There were three steps outside it. He sat down on the lowest, 
 putting his flowers beside him. There was something awful to 
 him even in thic nearness ; he dare not have gone higher. 
 
 He sat there for long— his heart beating, beating. Every 
 part of his French experience so far, whether by sympathy or 
 recoil had helped to bring him to this intoxication of sense and 
 soul. ' Regnault had spoken of the ' great things ' of life. Had 
 he too come to understand them— thus ? 
 
 At last he left his flowers there, kissing the step on which 
 they were laid, and which her foot must touch. He could hardly 
 sleep ; the slight fragrance which clung to the old bearskin in 
 which he wrapt himself helped to keep him restless ; it was the 
 faint heliotrope scent he had noticed in her room. 
 
 CHAPTER YI 
 
 ' He loves me— he does really ! Poor boy ! ' 
 
 The speaker was Elise Delaunay. She was sitting alone on 
 the divan in her atelier, trying on a pair of old Pompadour shoes, 
 with large faded rosettes and pink heels, which she had that 
 moment routed out of a broker's shop in the Rue de Seine, on her 
 way back from the Luxembourg with David. They made her 
 feet look enchantingly small, and she was holding back her skirts 
 that she might get a good look at them. 
 
 Her conviction of David's passion did not for some time lessen 
 her interest in the shoes, but at last she kicked them off, and flung 
 herself back on the divan, to think out the situation a little. 
 
 Yes, the English vouth's adoration could no longer be ignored. 
 It had become evident, even to her own acquaintances and com- 
 rades in the various galleries she was now haunting in this bye- 
 time of the artistic year. Whenever she and he appeared 
 together now, there were sly looks and smiles. 
 
 The scandal of it did not affect her m the least. She belonged 
 to Bohemia, so apparently did he. She had been perfectly honest 
 till now ; but she had never let any convention stand m her way. 
 All her conceptions of the relations between men and women were 
 of an extremely free kind. Her mother's blood m her accounted 
 both for a certain coldness and a certain personal refinement which 
 
310 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 both divided and protected her from a great many of her acquaint- 
 ance, but through her father she had been acquainted for years 
 with tlie type of life and menage which prevails among a certain 
 section of the French artist class, and if the occasion were but 
 strong enough she had no instincts inherited or acquired which 
 would stand in the way of the gratification of passion. 
 
 On the contrary, her reasoned opinions so far as she had any 
 were all in favour of Vunlou llbre — that curious type of associa- 
 tion which held the artist Theodore Rousseau for life to the woman 
 who passed as his wife, and which obtains to a remarkable extent, 
 with all those accompaniments of permanence, fidelity, and 
 mutual service, which are commonly held to belong only to 
 Vtmion legale^ in one or two strata of French society. She was 
 capable of sentiment ; she had hidden veins of womanish weak- 
 ness ; but at the same time the little creature's prevailing temper 
 was one of remarkable coolness and audacity. She judged for 
 herself ; she had read for herself, observed for herself. Such a 
 temper had hitherto preserved her from adventures ; but, upon 
 occasion, it might as easily land her in one. She was at once a 
 daughter of art and a daughter of the people, with a cross strain 
 of gentle breeding and intellectual versatility thrown in, which 
 made her more interesting and more individual than the rest of 
 her class. 
 
 ' We are a pair of Romantics out of date, you and I,' she had 
 said once to David, half mocking, half in earnest, and the phrase 
 fitted the relation and position of the pair very nearly. In spite 
 of the enormous difference of their habits and training they had 
 at bottom similar tastes — the same capacity for the excitements 
 of art and imagination, the same shrinking from the coarse and 
 ugly sides of the life amid which they moved, the same cravings 
 for novelty and experience. 
 
 David went no more to the ' Trois Rats,' and wiien, in obedi- 
 ence to Lenain's recommendation, he had bought and begun to 
 read a novel of the Goncourts, he threw it from him in a disgust 
 beyond expression. Her talk, meanwhile, was in some respects 
 of the frefest ; she would discuss subjects impossible to the English 
 girl of the same class ; she asked very few questions as to the 
 people she mixed with ; and he was, by now, perfectly acquainted 
 with her view, that on the whole marriage was for the bourgeois, 
 and had few attractions for people who were capable of penetrat- 
 ing deeper into the rich growths of life. But there was no per- 
 sonal taint or license in what she said ; and she herself could be 
 always happily divided from her topics. Their Bohemia was 
 canopied with illusions, but the illusions on the whole were those 
 of poetry. 
 
 Were all David's illusions hers, however ? Love ! She thought 
 of it, half laughing, as she lay on the divan. She knew nothing 
 about it — she was for art. Yet what a brow, what eyes, what a 
 gait— like a young Achilles ! 
 
 She sprang up to look at a sketch of him, dashed off the day 
 
CHAP. VI STORM AND STRESS 311 
 
 before, which was on the easel. Yes, it was like. There was 
 the quick ardent air, the southern colour, the clustering black 
 hair, the young parting of the lips. The invitation of the 
 eyes was irresistible — she smiled into them — the little pale face 
 flushing. 
 
 But at the same moment her attention was caught by a sketch 
 pinned against the wall just behind the easel. 
 
 ' Ah ! my cousin, my good cousin ! ' she said, with a little 
 mocking twist of the mouth ; ' how strange that you have not 
 been here all this time — never once ! There was something said, 
 I remember, about a visit to Bordeaux about now. Ah ! well — 
 tarit mieux — for you would be rather jealous, my cousin ! ' 
 
 Then she sat down with her hands on her knees, very serious. 
 How long since they met ? A week. How long till the temporary 
 closing of the Salon and the voting of the rewards ? A fortnight. 
 Well, should it go on till then ? Yes or no ? As soon as she 
 knew her fate— or at any rate if she got her mention — she would 
 go back to work. She had two subjects in her mind ; she would 
 work at home, and Taranne had promised to come and advise her. 
 Then she would have no time for handsome English boys. But 
 till then ? 
 
 She took an anemone from a bunch David had brought her, 
 and began to pluck off the petals, alternating 'yes' and 'no.' 
 The last petal fell to ' yes. ' 
 
 ' I should have done just the same if it had been " no," ' she 
 said, laughing. ' Allans, he amuses me, and I do him no harm. 
 When I go back to work he can do his business. He has done 
 none yet. He will forget me and make some money.' 
 
 She paced up and down the studio thinking again. She was 
 conscious of some remorse for her part in sending the English- 
 man's sister to the Cervins. The matter had never been mentioned 
 again between her and David ; yet she knew instinctively that he 
 was often ill at ease. The girl was perpetually in Montjoie's 
 studio, and surrounded in public places by a crew of his friends. 
 Madame Cervin was constantly in attendance no doubt, but if it 
 came to a struggle she would have no power with the English 
 girl, whose obstinacy was in proportion to her ignorance. 
 
 Elise had herself once stopped Madame Cervin on the stairs, 
 and said some frank things of the sculptor, in order to quiet an 
 uncomfortable conscience. 
 
 ' Ah ! you do not like Monsieur Montjoie ? ' said the other, 
 looking hard at her. 
 
 Elise coloured, then she recovered herself. 
 
 ' All the world knows that Monsieur Montjoie has no scruples, 
 madame,' she cried angrily. 'You know it yourself. It is a 
 shame. That girl understands nothing.' 
 
 Madame Cervin laughed. 
 
 ' Certainly she understands everything that she pleases, 
 mademoiselle. But if there is any anxiety, let her brother come 
 and look after her. He can take her where she wants to go. T 
 
313 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book in 
 
 should be glad indeed. I am as tired as a dog. Since she came 
 it is one tapage from morning till night.' 
 
 And Elise retired, discomfited before those small malicious 
 eyes. Since David's adoration for the girl artist in No. 27 had 
 become more or less public property, Madame Cervin, who had 
 seen from the beginning that Louie was a burden on her brother, 
 had decidedly the best of the situation. 
 
 ' Has she lent Montjoie money ?' 
 
 Elise meditated. The little bourgeoise had a curious weakness 
 for posing as the patron of the various artists in the house. ' Very 
 possible ! and she looks on the Maenad as the only way of getting 
 it back ? She would sell her soul for a napoleon — I always knew 
 that. Canaille, all of them ! ' 
 
 And the meditation ended in the impatient conclusion that 
 neither she nor the brother had any responsibility. After all, 
 any decent girl, French or English, could soon see for herself what 
 manner of man was Jules Montjoie ! And now for the ' private 
 view ' of a certain artistic club to which she had promised to take 
 her English acquaintance. All the members of the club were 
 younj, -of the new rebellious school of ^ plein air' — the afternoon 
 promised to be amusing. 
 
 So the companionship of these two went on, and David passed 
 from one golden day to another. How she lectured him, the little, 
 vain, imperious thing ; and how meek he was with her, how 
 different from his Manchester self ! The woman's cleverness 
 filled the field. The man, wholly preoccupied with other things, 
 did not care to produce himself, and in the first ardour of his new 
 devotion kept all the self-assertive elements of his own nature in 
 the background, caring for nothing but to watch her eyes as she 
 talked, to have her voice in his ears, to keep her happy and 
 content in his company. 
 
 Yet she was not taken in. With other people he must be 
 proud, argumentative, self-willed — that she was sure of ; but her 
 conviction only made her realise her power over him with the 
 more pleasure. His naive respect for her own fragmentary 
 knowledge, his unbounded admiration for her talent, his quick 
 sympathy for all she did and was, these things, little by little, 
 tended to excite, to preoccupy her. 
 
 Especially was she bent upon his artistic education. She 
 carried him hither and thither, to the Louvre, the Luxembourg, 
 the Salon, insisting with a feverish eloquence and invention that 
 he should worship all that she worshipped— no matter if he did not 
 understand !— let him worship all the same — till he had learnt his 
 new alphabet with a smiling docility, and caught her very tricks 
 of phrase. Especially were they haunters of the sculptures in 
 the Louvre, where, because of the dilficulty of it, she piqued 
 herself most especially on knowledge, and could convict him 
 most triumphantly of a barbarian ignorance. Up and down 
 they wandered, and she gave him eyes, whether for Artemis, 
 or Aphrodite, or Apollo, or still more for the significant and 
 
CHAP. VI STORM AND STRESS 315 
 
 troubling art of the Renaissance, French and Italian. She would 
 flit before him, perching here and there like a bird, and quivering 
 through and through with a voluble enjoyment. 
 
 Then from these lingerings amid a world charged at e very- 
 point with the elements of passion and feeling, they would turn 
 into the open air, into the May sunshine, which seemed to David's 
 northern eyes so lavish and inexhaustible, carrying with it inevi- 
 tably the kindness of the gods! They would sit out of doors 
 either in the greenwood paths of the Bois, where he could lie at 
 her feet, and see nothing but her face and the thick young wood 
 all round them, or in some corner of the Champs-Elysees, or the 
 sun-beaten Quai de la Conference, where the hurrying life of the 
 town brushed past them incessantly, yet without disturbing for a 
 moment their absorption in or entertainment of each other. 
 
 Yet all through she maintained her mastery of the situation. 
 She was a riddle to him often, poor boy ! One moment she would 
 lend herself in bewildering unexpected ways to his passion, the 
 next she would allow him hardly the privileges of the barest 
 acquaintance, hardly the carrying of her cloak, the touch of her 
 hand. But she had no qualms. It was but to last another fort- 
 night ; the friendship soothed and beguiled for her these days of 
 excited waiting ; and a woman, when she is an artist and a Roman- 
 tic, may at least sit, smoke, and chat with whomsoever she likes, 
 provided it be a time of holiday, and she is not betraying her art. 
 
 Meanwhile the real vulgarity of her nature — its insatiable 
 vanity, its reckless ambition — was masked from David mainly by 
 the very jealousy and terror which her artist's life soon produced 
 in him. He saw no sign of other lovers ; she had many acquaint- 
 ances but no intimates ; and the sketch in her room had been 
 carelessly explained to him as the portrait of her cousin. But 
 the atelier, and the rivalries it represented : — after three days 
 with her he had learnt that what had seemed to him the extrava- 
 gance, the pose of her first talk with him, was in truth the 
 earnest, the reality of her existence. She told him that since she 
 was a tiny child she had dreamed of fame — dreamed of people 
 turning in the streets when she passed — of a glory that should 
 lift her above all the commonplaces of existence, and all the dis- 
 advantages of her own start in life. 
 
 ' I am neither beautiful, nor rich, nor well-born ; but if I have 
 talent, what matter ? Everyone will be at my feet. And if I 
 have no talent — grand Dieu .^— what is there left for me but to 
 kill myself ? ' 
 
 And she would clasp her hands round her knees, and look at 
 him with fierce, drawn brows, as though defying him to say a 
 single syllable in favour of any meaner compromise with fate. 
 
 This fever of the artist and the concurrent — in a woman 
 above all — how it bewildered him ! He soon understood enough 
 of it, however, to be desperately jealous of it, to realise some- 
 thing of the preliminary bar it placed between any lover and the 
 girl's heart and life. 
 
314 THE HIS'IOHV Ob DAVID (iRlEVE book in 
 
 Above all was he jealous of her teachers. Taranne clearly 
 could beat her down with a word, reduce her to tears with an 
 unfavourable criticism ; then he had but to hold up a finger, 
 to say, ' Mademoiselle, you have worked well this week, your 
 drawing shows improvement, I have hopes of you,' to bring her 
 to his feet with delight and gratitude. It was a mondrous 
 power, this power of the master with his pupil ! How could 
 women submit to it ? 
 
 Yet his lover's instincts led him safely through many perils. 
 He was infinitely complaisant towards all her artistic talk, all her 
 gossip of the atelier. It seemed to him— but then his apprehen- 
 sion of this strange new world was naturally a somewhat confused 
 one — that Elise was not normally on terms with any of her fellow 
 students. 
 
 ' If I don't get my mention^' she would say passionately, ' I 
 tell you again it will be intrigue : it will be those creatures in the 
 atelier who want to get rid of me— to finish with me. Ah ! I will 
 crush them all yet. And I have been good to them all — every 
 one — I vow I have — even to that animal of a Breal, who is always 
 robbing me of my place at the concours, and taking mean advan- 
 tages. Miserables ! ' 
 
 And the tears would stand in her angry eyes ; her whole 
 delicate frame would throb with fierce feeling. 
 
 Gradually he learnt how to deal with these fits, even when 
 they chilled him with a dread, a conviction he dared not analyse. 
 He would so soothe and listen to her, so ply her with the praises of 
 her gift, which came floated to him on the talk of those acquaint- 
 ances of hers to whom she had introduced him, that her most 
 deep-rooted irritations would give way for a time. The woman 
 would reappear ; she would yield to the charm of his admiring 
 eyes, his stammered flatteries ; her whole mood would break up, 
 dissolve into eager softness, and she would fall into a childish 
 plaintiveness, saying wild generous things even of her rivals, 
 now there seemed to be no one under heaven to take their part, 
 and at last, even, letting her little hand fall into those eager 
 brown ones which lay in wait for it, letting it linger there — for- 
 gotten. 
 
 Especially was she touched in his favour by the way in which 
 Regnault had singled him out. After he had given her the his- 
 tory of that midnight walk, he saw clearly that he had riSen to a 
 higher plane in her esteem. She had no heroes exactly ; but she 
 had certain artistic passions, certain romantic fancies, which 
 seemed to touch deep fibres in her. Her admiration for Regnault 
 was one of these ; but David soon understood that he had no 
 cause whatever to be jealous of it. It was a matter purely of the 
 mind and the imagination. 
 
 So the days passed — the hot lengthening days. Sometimes in 
 the long afternoons they pushed far afield into the neighbourhood 
 of Paris. The green wooded hills of Sevres and St. Cloud, the 
 blue curves and reaches of the Seine, the flashing lights and 
 
CHAP. VI STORM AND STRESS 315 
 
 figures, the pleasures of companionship, self-revelation, independ- 
 ence — the day was soon lost in these quick impressions, and at 
 night they would come back in a fragrant moonlight, descending 
 from their train into the noise and glitter of the streets, only to 
 draw closer together— for surely on these crowded pavements 
 David might claim her little arm in his for safety's sake— till at 
 last they stood in the dark passage between his door and hers, and 
 she would suddenly pelt him with a flower, spring up her small 
 stairway, and lock her door behind her, before, in his emotion, 
 he could find his voice or a farewell. Then he would make his 
 way into his own den, and sit there in the dark, lost in a throng- 
 ing host of thoughts and memories, — feeling life one vibrating 
 delight. 
 
 At last one morning he awoke to the fact that only four 
 days more remained before the date on which, according to 
 their original plan, they were to go back to Manchester. He 
 laughed aloud when the recollection first crossed his mind ; then, 
 having a moment to himself, he sat down and scrawled a few 
 hasty words to John. Business detained him yet a while— would 
 detain him a few weeks — let John manage as he pleased, his em- 
 ployer trusted everything to him — and money was enclosed. 
 Then he wrote another hurried note to the bank where he had 
 placed his six hundred pounds. Let them send him twenty 
 pounds at once, in Bank of England notes. He felt himself a 
 young king as he gave the order— king of this mean world and of 
 its dross. All his business projects had vanished from his mind. 
 He could barely have recalled them if he had tried. During the 
 first days of his acquaintance with Elise he had spent a few spare 
 hours in turning over the boxes on the quays, in talks with book- 
 sellers in the Rue de Seine or the Rue de Lille, in preliminary 
 inquiries respecting some commissions he had undertaken. But 
 now, every hour, every thought were hers. What did money 
 matter, in the name of Heaven ? Yet when his twenty pounds 
 came, he changed his notes and pocketed his napoleons with a 
 vast satisfaction. For they meant power, they meant opportun- 
 ity ; every one should be paid away against so many hours by her 
 side, at her feet. 
 
 Meanwhile day after day he had reminded himself of Louie, 
 and day after day he had forgotten her again, absolutely, alto- 
 gether. Once or twice he met hei* on the stairs, started, remem- 
 bered, and tried to question her as to what she was doing. But 
 she was still angry with him for his interference on the day of 
 the pose ; and he could get very little out of her. Let him only 
 leave her alone ; she was not a school-child to be meddled with ; 
 that he would find out. As to Madame Cervin, she was a little 
 fool, and her meanness in money matters was disgraceful ; but 
 she, Louie, could put up with her. One of these meetings took 
 place on the day of his letters to the bank and to John. Louie 
 asked him abruptly when he thought of returning. He flushed 
 
31 G TPIE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 deeply, stammered, said he was inclined to stay longer, but of 
 course she could be sent home. An escort could be found for 
 her. She stared at him ; then suddenly her black eyes sparkled, 
 and she laughed so that the sound echoed up the dark stairs. 
 David hotly inquired what she meant ; but she ran up still laugh- 
 ing loudly, and he was left to digest her scornful amusement as 
 best he could. 
 
 Not long after he found the Cervins' door open as he passed, 
 and in the passage saw a group of people, mostly men ; Montjoie 
 in front, just lighting a cigar ; Louie's black hat in the back- 
 ground. David hurried past ; he loathed the sculptor's battered 
 look, his insolent eye, his slow ambiguous manner ; he still burnt 
 with the anger and humiliation of his ineffectual descent on the 
 man's domain. But Madame Cervin, catching sight of him from 
 the back of the party, pursued him panting and breathless to his 
 own door. Would monsieur please attend to her ; he was so hard 
 to get hold of ; never, in fact, at home ! Would he settle her 
 little bill, and give her more money for current expenses ? Ma- 
 demoiselle Louie required to be kept amused — mon Dieii ! — from 
 morning to niglit ! She had no objection, provided it were made 
 worth her while. And how much longer did monsieur think of 
 remaining in Paris ? 
 
 David answered recklessly that he did not know, paid her bill 
 for Louie's board and extras without looking at it, and gave her 
 a napoleon in hand, wherewith she departed, her covetous eyes 
 aglow, her mouth full of excited civilities. 
 
 She even hesitated a moment at the door and then came back 
 to assure him that she was really all discretion with regard to his 
 sister ; no doubt monsieur had heard some unpleasant stories, for 
 instance, of M. Montjoie ; she could understand perfectly, that 
 coming from such a quarter, they had affected monsieur's mind ; 
 but he would see that she could not make a sudden quarrel with 
 one of her husband's old friends ; Mademoiselle Louie (who was 
 already her cherie) had taken a fancy to pose for this statue ; it 
 was surely better to indulge her than to rouse her self-will, but 
 she could assure monsieur that she had looked after her as 
 though it had been her own daughter. 
 
 David stood impatiently listening. In a few minutes he was 
 to be with Elise at the corner of the Rue Lafitte. Of course it 
 was, all right ! — and if it were not, he could not mend it. The 
 woman was vulgar and grasping, but what reason was there to 
 think anything else that was evil of her ? Probably she had put 
 up with Louie more easily than a woman of a higher type would 
 have done. At any rate she was doing her best, and what more 
 could be asked of him than he had done ? Louie behaved out- 
 rageously in Manchester ; he could not help it, either there or 
 here. He had interfered again and again, and had always been 
 a fool for his pains. Let her choose for herself. A number of 
 old and long-hidden exasperations seemed now to emerge when- 
 ever he thought of his sister. 
 
CHAP. VI STORM AND STRESS 317 
 
 Five miiintes later he was in the Rue Lafitte. 
 
 It was Elise's eaiDi'ice that they should always meet in this 
 way, out of doors ; at the corner of their own street ; on the 
 steps of the Madeleine ; beneath the Vendome Column ; in front 
 of a particular bonbon shop ; or beside the third tree from the 
 Place de la Concorde in the northern alley of the Tuileries 
 Gardens. He had been only once inside her studio since the first 
 evening of their acquaintance. 
 
 His mind was full of excitement, for the Salon had been 
 closed since the day before ; and the awards of the.jury would be 
 informally known, at least in some cases, by the evening. Elise's 
 excitement since the critical hours began had been pitiful to see. 
 As he stood waiting he gave his whole heart to her and her 
 ambitions, flinging away from him with a passionate impatience 
 every other interest, every other thought. 
 
 When she came she looked tired and white. ' I can't go to 
 galleries, and I can't paint,' she said, shortly. 'What shall we 
 do?' 
 
 Her little black hat was drawn forward, but through the 
 dainty veil he could see the red spot on either cheek. Her hands 
 were pushed deep into the pockets of her light grey jacket, 
 recalling the energetic attitude in which she had stood over Louie 
 on the occasion of their first meeting. He guessed at once that 
 she had not slept, and that she was beside herself with anxiety. 
 How to manage her ? — how to console her ? He felt himself so 
 young and raw ; yet already his passion had awakened in him a 
 hundred new and delicate perceptions. 
 
 ' Look at the weather ! ' he said to her. ' Come out of town ! 
 let us make for the Gare St. Lazare, and spend the day at St. 
 Germain.' 
 
 She hesitated. 
 
 ' Taranne will write to me directly he knows — directly ! He 
 might write any time this evening. No, no ! — I can't go ! I 
 must be on the spot. ' 
 
 ' He can't write before the evening. You said yourself before 
 seven nothing could be known. We will get back in ample time, 
 I swear. ' 
 
 They were standing in the shade of a shop awning, and he 
 was looking down at her, eagerly, persuasively. She had a debate 
 with herself, then with a despairing gesture of the hands, she 
 turned abruptly — 
 
 ' Well then— to the station ! ' 
 
 When they had started, she lay back in the empty carriage he 
 had found for her, and shut her eyes. The air was oppressive, 
 for the day before had been showery, and the heat this morning 
 was a damp heat which relaxed the whole being. But before the 
 train moved, she felt a current of coolness, and hastily looking up 
 she saw that David had possessed himself of the cheap fan which 
 had been lying on her lap, and was fanning her with his gaze fixed 
 upon her, a gaze which haunted her as her eyelids fell again. 
 
3Ji THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 Suddenly she fell into an inward perplexity, an inward impa- 
 tience on the subject of her companion, and her relation to him. 
 It had been all very well till yesterday ! But now the artistic and 
 professional situation had become so strained, so intense, she 
 could hardly give him a thought. His presence there, and its 
 tacit demands upon her, tried her nerves. Her mind was full of 
 a hundred miseres d'atelie)\ of imaginary enemies and intrigues ; 
 one minute she was all hope, the next all fear ; and she turned 
 sick when she thought of Taranne's letter. 
 
 What had she been entangling herself for ? she whose whole 
 life and soul belonged to art and ambition I This comradeship, 
 begun as a caprice, an adventure, was becoming too serious. It 
 must end ! — end probably to-day, as she liad all along deter- 
 mined. Then, as she framed the thought, she became conscious 
 of a shrinking, a difficulty, which enraged and frightened her. 
 
 She sat up abruptly and threw back her veil. 
 
 David made a little exclamation as he dropped the fan, 
 
 ' Yes ! ' she said, looking at him with a little frown, ' yes — 
 what did you say ? ' 
 
 Then she saw that his whole face was working with emotion. 
 
 ' I wish you would have stayed like that,' he said, in a voice 
 which trembled. 
 
 ' Why ? ' 
 
 ' Because — because it was so sweet ! ' 
 
 She gave a little start, and a sudden red sprang into her 
 cheek. 
 
 His heart leapt. He had never seen her blush for any word 
 of his before. 
 
 ' I prefer the air itself,' she said, bending forward and looking 
 away from him out of the open window at the villas they were 
 passing. 
 
 Yet, all the while, as the country houses succeeded each other 
 and her eyes followed them, she saw not their fragrant, flowery 
 gardens, but the dark face and tall young form opposite. He was 
 handsomer even than when she had seen him first — handsomer 
 far than her portrait of him. Was it the daily commerce with 
 new forms of art and intelligence which Paris and her compan- 
 ionship had brought him ? — or simply the added care which a 
 man in love instinctively takes of the little details of his dress 
 and social conduct ? — which had given him this look of greater 
 maturity, greater distinction ? Her heart fluttered a little — then 
 she fell back on the thought of Taranne's letter. 
 
 They emerged from the station at St. Germain into a fierce 
 blaze of sun, which burned on the square red mass of the old 
 chateau, and threw a blinding glare on the white roads. 
 
 ' Quick ! for the trees ! ' she said, and they both hurried over 
 the open space which lay between them and the superb chestnut 
 grove which borders the famous terrace. Once there all was 
 well, and they could wander from alley to alley in a green shade, 
 the white blossom-spikes shining in the sun overhead, and to 
 
ciiAr. Yi STORM AND STRESS 319 
 
 their right the blue and purple plain, with the Seine winding and 
 dimpling, the river polders with their cattle, and far away the 
 dim heights of Montmartre just emerging behind the great mass 
 of Mont Valerien, which blocked the way to Paris. Such lights 
 and shades, such spring leaves, such dancing airs ! 
 
 Elise drew a long breath, slipped off her jacket which he made 
 a joy of carrying, and loosened the black lace at her throat which 
 fell so prettily over the little pink cotton underneath. 
 
 Then she looked at her companion unsteadily. There was 
 excitement in this light wind, this summer sun. Her great 
 resolve to ' end it ' began to look less clear to her. Nay, she 
 stood still and smiled up into his face, a very siren of provocation 
 and wild charm— the wind blowing a loose lock about her eyes. 
 
 ' Is this better than England— than your Manchester ? ' she 
 asked him scornfully, and he— traitor !— flinging out of his mind 
 all the bounties of an English May, all his memories of the white- 
 thorn and waving fern and foaming streams set in the deep 
 purple breast of the Scout — vowed to her that nowhere else could 
 there be spring or beauty or sunshine, but only here in France 
 and at St. Germain. 
 
 At.this she smiled and blushed — no woman could have helped 
 the blush. In truth, his will, steadily bent on one end, while 
 hers was distracted by half a dozen different impulses, was 
 beginning to affect her in a troubling, paralysing way. For all 
 her parade of a mature and cynical enlightenment, she was just 
 twenty ; it was such a May day as never was ; and when once 
 she had let herself relax towards him again, the inward ache of 
 jealous ambition made this passionate worship beside her, irrele- 
 vant as it was, all the more soothing, all the more luring. 
 
 Still she felt that something must be done to stem the tide, 
 and again she fell back upon luncheon. They had bought some 
 provisions on their way to the station in Paris. He might subsist 
 on scenery and aesthetics if he pleased— as for her, she was a 
 common person with common needs, and must eat. 
 
 ' Oh, not here ! ' he cried, ' why, this is all in public. Look at 
 the nursemaids, and the boys playing, and the carriages on the 
 terrace. Come on a little farther. You remember that open place 
 with the thorns and the stream ?— there we should be in peace.' 
 
 She did not know that she wanted to be in peace ; but she 
 gave way. 
 
 So they wandered on past the chestnuts into the tangled 
 depths of the old forest. A path sunk in brambles and fern took 
 them through beech wood to the little clearing David had in his 
 mind. A tiny stream much choked by grass and last year's 
 leaves ran along one side of it. A fallen log made a seat, and 
 the beech trees spread their new green fans ' overhead, or flung 
 them out to right and left around the little space, and for some 
 distance in front, till the green sprays and the straight grey stems 
 were lost on all sides in a brownish pinkish mist which betrayed a 
 girdle of oaks not yet conquered by the summer. 
 
320 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 She took her seat on the log, and he flung iiimself beside her. 
 Out came the 'stores in his pockets, and once more they made 
 themselves childishly merry over a scanty meal, which left them 
 still hungry. 
 
 Then for an hour or two they sat lounging and chattering in 
 the warm shade, while the gentle wind brought them every spring 
 scent, every twitter of the birds, every swayiug murmur of the 
 forest. David lay on his back against the log, his eyes now 
 plunging into the forest, now watching the curls of smoke from his 
 pipe mounting against the background of green, or the moist fleecy 
 clouds which seemed to be actually tangled in the tree-tops, now 
 fixed as long as they dared on his companion's face. She was 
 not beautiful ? Let her say it ! For she had the softest mouth 
 which drooped like a child with a grievance when she was silent, 
 and melted into the subtlest curves when she talked. She had, 
 as a rule, no colour, but her clear paleness, as contrasted with the 
 waves of her light-gold hair, seemed to him an exquisite beauty. 
 The eyebrows had an oriental trick of mounting at the corners, 
 but the effect, taken with the droop of the mouth, was to give the 
 face in repose a certain charming look of delicate and plaintive 
 surprise. Above all it was her smallness which entranced him ; 
 her feet and hands, her tiny waist, the finesse of her dress and 
 movements. All the women he had ever seen, Lucy and Dora 
 among them, served at this moment only to make a foil in his 
 mind for this little Parisian beside him. 
 
 How she talked this afternoon ! In her quick reaction towards 
 him she was after all more the woman than she had ever been. 
 She chattered of her forlorn childhood, of her mother's woes and 
 her father's iniquities, using the frankest language about these 
 last ; then of herself and her troubles. He listened and laughed; 
 his look as she poured herself out to him was in itself a caress. 
 Moreover, unconsciously to both, their relation had changed 
 somewhat. The edge of his first ignorance and shyness had 
 rubbed off. He w;is no longer a mere slave at her feet. Rather 
 a new and sweet equality seemed at last after all these days to 
 have arisen between them ; a bond more simple, more natural. 
 Every now and then he caught his breath under the sense of a 
 coming crisis ; meanwhile the May day was a dream of joy, and 
 life an intoxication. 
 
 But he controlled himself long, being indeed in desperate fear 
 of breaking the spell which held her to him this heavenly after- 
 noon. The hours slipped by ; the air grew stiller and sultrier. 
 Presently, just as the sun was sinking into the western wood, a 
 woman, carrying a bundle and with a couple of children, crossed 
 the glade. One child was on her arm ; the other, whimpering 
 with heat and fatigue, dragged wearily behind her, a dead weight 
 on its mother's skirts. The woman looked worn out, and was 
 scolding the crying child in a thin exasperated voice. When she 
 came to the stream, she put down her bundle, and finding a seat 
 by the water, she threw back her cotton bonnet and began to 
 
CHAP. XI STORM AND STRESS 331 
 
 wipe her brow, with long breaths which were very near to groans. 
 Then tiie child on her lap set up a shout of hunger, while the 
 child behind her began to cry louder than before. The woman 
 hastily raised the baby, unfastened her dress, and gave it the 
 breast, so stilling its cries; then, first slapping the other child 
 with angrv vehemence, she groped in the bundle for a piece of 
 sausage roll, and by dint of alternately shaking the culprit and 
 stuffing the food into its poor open mouth, succeeded in reducing 
 it to a chewing and sobbing silence. The mother herself was 
 clearly at the last gasp, and when at length the children were 
 quiet, as she turned her harshly outlined head so as to see who 
 the other occupants of the glade might be, her look had in it the 
 dull hostility of the hunted creature whose powers of self-defence 
 are almost gone. 
 
 But she could not rest long. After ten minutes, at longest, she 
 dragged herself up from the grass with another groan, and they 
 all disappeared into the trees, one of the children crying again— a 
 pitiable trio. 
 
 Elise had watched the group closely, and the sight seemed in 
 some unexplained way to chill and irritate the girl. 
 
 ' There is one of the drudges that men make,' she said bitterly, 
 looking after the woman. 
 
 ' Men ? ' he demurred ; ' I suspect the husband is a drudge 
 too.' 
 
 ' Not he ! ' she cried. ' At least he has liberty, choice, com- 
 rades. He is not battered out of all pleasure, all individuality, 
 that other human beings may have their way and be cooked for, 
 and this wretched human race may last. The woman is always 
 the victim, say what you like. But for some of us e.t least there 
 is a way out ! ' 
 
 She looked at him defiantly. 
 
 A tremor swept through him under the suddenness of this 
 Jarring note; Then a delicious boldness did away with the tremor. 
 He met her eyes straight. 
 
 ' Yes— love can always find it,' he said under his breath — ' or 
 make it.' 
 
 She wavered an instant, then she made a rally. 
 
 'I know nothing about that,' she said scornfully; 'I was 
 thinking of art. Art breaks all chains, or accepts none. The 
 woman that has art is free, and she alone ; for she has scaled the 
 men's heaven and stolen their sacred fire.' 
 
 She clasped her hands tightly on her knee ; her face was full 
 of aggression. 
 
 David sat looking at her, trying to smile, but his heart sank 
 within him. 
 
 He threw away his pipe, and laid his head down against the 
 log, not far from her, drawing his hat over his eyes. So they sat 
 in silence a little while, till he looked up and said, in a bright 
 beseeching tone : 
 
 ' Finish me that scene in Hernani ! ' 
 
323 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iii 
 
 The day before, after a matinee of Andromaque at the 
 Theatre-Frangais, in a moment of rebellion and reaction against 
 all things classical, they had both thrown themselves upon 
 Hernani. She had read it aloud to him in a green corner of the 
 Bois, having a faculty that wa}', and bidding him take it as a 
 French lesson. He took it, of course, as a lesson in nothing but 
 the art of making wild speeches to the w^oman one loves. 
 
 But now she demurred. 
 
 ' It is not here. ' 
 
 He produced it out of his pocket. 
 
 She shrugged her shoulders. 
 
 ' I am not in the vein. ' 
 
 ' You said last week you were not in the vein,' he said, laugh- 
 ing tremulously, ' and you read me that scene from Ruy Bias, so 
 that when we went to see Sarah Bernhardt in the evening I was 
 disappointed ! ' 
 
 She smiled, not being able to help it, for all flattery was sweet 
 to her. 
 
 ' We must catch our train. I would never speak to you again 
 if we were late ! ' 
 
 He held up his watch to her. 
 
 'An hour — it is, at the most, half an hour's walk.' 
 
 ^ Ah, mon Bieu T she cried, clasping her hands. 'It is all 
 over, the vote is given. Perhaps Taranne is writing to me now, 
 at this moment ! ' 
 
 'Read — read ! and forget it half an hour more.' 
 
 She caught up the book in a frenzy, and began to read, first 
 carelessly and with unintelligible haste ; but before a page w'as 
 over, the artist had recaptured her, she had slackened, she had 
 begun to interpret. 
 
 It was the scene in the third act where Hernani the outlaw, 
 who has himself bidden his love. Dona Sol, marry her kinsman 
 the old Duke, rather than link her fortunes to those of a ruined 
 chief of banditti, comes in upon the marriage he has sanctioned, 
 nay commanded. The bridegroom's wedding gifts are there on 
 the table. He and Doila Sol are alone. 
 
 The scene begins wdth a speech of bitter irony from Hernani. 
 His friends have been defeated and dispersed. He is alone in the 
 world ; a price is on his head ; his lot is more black and hopeless 
 than before. Yet his heart is bursting within him. He had 
 bidden her, indeed, but how could she have obeyed ! Traitress ! 
 false love ! false heart ! 
 
 He takes up the jewels one by one. 
 
 ' This necklace is hrave work, — and the bracelet is rare — 
 though not so rare as the ivoman uho beneath a brow so pure can 
 bear about with her a heart so vile I And what in exchange ? A 
 little love? Bah! — a mere trifle ! . . . Great God / that one ca?i 
 betray like this — and feel no shame — and lice!'' 
 
 For answer, Doiia Sol goes proudly up to the w^edding casket 
 and, with a gesture matching his own, takes out the dagger from 
 
CHAP. Yi STORM AND STRESS 833 
 
 its lowest depth. ' You stop halfway ! ' she says to him calmly, 
 and he understands. In an instant he is at her feet, tortured 
 with remorse and passion, and the magical love scene of the act 
 develops. What ingenuity of tenderness, yet w^hat truth ! 
 
 ' She has pardoned me, and loves me ! Ah, who will viake it 
 possible that I too, after such words, should love Hernani aiid 
 forgive him f Tears !— thou weepest, and again it is my fault ! 
 And who will punish me ? for thou ivilt hut forgive again ! 
 Ah, my friends are all dead !— and it is a madman speaks to 
 thee. Forgive! I would fain love— I know not how. And yet, 
 what deeper love coidd there he than this ? Oh ! Weep not, hut 
 die with me ! If I had hut a world, and coidd give it thee !' 
 
 The voice of the reader quivered. A hand came upon the 
 book and caught her hand, Bhe looked up and found herself face 
 to face with David, kneeling beside her. They stared at each 
 other. Then he said, half choked : 
 
 ' I can't bear it any more ! I love you with all my heart— oh, 
 you know — you know I do ! ' 
 
 She was stupefied for a moment, and then with a sudden ges- 
 ture she drew herself awav, and pushed him from her. 
 
 ' Leave me alone— leave me free— this moment ! ' she said 
 passionately. 'Why do you persecute and pursue me? What 
 right have you ? I have been kind to you, and you lay snares for 
 me. I will have nothing more to do with you. Let me go home, 
 and let us part.' 
 
 She got up, and with feverish haste tied her veil over her hat. 
 He had fallen with his arms across the log, and his face hidden 
 upon them. She paused irresolutely. 
 ' Monsieur David ! ' 
 He made no answer. 
 She bent down and touched him. 
 He shook his head. 
 'No, no ! — go ! ' he said thickly. 
 
 She bit her lip. The breath under her little lace tippet rose 
 and fell with furious haste. Then she sat down beside him, and 
 with her hands clasped on her knee began to plead with him in 
 tremulous light tones, as though they were a pair of children. 
 Why was he so foolish ? Why had he tried to spoil their beautiful 
 afternoon ? She must go. The train would not wait for them. 
 But he must come too. He must. 
 
 After a little he rose without a word, gathered up the book 
 and her wrap, and off they set along the forest path. 
 
 She stole a glance at him. It seemed to her that he walked as 
 if he did not know w^here he was or who was beside him. 
 
 Her heart smote her. AVhen they were deep in a hazel thicket, 
 she stole out a small impulsive hand, and slipped it into his, which 
 hung beside him. He started. Presently she felt a slight pressure, 
 but it relaxed instantly, and she took back her hand, feeling 
 ashamed of herself, and aggrieved besides. She shot on m front 
 of him, and he followed. 
 
324 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 So they walked throii^h the chestnuts and across the white 
 road to the station in the red glow of the evening sun. He 
 followed her into the railway carriage, did her every little service 
 with perfect gentleness ; then when they started he took the 
 opposite corner, and turning away from her, stared, with eyes 
 that evidently saw nothing, at the villas beside the line, at the 
 children in the streets, at the boats on the dazzling river. 
 
 She in her corner tried to be angry, to harden her heart, to 
 possess herself only with the thought of Taranne's letter. But 
 the evening was not as the morning. That dark teasing figure 
 at the other end, outlined against the light of the window, 
 intruded, took up a share in her reverie she resented but could 
 not prevent — nay, presently absorbed it altogether. Absurd ! 
 she had had love made to her before, and had known how to deal 
 with it. The artist must have comrades, and the comrades may 
 play false ; well, then the artist must take care of herself. 
 
 She had done no harm ; she was not to blame ; she had let 
 him know from the beginning that she only lived for art. What 
 folly, and what treacherous, inconsiderate folly, it had all been ! 
 
 So she lashed lierself up. But her look stole incessantly to 
 that opposite corner, and every now and then she felt her lips 
 trembling and her eyes growing hot in a way which annoyed 
 her. 
 
 When they reached Paris she said to him imperiously as he 
 helped her out of the carriage, ' A cab, please ! ' 
 
 He found one for her, and would have closed the door upon 
 her. 
 
 ' No, come in ! ' she said to him with the same accent. 
 
 His look in return was like a blow to her, there was such an 
 inarticulate misery in it. But he got in, and they drove on in 
 silence. 
 
 AVhen they reached the Rue Chantal she sprang out, snatched 
 her key from the concierge, and ran up the stairs. But when she 
 reached the point on that top passage where their ways diverged, 
 she stopped and looked back for him. 
 
 ' Come and see my letter,' she said to him, hesitating. 
 
 He stood quite still, his arms hanging beside him, and drew a 
 long breath that stabbed her. 
 
 'I think not.' 
 
 And he turned away to his own door. 
 
 But she ran back to him and laid her hand on his arm. Her 
 eyes were full of tears. 
 
 ' Please, Monsieur David. We were good friends this morn- 
 ing. Be now and always my good friend ! ' 
 
 He shook his head again, but he let himself be led by her. 
 Still holding him — torn between her quick remorse and her 
 eagerness for Taranne's letter, she unlocked her door. One dart 
 for the table. Yes ! there it lay. She took it up ; then her face 
 blanched suddenly, and she came piteously up to David, who was 
 standing just inside the closed door. 
 
CHAP. VI STORM AND STRESS 325 
 
 ' Wish me luck, Monsieur David, wish me luck, as you did 
 before ! ' 
 
 But he was silent, and she tore open the letter. ' Dieu !— 
 mon Dieu ! ' 
 
 It was a sound of ecstasy. Then she flung down the letter, 
 and running up to David, she caught his arm again with both 
 hands. 
 
 ' Triomphe! THomphe ! I have got my mention, and the 
 picture they skied is to be brought down to the line, and Taranne 
 says I have done better than any other pupil of his of the same 
 standing— that I have an extraordinary gift— that I must succeed, 
 all the world says so— and two other members of the jury send 
 me their compliments. Ah I Monsieur David '—in a tone of 
 reproach — 'be kind— be nice— congratulate me.' 
 
 And she drew back an arm's-length that she might look at 
 him, her own face overflowing with exultant colour and life. 
 Then she approached again, her mood changing. 
 
 ' It is too detestable of you to stand there like a statue ! ah ! 
 that it is ! For I never deceived you, no, never. I said to you 
 the first night— there is nothing else for me in the world but art 
 —nothing ! Do you hear ? This falling in love spoils everything 
 —everything / Be friends with me. You will be going back to 
 England soon. Perhaps— perhaps '—her voice faltered—' I will 
 take a week's more holiday— Taranne says I ought. But then I 
 must go to work— and we will part friends— always friends— and 
 respect and understand each other all our lives, tfest-ce pas ? ' 
 
 ' Oh ! let me go ! ' cried David fiercely, his loud strained voice 
 startling them both, and flinging her hand away from him, he 
 made for the door. But impulsively she threw herself against it, 
 dismayed to find herself so near crying, and shaken with emotion 
 from head to foot. 
 
 They stood absorbed in each other ; she with her hands behmd 
 her on the door, and her hat tumbling back from her masses of 
 loosened hair. And as she gazed she was fascinated ; for there 
 was a grand look about him in his misery — a look which was 
 strange to her, and which was in fact the emergence of his 
 rugged and Puritan race. But whatever it was it seized her, as 
 all aspects of his personal beauty had done from the beginning. 
 She held out her little white hands to him appealing. 
 
 ' No ! no ! ' he said roughly, trying to put her away, ' never- 
 never— Mends ! You mav kill me— you shan't make a child of 
 me anv more. Oh ! my God ! ' It was a cry of agony. ' A man 
 can't go about with a girl in this way, if— if she is like you, and 
 not—' His voice broke— he lost the thread of what he was 
 saying, and drew his hand across his eyes before he broke out 
 again. ' What— vou tliought I was just a raw cub, to be played 
 with. Oh, I am too dull, I suppose, to understand ! But I have 
 grown under your hands anyway. I don't know myself— I should 
 do you or myself a mischief if this went on. Let me go— and go 
 home to-night ! ' 
 
326 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 And again he made a threatening step forward. But when he 
 came close to her he broke down. 
 
 ' I would have worked for you so,' he said thickly. ' For your 
 sake I would have given up my country. I would have made 
 myself French altogether. It should have been marriage or no 
 marriage as you pleased. You should have bee a free to go or stay. 
 Only I would have laid myself down for you to Avalk over. I have 
 some money. I would have settled here. I would have protected 
 you. It is not right for a woman to be alone — anyone so young 
 and so pretty. I thought you understood — that you must under- 
 stand — that your heart was melting to me. I should have done 
 your work no harm — I should have been your slave — you know 
 that. That cursed, cursed art ! ' 
 
 He spoke with a low intense emphasis ; then turning away he 
 buried his face in his hands. 
 
 ' David ! ' 
 
 He looked up startled. She was stepping towards him, a smile 
 of ineffable charm floating as it were upon her tears. 
 
 ' I don't know what is the matter with me ! ' she said tremu- 
 lously. ' There is trouble in it, I know ! It is the broken glass 
 coming true. Mais, voyons ! c^est jSl^^s fort que mot ! Do you 
 care so much — would it break your heart — would you let me work 
 — and never, never get in the way ? Would you be content that 
 art should come first and you second ? I can promise you no 
 more than that— not one little inch ! Would you be content ? 
 Say!' 
 
 He ran to her with a cry. She let him put his arms round 
 her, and a shiver of excitement ran through her. 
 
 'What does it mean?' she said breathlessly. ' One is so 
 strong one moment — and the next — like this ! Oh, why did you 
 ever come ? ' 
 
 Then she burst into tears, hiding her eyes upon his breast. 
 
 ' Oh ! I have been so much alone ! but I have got a heart 
 somewhere all the same. If you will have it, you must take the 
 consequences.' 
 
 Awed by the mingling of his silence with that painful throb- 
 bing beneath her cheek, she looked up. He stooped — and their 
 young faces met. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 During the three weeks which had ended for David and Elise in 
 this scene of passion, Louie had been deliberately going her own 
 way, managing even in this unfamiliar milieu to extract from it 
 almost all the excitement or amusement it was capable of yielding 
 her. All the morning she dragged Madame Cervin about the 
 Paris streets ; in the afternoon she would sometimes pose for 
 Montjoie, and sometimes not ; he had to bring her bonbons and 
 theatre tickets to bribe her, and learn new English wherewith to 
 flatter her. Then in the evenings she made the Cervins take her 
 
CHAP. VII STORM AND STRESS 327 
 
 to theatres and various entertainments more or less reputable, for 
 which of course David paid. It seemed to Madame Cervin, as 
 she sat staring beside them, that her laughs never fell in with the 
 laughs of other people. But whethei she understood or no, it 
 amused her, and go she would. 
 
 A looker-on might have found the relations between Madame 
 Cervin and her boarder puzzling at first sight. In reality they 
 represented a compromise between considerations of finance and 
 considerations of morals — as the wife of the ancien prix de Borne 
 understood these last. For the ex-modiste was by no means 
 without her virtues or her scruples. She had ugly manners and 
 ideas on many points, but she had lived a decent life at any rate 
 since her marriage with a man for whom she had an incompre- 
 hensible affection, heavily as he burdened and exploited her ; and 
 though she took all company pretty much as it came, she had a 
 much keener sense now than in her youth of the practical 
 advantages of good behaviour to a woman, and of the general 
 reasonableness of the bourgeois point of view with regard to 
 marriage and the family. Her youth had been stormy ; her 
 middle age tended to a certain conservative philosophy of com- 
 mon sense, and to the development of a rough and ready 
 conscience. 
 
 Especially was she conscious of the difficulties of virtue. 
 When Elise Delaunay, for instance, was being scandalously 
 handled by the talkers in her stuffy salon, Madame Cervin sat 
 silent. Not only had she her own reasons for being grateful to 
 the little artist, but with the memory of her own long-past adven- 
 tures behind her she was capable by now of a secret admiration 
 for an unprotected and struggling girl who had hitherto held her 
 head high, worked hard, and avoided lovers. 
 
 So that when the artist's wife undertook the charge of the 
 good-looking English girl she had done it honestly, up to her 
 lights, and she had fulfilled it honestly. She had in fact hardly 
 let Louie Grieve out of her sight since her boarder was handed 
 over to her. 
 
 These facts, however, represent only one side of the situation. 
 Madame Cervin was now respectable. She had relinquished 
 years before the cliasse for personal excitement ; she had replaced 
 it by ' the chasse of the five-franc piece. ' She loved her money 
 passionately ; but at the same time she loved power, gossip, and 
 small flatteries. They distracted her, these last, from the 
 depressing spectacle of her husband's gradual and inevitable 
 decay. So that her life represented a balance between these 
 various instincts. For some time past she had gathered about 
 her a train of small artists, whom she mothered and patronised, 
 and whose wild talk and pecuniary straits diversified the mono- 
 tony of her own childless middle age. Montjoie, whose undoubted 
 talent imposed upon a woman governed during all her later life 
 by the traditions and the admirations of the artist world, had 
 some time before established a hold upon her, partly dependent 
 
328 THE HISTORY OF DA^^D GRIEVE book iij 
 
 on a certain magnetism in the man, partlj^ as Elise had sus- 
 pected, upon money relations. For the grasping little bourgeoise 
 who would haggle for a morning over half a franc, and keep a 
 lynx-eyed watch over the woman who came to do the weekly 
 cleaning, lest the miserable creature should appropriate a crust 
 or a cold potato, had a weak side for her artist friends who flat- 
 tered and amused her. She would lend to them now and then out 
 of her hoards ; she had lent to Montjoie in the winter when, after 
 months of wild dissipation, he was in dire straits and almost 
 starving. 
 
 But having lent, the thought of her jeopardised money would^ 
 throw her into agonies, and she would scheme perpetually to get 
 it back. Like all the rest of Montjoie's creditors she was hanging 
 on the Meenad, which promised indeed to be the clief-cV ceuvre of 
 an indisputable talent, could that talent only be kept to work. 
 When the sculptor— whose curiosity had been originally roused 
 by certain phrases of Barbier's in his preliminary letters to his 
 nephew, phrases embellished by Dubois' habitual fanfaronnade 
 —had first beheld the English g^rl, he had temporarily thrown up 
 his work and was lounging about Paris in moody despair, to 
 Madame Cervin's infinite disgust. But at sight of Louie his 
 artist's zeal rekindled. Her wild nature, her half -human eye, the 
 traces of Greek form in the dark features— these things fired and 
 excited him. 
 
 ' Get me that girl to sit,' he had said to Madame Cervin, ' and 
 the Maenad will be sold in six weeks ! ' 
 
 And Madame Cervin, fully determined on the one hand that 
 Montjoie should finish his statue and pay his debts, and on the 
 other that the English girl should come to no harm from a 
 man of notorious character, had first led up to the sittings, and 
 then superintended tliem with the utmost vigilance. She meant 
 no harm— the brother was a fool for liis pains— but Montjoie 
 should have his sitter. So she sat there, dragon-like, hour after 
 hour, knitting away with her little fat hands, while Louie posed, 
 and Montjoie worked ; and groups of the sculptor's friends came 
 in and out, providing the audience which excited the ambition of 
 the man and the vanity of the girl. 
 
 So the days passed. At last there came a morning when 
 Louie came out early from the Cervins' door, shut it behind her, 
 and ran up the ladder-like stairs which led to David's room. 
 
 ' David ! ' 
 
 Her voice was pitched in no amiable key, as she violently 
 shook the handle of the door. But, call and shake as she might, 
 there was no answer, and after a while she paused, feeling a 
 certain bewilderment. 
 
 ' It is ridiculous ! He can't be out ; it isn't half -past eight. 
 It's just his tiresomeness.' 
 
 And sne made another and still more vehement attempt, all 
 lo no purpose. Not a sound was to be heard from the room 
 
CHAP. VII STORM AND STRESS 329 
 
 within. But as she was again standing irresolute, she heard a 
 footstep behind her on the narrow stairs, and looking round saw 
 the concierge, Madame Merichat. The woman's thin and sallow 
 face — tlie face of a born pessimist — had a certain sinister flutter 
 in it. 
 
 She Jield out a letter to the astonished Louie, saying at the 
 same time with a disagreeable smile : 
 
 ' What is the use of knocking the house down when there is 
 no one there ? ' 
 
 ' Where is he ? ' cried Louie, not understanding her, and look- 
 ing at the letter with stupefaction. 
 
 The woman put it into her hand. 
 
 'No one came back last night,' she said with a shrug. 
 ' Neither monsieur nor mademoiselle ; and this morning I receive 
 orders to send letters to " Barbizon, pres Fontainebleau." ' 
 
 Louie tore open her letter. It was from David, and dated 
 Barbizon. He would be there, it said, for nearly a month. If 
 she could wait with Madame Cervin till he himself could take 
 her home, well and good. But if that were disagreeable to her, 
 let her communicate with him ' chez Madame Pyat, Barbizon, 
 Fontainebleau,' and he would write to Dora Lomax at once, and 
 make arrangements for her to lodge there, till he returned to 
 Manchester. Some one could easily be found to look after her on 
 the homeward journey if Madame Cervin took her to the train. 
 Meanwhile he enclosed the money for two weeks' pension and 
 twenty francs for pocket money. 
 
 No other person was mentioned in the letter, and the writer 
 offered neither explanation nor excuses. 
 
 Louie crashed the sheet in her hand, with an exclamation, her 
 cheeks flaming. 
 
 ' So they are amusing themselves at Fontainebleau ? ' inquired 
 Madame Merichat, who had been leaning against the wall, twist- 
 ing her apron and studying the English girl with her hard, 
 malicious eyes. ' Oh ! I don't complain ; there was a letter for 
 me too. Monsieur has paid all. But I regret for mademoiselle— 
 if mademoiselle is surprised.' 
 
 She spoke to deaf ears. 
 
 Louie pushed past her, flew downstairs, and rang the Cervins' 
 bell violently. Madame Cervin herself opened the door, and the 
 girl threw herself upon her, dragged her into the salon, and then 
 said with the look and tone of a fury : 
 
 ' Read that ! ' 
 
 She held out the crumpled letter. Madame Cervin adjusted 
 her spectacles with shaking hands. 
 
 ' But it is in English ! ' she cried in despair. 
 
 Louie could have beaten her for not understanding. But, 
 herself trembling with excitement, she was forced to bring all the 
 French, words she knew to bear, and between them, somehow, 
 piecemeal, Madame Cervin was brought to a vague understanding 
 of the letter. 
 
330 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 * Gone to Fontainebleau ! ' she cried, subsiding on to the sofa. 
 ' But why, with whom ? ' 
 
 ' Why, with that girl, that creature — can't you understand ? ' 
 said Louie, pacing up and down. 
 
 ' Ah, I will go and find out all about that ! ' said Madame 
 Cervin, and hastily exchanging the blue cotton apron and jacket 
 she wore in the mornings in the privacy of her own apartment 
 for her walking dress, she whisked out to make inquiries. 
 
 Louie was left behind, striding from end to end of the little 
 salon, brows knit, every feature and limb tense with excitement. 
 As the meaning of her discovery grew plainer to her, as she 
 realised what had happened, and what the bearing of it must be 
 on herself and her own position, the tumult within her rose and 
 rose. After that day in the Louvre her native shrewdness had 
 of course very soon informed her of David's infatuation for the 
 little artist. And when it became plain, not only to her, but to 
 all Elise Delaunay's acquaintance, there was much laughter and 
 gossip on the subject in the Cervins' apartment. It was soon 
 discovered that Louie had taken a dislike, which, perhaps, from 
 the beginning had been an intuitive jealousy, to Elise, and had, 
 moreover, no inconvenient sensitiveness on her brother's account, 
 which need prevent the discussion of his love affairs in her 
 presence. So the discussion went freely on, and Louie only 
 regretted that, do what she would to improve herself in French, 
 she understood so little of it. But the tone towards Elise among 
 Montjoie's set, especially from Montjoie himself, was clearly con- 
 temptuous and hostile ; and Louie instinctively enjoyed the mud 
 which she felt sure was being thrown. 
 
 Yet, incredible as it may seem, with all this knowledge on her 
 part, all this amusement at her brother's expense, all this blacken- 
 ing of Elise's character, the possibility of such an event as had 
 actually occurred had never entered the sister's calculations. 
 
 And the reason lay in the profound impression which one side 
 of his character had made upon her during the five months they 
 had been together. A complete stranger to the ferment of the 
 lad's imagination, she had been a constant and chafed spectator 
 of his daily life. The strong self-restraint of it had been one of 
 the main barriers between them. She knew that she was always 
 jarring upon him, and that he was always blaming her reckless- 
 ness and self-indulgence. She hated his Spartan ways — his 
 teetotalism, the small store he set by any personal comfort or 
 luxury, his powers of long-continued work, his indifference to 
 the pleasures and amusements of his age, so far as Manchester 
 could provide them. They were a reflection upon her, and many 
 a gibe she had flung out at him about them. But all the same 
 these ways of his had left a mark upon her ; they had rooted a 
 certain conception of him in her mind. She knew perfectly well 
 that Dora Lomax was in love with him, and what did he care ? 
 ' Not a ha'porth ! ' She had never seen him turn his head for any 
 girl ; and when he had shown himself sarcastic on the subject of 
 
CHAP. VII STORM AND STRESS 331 
 
 her companions, she had cast about in vain for materials where- 
 with to retort. 
 
 And now ! That he should fall in love with this French girl- 
 that w^as natural enough ; it had amused and pleased her to see 
 him lose his head and make a fool of himself like other people ; 
 but that he should run away with her after a fortnight, without 
 apparently a word of marrying her — leaving his sister in the 
 lurch — 
 
 ' Hypocrite ! ' 
 
 She clenched her hands as she w^alked. What was really 
 surging in her w^as that feeling of ownership with regard to 
 David which had played so large a part in their childhood, even 
 wiien she had teased and plagued him most. She might worry 
 and defy him ; but no sooner did another woman appropriate 
 him, threaten to terminate for good that hold of his sister upon 
 him which had been so lately renewed, than she was flooded with 
 jealous rage. David had escaped her — he was hers no longer — he 
 was Elise Delaunay's ! Nothing that she did could scandahse or 
 make him angry any more. He had sent her money and washed 
 his hands of her. As to his escorting her back to England in two 
 or three weeks, that was just a lie ! A man who takes such a 
 plunge does not emerge so soon or so easily. No, she would have 
 to go back by herself, leaving him to his intrigue. The very 
 calmness and secretiveness of his letter was an insult. ' Mind 
 your own business, little girl— go home to work — and be good ! ' 
 — that was what it seemed to say to her. She set her teeth over 
 it in her wild anger and pride. 
 
 At the same moment the outer door opened and Madame 
 Cervin came bustling back again, bursting with news and indig- 
 nation. 
 
 Oh, there was no doubt at all about it, they had gone off 
 together ! Madame Merichat had seen them come downstairs 
 about noon the day before. He was carrying a black bag and a 
 couple of parcels. She also was laden ; and about halfway down 
 the street, Madame Merichat, watching from her window, had seen 
 them hail a cab, get into it, and drive away, the cab turning to 
 the right when they reached the Boulevard. 
 
 Madame Cervins wrath was loud, and stimulated moreover 
 by personal alarm. One moment, remembering the scene in 
 Montjoie's studio, she cried out, like the sister, on the brother's 
 h}T)ocrisy ; the next she reminded her boarder that there was two 
 weeks' pension owing. 
 
 Louie smiled scornfully, drew out the notes from David's letter 
 and flung them on the table. Then Madame Cervin softened, and 
 took occasion to remember that condolence with the sister was at 
 least as appropriate to the situation as abuse of the brother. She 
 attempted some consolation, nay, even some caresses, but Louie 
 very soon shook her off. 
 
 ' Don't talk to me ! don't kiss me ! ' she said impatiently. 
 
 And she swept out of the room, went to her own, and locked 
 
332 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book in 
 
 the door. Then she threw herself face downwards on her bed, 
 and remained there for some time hardly moving. But with 
 every minute that passed, as it seemed, the inward smart grew 
 sharper. She had been hardly conscious of it, at first, this smart, 
 in her rage and pride, but it was there. 
 
 At last she could bear it quietly no longei. She sprang up 
 and looked about her. There, just inside the open press which 
 held her wardrobe, were some soft white folds of stuff. Her eye 
 gleamed : she ran to the cupboard and took out the Maenad's 
 dress. During the last few days she had somewhat tired of the 
 sittings — she had at any rate been capricious and tiresome about 
 them ; and Montjoie, who was more in earnest about this statue 
 than he had been about any work for years, was at his wit's end, 
 first to control his own temper, and next so to lure or drive his 
 strange sitter as to manage her without offending her. 
 
 But to-day the dress recalled David — promised distraction and 
 retaliation. She slipped off her tight gingham with hasty fingers, 
 and in a few seconds she w^as transformed. The light folds 
 floated about her as she walked impetuously up and down, 
 studying every movement in the glass, intoxicated by the polished 
 clearness and whiteness of her own neck and shoulders, the 
 curves of her own grace and youth. Many a night, even after a 
 long sitting, had she locked her door, made the gas flare, and sat 
 absorbed brfore her mirror in this guise, throwing herself into 
 one attitude after another, naively regretting that sculpture took 
 so long, and that Montjoie could not fix them all. The ecstasy of 
 self-worship in which the whole process issued v/as but the fruition 
 of that childish habit which had wrought with childish things for 
 the same end — with a couple of rushlights, an old sheet and 
 primroses from the brook. 
 
 Her black abundant hair was still curled about her head. 
 Well, she could pull it down in the studio — now for a wrap — and 
 then no noise ! She would slip downstairs so that madame should 
 know nothing about it. She was tired of that woman always at 
 her elbow. Let her go marketing and leave other people in peace. 
 
 But before she threw on her wrap she stood still a moment, 
 her nostril quivering, expanding, one hand on her hip, the other 
 swinging her Msenad's tambourine. She knew very little of this 
 sculptor-man — she did not understand him ; but he interested, to 
 some extent overawed, her. He had poured out upon her the 
 coarsest fiatteries, yet she realised that he had not made love to 
 her. Perhaps Madame Cervin had been in the way. Well, now 
 for a surprise and a tete-a-tete ! A dare-devil look — her mother's 
 look — sprang into her eyes. 
 
 She opened the door, and listened. No one in the little 
 passage, only a distant sound of rapid talking, which suggested 
 to the girl that madame was at that moment enjoying the dis- 
 cussion of her boarder's affairs with monsieur, who was still in 
 bed. She hurried on a waterproof which covered her almost 
 
CHAP, yii STORM AND STRESS 333 
 
 from top to toe. Then, holding up her draperies, she stole out, 
 and on to the public stairs. 
 
 They were deserted, and running down them she turned to 
 the right at the bottom and soon found herself at the high studio 
 door. 
 
 As she raised her hand to the bell she flushed with passion. 
 
 ' I'll let him see whether I'll go home whining to Dora, while 
 he's amusing himself,' she said under her breath. 
 
 The door was opened to her by Montjoie himself, in his work- 
 ing blouse, a cigarette in his mouth. His hands and dress were 
 daubed with clay, and he had the brutal look of a man in the 
 blackest of tempers. But no sooner did he perceive Louie Grieve's 
 stately figure in the passage than his expression changed. 
 
 ' You — you here ! and for a sitting ? ' 
 
 She nodded, smiling. Her look had an excitement which he 
 perceived at once. His eye travelled to the white drapery and 
 the beautiful bare arm emerging from the cloak ; then he looked 
 behind her for Madame Cervin. 
 
 No one— except this Maenad in a waterproof. Montjoie threw 
 away his cigarette. 
 
 ' Entrez, entrez, mademoiselle ! ' he said, bowing low to her. 
 'When the heavens are blackest, then they open. I was in a 
 mind to wring the Maenad's neck three minutes ago. Come and 
 save your portrait ! ' 
 
 He led her in through the ante-room into the large outer 
 studio. There stood the Maenad on her revolving stand, and 
 there was the raised platform for the model. A heap of clay was 
 to one side, and water was dripping from the statue on to the 
 floor. The studio light had a clear evenness ; and, after the heat 
 outside, the coolness of the great bare room was -refreshing. 
 
 They stood and looked at the statue together, Louie still in her 
 cloak. Montjoie pointed out to her that he was at work on the 
 shoulders and the left arm, and was driven mad by the difficulties 
 of the pose. ' Tonnerre de Dieu ! when I heard you knock, I felt 
 like a murderer ; I rushed out to let fly at someone. And there 
 was my Maenad on the mat ! — all by herself, too, without that 
 little piece of ugliness from upstairs behind her. I little thought 
 this day— this cursed day— was to turn out so. I thought you 
 were tired of the poor sculptor — that you had deserted him for 
 good and all. Ah ! deesse—Je vous salue ! ' 
 
 He drew back from her, scanning her from head to foot, a new 
 tone in his voice, a new boldness in his deep-set eyes— eyes which 
 were already old. Louie stood instinctively shrinking, yet smil- 
 ing, understanding something of what he said, guessing more. 
 
 There was a bull-necked strength about the man, with his 
 dark, square, weather-beaten head, and black eyebrows, which 
 made her afraid, in spite of the smooth and deprecating manner 
 in which he generally spoke to women. But her fear of him was 
 not unpleasant to her. She liked him ; she would have liked 
 above all to quarrel with him ; she felt that he was her match. 
 
334 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 He stepped forward, touched her arm, and took a tone of 
 command. 
 
 ' Quick, mademoiselle, with that cloak ! ' 
 
 She mounted the steps, threw off her cloak, and fell into her 
 attitude without an instant's hesitation. Montjoie, putting his 
 hands over his eyes to look at her, exclaimed under his breath. 
 
 It was perfectly true that, libertine as he was, he had so far 
 felt no inclination whatever to make love to the English girl. Nor 
 was the effect merely the result, of Madame Cervin's vigilance. 
 Personally, for all her extraordinary beauty, his new model left 
 him cold. Originally he had been a man of the most complex 
 artistic instincts, the most delicate and varied perceptions. They 
 and his craftsman's skill were all foundering now in a sea of evil 
 living. But occasionally they were active still, and they had 
 served him for the instant detection of that common egotistical 
 paste of which Louie Grieve was made. He would have liked to 
 chain her to his model's platform, to make her the slave of his 
 fevered degenerating art. But she had- no thrill for him. While 
 he was working from her his mind was often running on some 
 little grisette or other, who had not half Louie Grieve's physical 
 perfection, but who had charm, provocation, wit — all that makes 
 the natural heritage of the French woman, of whatever class. At 
 the same time it had been an irritation and an absurdity to him 
 that, under Madame Cervin's eye, he had been compelled to treat 
 her with the ceremonies due to une jeune fllle honiiete. For he 
 had at once detected the girl's reckless temper. From what social 
 stratum did she come — she and the brother ? In her, at least, 
 there was some wild blood ! When he sounded Madame Cervin, 
 however, she, with her incurable habit of vain mendacity, had 
 only put her lodger in a light which Montjoie felt certain was a 
 false one. 
 
 But this morning ! Never had she been so superb, so inspir- 
 ing ! All the vindictive passion, all the rage with David that was 
 surging within her, did but give the more daring and decision 
 to her attitude, and a wilder power to her look. Moreover, the 
 boldness of her unaccompanied visit to him provoked and 
 challenged him. He looked at her irresolutely ; then with an 
 effort he turned to his statue and fell to work. The touch of the 
 clay, the reaction from past despondency prevailed ; before half 
 an hour was over he was more enamoured of his task than he had 
 ever yet been, and more fiercely bent on success. Insensibly as 
 the time passed, his tone with her became more and more short, 
 brusque, imperious. Once or twice he made some rough alteration 
 in the pose, with the overbearing haste of a man who can hardly 
 bear to leave the work under his hands even for an instant. 
 When he first assumed this manner Louie opened her great eyes. 
 Then it seemed to please her. She felt no regret whatever for the 
 smooth voice ; the more dictatorial he became the better she liked 
 it, and the more submissive she was. 
 
 This went on for about a couple of hours — an orgie of work 
 
CiiAP, VII STORM AND STRESS 335 
 
 on his side, of excited persistence on hers. Her rival in the clay 
 grew in life and daring under her eyes, rousing in her, whenever 
 she w^as allowed to rest a minute and look, a new intoxication 
 with herself. They hardly talked. He was too much absorbed 
 in what he was doing ; and she also was either bent upon her 
 task, or choked by wild gusts of jealous and revengeful thought. 
 Every now^ and then as she stood there, in her attitude of eager 
 listening, the wall of the studio would fade before her eyes, and 
 she would see nothing but a torturing vision of David at Fontaine- 
 bleau, wrapt up in 'that creature,' and only remembering his 
 sister to rejoice that he had shaken her off. Ah ! How could 
 she sufficiently avenge herself ! how could she throw all his 
 canting counsels to the winds with most emphasis and effect ! 
 
 At last a curious thing happened. Was it mere nervous 
 reaction after such a strain of will and passion, or was it the sud- 
 den emergence of something in the sister which was also common 
 to the brother — a certain tragic susceptibility, the capacity for a 
 wild melancholy? For, in an instant, while she was thinking 
 vaguely of Madame Cervin and her money affairs, despair seized 
 her — shuddering, measureless despair — rushing in upon her, and 
 sweeping away everything else before it. She tottered under it, 
 fighting down the clutch of it as long as she could. It had no 
 words, it was like a physical agony. All that was clear to her for 
 one lurid moment was that she would like to kill herself. 
 
 The studio swam before her, and she dropped into the chair 
 behind her. 
 
 Montjoie gave a protesting cry. 
 
 ' Twenty minutes more ! — Courage ! ' 
 
 Then, as she made no answer, he went up to her and put a 
 violent hand on her shoulder — beside himself. 
 
 ' You sfiall not be tired, I tell you. Look up ! look at me ! ' 
 
 Under the stimulus of his master's tone she slowly recovered 
 herself — her great black eyes lifted. He gazed into them steadily; 
 his voice sank. 
 
 'You belong to me,' he said with breathless rapidity. 'Do 
 you understand ? What is the matter with you ? What are those 
 tears ? ' 
 
 A cry of nature broke from her. 
 
 ' My brother has left me — with that girl ! ' 
 
 She breathed out the words into the ears of the man stooping 
 towards her. His great brow lifted — he gave a little laugh. 
 Then eagerly, triumphantly, he seized her again by the arms. 
 'J. la bonne lieure ! Then it is plainer still. You belong to me 
 and I to you. In that statue we live and die together. Another 
 hour, and it will be a masterpiece. Come ! one more ! ' 
 
 She drank in his tone of mad excitement as though it were 
 wine, and it revived her. The strange grip upon her heart re- 
 laxed ; the nightmare was dashed aside. Her colour came back, 
 and, pushing him proudly away from her, she resumed her pose 
 without a word. 
 
THiE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ill 
 
 CHAPTER YIII 
 
 * Do you know, sir, that that good woman has brought in the 
 soup for the second time ? I can see her fidgeting about the table 
 through the window. If we go on like this, she will depart and 
 leave us to wait on ourselves. Then see if you get any soup out 
 of me.'' 
 
 David, for all answer, put his arm close round the speaker. 
 She threw herself back against him, smiling into his face. But 
 neither could see the other, for it was nearly dark, and tlirough 
 the acacia trees above them the stars glimmered in the warm sky. 
 To their left, across a small grass-plat, was a tiny thatched house, 
 buried under a great vine which embowered it all from top to 
 base, and overhung by trees which drooped on to the roof, and 
 swept the windows with their branches. Through a lower window, 
 opening on to the gravel path, could be seen a small bare room, 
 with a paper of coarse brow^n and blue pattern, brightly illumi- 
 nated by a paraffin lamp, which also threw a square of light far 
 out into the garden. The lamp stood on a table which was spread 
 for a meal, and a stout woman, in a white cap and blue cotton 
 apron, could be seen moving beside it. 
 
 ' Come in ! ' said Elise, springing to her feet, and laying a 
 compelling hand on her companion. ' Get it over ! The moon 
 is w^aiting for us out there ! ' 
 
 And she pointed to where, beyond the roofs of the neighbour- 
 ing houses, rose the dark fringe of trees which marked the edge 
 of the forest. 
 
 They went in, hand in hand, and sat opposite each other at 
 the little rickety table, while the peasant woman from whom they 
 had taken the house waited upon them. The day before, after 
 looking at the auherge, and finding it full of artists come down 
 to look for spring subjects in the forest, they had wandered on 
 searching for something less public, more poetical. And they 
 had stumbled upon this tiny overgrown house in its tangled 
 garden. The woman to whom it belonged had let it for the 
 season, but till the beginning of her 'let ' there was a month ; 
 and, after much persuasion, she had consented to allow the 
 strangers to hire it and her services as homip, by the week, for a 
 sum more congruous with the old and primitive days of Barbizon 
 than with the later claims of the little place to fashion and fame. 
 As the lovers stood together in the salon, exclaiming with delight 
 at its bare floor, its low ceihng, its old bureau, its hard sofa with 
 the Empire lei^s, and the dilapidated sphinxes on the arms, the 
 owmer of the house looked them up and down, from the door, 
 with comprehending eyes. Barbizon had known adventures like 
 this before ! 
 
 But she might think what she liked ; it mattered nothing to 
 her lodgers. To ' a pair of romantics out of date,' the queer 
 overgrown place she owned w^as perfection, and they took pos- 
 
CHAP. Yiii STORM AND STRESS 837 
 
 session of it in a dream of excitement raid joy. From the top 
 loft, still bare and echoing, where the highly respectable summer 
 tenants were to put up the cots of their children, to the outside 
 den which served for a kitchen, whence a wooden ladder led to a 
 recess among the rafters, occupied by Madame Pyat as a bed- 
 room ; from the masses of Virginia creeper on the thatched roof 
 to the thicket of acacias and roses on the front grass-plat, and 
 the high flowery wall which shut them off from the curious eyes 
 of the street, it was all, in the lovers' feeling, the predestined 
 setting for such an idyll as theirs. 
 
 And if this was so in the hot mornings and afternoons, how 
 much more in the heavenly evenings and nights, when the forest 
 lay whispering and murmuring under the moonlight, and they, 
 wandering together arm in arm under the gaunt and twisted 
 oaks of the Bas Breau, or among the limestone blocks which strew 
 the heights of this strange woodland, felt themselves part of the 
 world about them, dissolved into its quivering harmonious life, 
 shades among its shadows ! 
 
 On this particular evening, after the hurried and homely 
 meal, David brought Elise's large black hat, and the lace scarf 
 which had bewitched him at St. Germain — oh, the joy of hand- 
 ling such things in this familiar, sacrilegious way ! — and they 
 strolled out into the long uneven street beyond their garden wall, 
 on their way to the forest. The old inn to the left was in a 
 clatter. Two diligences had just arrived, and the horses were 
 drooping and panting at the door. A maidservant was lighting 
 guests across the belittered courtyard with a flaring candle. 
 There was a red glimpse of the kitchen with its brass and copper 
 pans, and on the bench outside the gateway sat a silent trio of 
 artists, who had worked well and dined abundantly, and were 
 now enjoying their last smoke before the sleep, to which they 
 were already nodding, should overtake them. The two lovers 
 stepped quickly past, making with all haste for that leafy mystery 
 beyond cleft by the retreating whiteness of the Fontainebleau 
 road — into which the village melted on either side. 
 
 Such moonlight ! All the tones of the street, its white and 
 greys, the reddish brown of the roofs, were to be discerned under 
 it ; and outside in the forest it was a phantasmagoria, an intoxi- 
 cation. The little paths they were soon threading, paths strewn 
 with limestone dust, wound like white threads among the rocks 
 and through the blackness of the firs. They climbed them hand 
 in hand, and soon they were on a height looking over a great 
 hollow of the forest to the plain beyond, as it were a vast cup 
 overflowing with moonlight and melting into a silver sky. The 
 width of the heavens, the dim immensity of the earth, drove them 
 close together in a delicious silence. The girl put the warmth of 
 her lover's arm between her and the overpowering greatness of a 
 too august nature. The man, on the other hand, rising in this to 
 that higher stature which was truly his, felt himself carried out 
 into nature on the wave of his own boundless emotion. That 
 
338 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 cold Deism he had held so loosely broke into passion. The 
 humblest phrases of worship, of entreaty, swept across the brain. 
 'Could one ever have guessed,' he asked her, his words 
 stumbling and broken, ' that such happiness was possible ? ' 
 She shook her head, smiling at him. 
 
 ' Yes, certainly ! — if one has read poems and novels. Noth- 
 ing to me is ever more than I expect, — generally less.' 
 
 Then she broke off hesitating, and hid her face against his 
 breast. A pang smote him. He cried out in the old common- 
 places that he was not worthy, that she must tire of him, that 
 there was nothing in him to hold, to satisfy her. 
 
 'And three weeks ago,' she said, interrupting him, 'we had 
 never heard each other's names. Strange— life is strange ! 
 Well, now,' and she quickly drew herself away from him, and 
 holding him by both hands lightly swung his arms backwards 
 and forwards, ' this can't last for ever, you know. In the first 
 place— we shall die:' and throwing herself back, she pulled 
 against him childishly, a spray of ivy he had wound round her 
 hat drooping with fantastic shadows over her face and neck. 
 
 'Do you know what you are like?' he asked her, evading 
 what she had said, while his eyes devoured her. 
 'No!' 
 
 'You are like that picture in the Louvre, — Da Vinci's St. 
 John, that you say should be a Bacchus.' 
 
 ' Which means that you find me a queer, — heathenish, — sort 
 of creature ? ' she said, still laughing and swaying. ' So I am. 
 Take care ! Well now, a truce to love-making ! I am tired of 
 being meek and charming— this night excites me. Come and 
 see the oaks in the Bas Breau.' 
 
 And running down the rocky path before them she led him 
 in and out through twisted leafy w^ays, till at last they stood 
 among the blasted giants of the forest, the oaks of the Bas 
 Breau. In the emboldening daylight, David, with certain 
 English wood scenes in his mind, would swear the famous 
 trees of Fontainebleau had neither size nor age to speak of. 
 But at night they laid their avenging spell upon him. They 
 stood so finely on the broken ground, each of them with a kingly 
 space about him ; there was so wild a fantasy in their gnarled 
 and broken limbs ; and under the night their scanty crowns of 
 leaf, from which the sap was yearly ebbing, had so lofty a 
 remoteness. 
 
 They found a rocky seat in front of a certain leafless monster, 
 which had been struck by lightning in a winter storm years 
 before, and rent from top to bottom. The bare trunk with its 
 torn branches yawning stood out against the rest, a black and 
 melancholy shape, preaching desolation. But Elise studied it 
 coolly. 
 
 ' I know that tree by heart,' she declared. ' Corot, Rousseau, 
 Diaz — it has served them all. I could draw it with my eyes 
 ^hut.' 
 
CHAP. VIII STORM AND STRESS 339 
 
 Then with the mention of drawing she began to twist her 
 fingers restlessly. 
 
 'I wonder what the concoiirs was to-day,' she said. 'Now 
 that I am away that Breal girl will carry off everything. There 
 will be no bearing her— she was never second till I came.' 
 
 David took a very scornful view of this contingency. 'When 
 you go back you will beat them all again ; let them have their 
 few weeks' respite ! You told me yesterday you had forgotten 
 the atelier.'' 
 
 ' Did I ? ' she said with a strange little sigh. ' It wasn't true 
 — I haven't.' 
 
 With a sudden whim she pulled off his broad hat and threw 
 it down. Reaching forward she took his head between her 
 hands, and arranged his black curls about his brow in a way to 
 suit her. Then, still holding him, she drew back with her head 
 on one side to look at him. The moon above them, now at its 
 full zenith of brightness, threw the whole massive face into 
 strong rehef, and her own look melted into delight. 
 
 'There is no model in Paris,' she declared, 'with so fine a 
 head.' Then with another sigh she dropped her hold, and 
 propping her chin on her hands, she stared straight before her 
 in silence. 
 
 ' Do you imagine you are the first V she asked him presently, 
 with a queer abruptness. 
 There was a pause. 
 
 'You told me so,' he said, at last, his voice quivering; 
 ' don't deceive me— there is no fun in it — I believe it all ! ' 
 
 She laughed, and did not answer for a moment. He put out 
 his covetous arms and would have drawn her to him, but she 
 withdrew herself. 
 
 ' What did I tell you ? I don't remember. In the first place 
 there was a cousin — there is always a cousin ! ' 
 
 He stared at her, his face flushing, and asked her slowly 
 what she meant. 
 
 ' You have seen his portrait in my room,' she said coolly. 
 He racked his brains. 
 
 ' Oh ! that portrait on the wall,' he burst out at last, in vain 
 trying for a tone as self-possessed as her own, ' that man wdth a 
 short beard ? ' 
 She nodded. 
 
 ' Oh, he is not bad at all, my cousin. He is the son of that 
 uncle and aunt I told you of. Only while they were rusting in 
 the Gironde, he was at Paris learning to be a doctor, and enlarging 
 his mind by coming to see me every week. When they came up 
 to town to put in a claim to me, tliey thought me a lump of 
 wickedness, as I told you ; I made their hair stand on end. But 
 Guillaume knew a good deal more about me ; and lie was not 
 scandalised at all ; oh dear, no. He used to come every Saturday 
 and sit in a corner while I painted— a long lanky creature, 
 rather good looking, but with spectacles— he has ruined his eyes 
 
340 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 with reading. Oh, he would have married me any day, and let 
 his relations shriek as they please ; so don't suppose. Monsieur 
 David, that I have had no chances of respectability, or that my 
 life began with you. ! ' She threw him a curious look. 
 
 'Why do you talk about him?' cried David, beside himself. 
 ' What is your cousin to either of us ? ' 
 
 ' I shall talk of what I like,' she said wilfully, clasping her 
 hands round her knees with the gesture of an obstinate 
 child. 
 
 David stared away into the black shadow of the oaks, marvel- 
 hng at himself— at the strength of that sudden smart within 
 him, that half-frenzied restlessness and dread which some of her 
 lightest sayings had the power to awaken in him. 
 
 Then he repented him, and turning, bent his head over the 
 little hands and kissed them passionately. She did not move or 
 speak. He came close to her, trying to decipher her face in the 
 moonlight. For the first time since that night in the studio there 
 was a film of sudden tears in the wide grey eyes. He caught her 
 in his arms and demanded why. 
 
 ' You quarrel with me and dictate to me,' she cried, wrestling 
 with herself, choked by some inexplicable emotion, ' when I have 
 given you everything — when I am alone in the world with you— 
 at your mercy— I who have been so proud, have held my head so 
 high ! ' 
 
 He bent over her, pouring into her ear all the words that 
 passion could find or forge. Her sudden attack upon him, poor 
 fellow, seemed to him neither unjust nor extravagant. She had 
 given him everything, and who and what was he that she should 
 have thrown him so much as a look ! 
 
 Gradually her mysterious irritation died away. The gentleness 
 of the summer nigli\, the serenity of the moonlight, the sea-like 
 murmur of the fo'i'est — these things sank little by httle into their 
 hearts, and in the calm they made, youth and love spoke again— 
 siren voices !— -with the old magic. And when at last they loi- 
 tered home, they moved in a trance of feeling which wanted no 
 words. The moon dropped slowly into the western trees ; mid- 
 night chimes came to them from the villages which ring the 
 forest ; and a playing wind sprang up about them, cooling the 
 girPs hot cheeks, and freshening the verdurous ways through 
 which they passed. 
 
 But in the years which came after, whenever David allowed 
 his mind to dwell for a short shuddering instant on these days at 
 Fontainebleau, it often occurred to him to wonder whether during 
 their wild dream he had ever for one hour been truly happy. 
 At the height of their passion had there been any of that exqui- 
 site give and take between them which may mark the simplest 
 love of the rudest lovers, but which is in its essence moral, a 
 thing not of the senses but of the soul? There is nothing else 
 which is vital to love. Without it passion dies into space like 
 
CHAP. VIII STORM AND STRESS 341 
 
 the flaming corona of the sun. With it, the. humblest hearts may 
 ' bear it out even to the edge of doom.' 
 
 There can be no question that after the storm of feehng, ex- 
 citement, pity, which had swept her into his arms, he gained 
 upon her vagrant fancy for a time day by day. Seen close, his 
 social simplicity, his delicately tempered youth had the effect of 
 great refinement. He bad in him much of the peasant nature, 
 but so modified by fine perception and wide-ranging emotion, 
 that what had been coarseness in his ancestors was in him only 
 a certain rich savour and fulness of being. His mere sympathetic, 
 sensitive instinct had developed in him all the essentials of good 
 manners, and books, poetry, observation had done the rest. 
 
 So that in the little matters of daily contact he touched and 
 charmed her unexpectedly. He threw no veil whatever over his 
 tradesman's circumstances, and enjoyed trying to make her 
 understand what had been the conditions and prospects of his 
 Manchester life. He had always, indeed, conceived his book- 
 seller's profession with a certain dignity ; and he was secretly 
 proud, with a natural conceit, of the efforts and ability which had 
 brought him so rapidly to the front. How oddly the Manchester 
 names and facts sounded in the forest air ! She would sit with 
 her little head on one side listening ; but privately he suspected 
 that she understood very little of it ; that she accepted him and 
 his resources very much in the vague with the insouciance of 
 Bohemia. 
 
 He himself, however, was by no means without plans for the 
 future. In the first flush of his triumphant passion he had won 
 from her the promise of a month alone with him, in or near 
 Fontainebleau — her own suggestion — after which she w^as to go 
 back in earnest to her painting, and he was to return to Man- 
 chester and make arrangements for their future life together. 
 Louie must be provided for, and after that his ideas about him- 
 self were already tolerably clear. In one of his free intervals, 
 during his first days in Paris, he had had a long conversation 
 one evening with the owner of an important bookshop on the 
 Quai St. -Michel. The man badly wanted an English clerk with 
 English connections. David made certain of the opening, should 
 he choose to apply for it. And if not there, then somewhere 
 else. With the consciousness of capital, experience, and brains, 
 to justify him, he had no fears. Meanwhile, John should keep 
 on the Manchester shop, and he, David, would go over two or 
 three times a year to stock-take and make up accounts. John 
 was as honest as the day, and had already learnt much. 
 
 But although his old self had so far reasserted itself ; 
 although the contriving activity of the brain was all still there, 
 ready to be brought to bear on this new life when it was 
 wanted ; Elise could never mistake him, or the true character of 
 this crisis of his youth. The self-surrender of passion had trans- 
 formed, developed him to an amazing extent, and it found its 
 natural language. As she grew deeper and deeper into the boy's 
 
342 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 heart, and as the cloud of diffidence which had enwrapped him 
 since he came to Paris gave way, so that even in this brilliant 
 France he ventured at last to express his feelings and ideas, the 
 poet and thinker in him grew before her eyes. She felt a new 
 consideration, a new intellectual respect for him. 
 
 But above all his tenderness, his womanish consideration and 
 sweetness amazed her. She had been hotly wooed now and then, 
 but with no one, not even ' the cousin,' had she ever been on 
 terms of real intimacy. And for the rest she had lived a rough- 
 and-tumble, independent life, defending herself first of all 
 against the big boys of the farm, then against her father, or her 
 comrades in the atelier^ or her Bohemian suitors. The ingenuity 
 of service David showed in shielding and waiting upon her bewil- 
 dered her — had, for a time, a profound effect upon her. 
 
 And yet ! — all the while — what jars and terrors from the very 
 beginning ! He seemed often to be groping in the dark with her. 
 Whole tracts of her thought and experience were mysteries to 
 him, and grew but little plainer with their new relation. Little 
 as he knew or would have admitted it, the gulf of nationality 
 yawned deep between them. And those artistic ambitions of 
 hers — as soon as they re-emerged on the other side of the first 
 intoxication of passion — they were as much of a jealousy and a 
 dread to him as before. His soul was as alive as it had ever 
 been to the threat and peril of them. 
 
 Their relation itself, too — to her, perhaps, secretly a guarantee 
 — was to him a perpetual restlessness. L'union libre as the 
 French artist understands it was not in his social tradition, what- 
 ever might be his literary assimilation of French ideas. He 
 might passionately adopt and defend it, because it was her will ; 
 none the less was he, at the bottom of his heart, both ashamed 
 and afraid because of it. From the very beginning he had let 
 her know that she had only to say the word and he was ready to 
 marry her instantly. But she put him aside with an impatient 
 wave of her little hand, a nervous, defiant look in her grey eyes. 
 Yet one day, when in the little village shop of Barbizon, a woman 
 standing beside Elise at the counter looked her insolently over 
 from head to foot, and took no notice of a question addressed to 
 her on the subject of one of the forest routes, the girl felt an 
 unexpected pang of resentment and shame. 
 
 One afternoon, in a lonely part of the forest, she strained her 
 foot by treading on a loose stone among the rocks. Tired with 
 long rambling and jarred by the shock she sank down, looking 
 white and ready to cry. Pain generally crushed and demoralised 
 her. She was capable, indeed, of setting the body at defiance on 
 occasion ; but, as a rule, she had no physical fortitude, and did 
 not pretend to it. 
 
 David was much perplexed. So far as he knew, they were 
 not near any of the huts which are dotted over the forest and 
 
CHAP. VIII STORM AND STRESS 343 
 
 provide the tourist with consommations and carved articles. 
 There was no water wherewith to revive her or to bandage the 
 foot, for Fontainebleaa has no streams. All he could do was to 
 carry her. And this he did, with the utmost skill, and with a 
 leaping thrill of tenderness which made itself felt by the little 
 elfish creature in the clasp of his arms, and in the happy leaning 
 of his dark cheek to hers, as she held him round the neck. 
 
 ' Paul and Virginia ! ' she said to him, laughing. " He lore 
 her in his arms!''—?i\\ heroes do it— in reality, most women 
 would break the hero's back. ' Confess I am even lighter than 
 you thought ! ' 
 
 ' As light as Venus' doves,' he swore to her. * Bid me carry 
 you to Paris and see.' 
 
 ' Paris ! ' At the mention of it she fell silent, and the corners 
 of her mouth drooped into gravity. But he strode happily on, 
 perceiving nothing. 
 
 Then when they got home, she limping through the village, 
 he put on the airs of a surgeon, ran across to the grocer, who 
 kept a tiny pharmacie in one corner of his miscellaneous shop, 
 and confeiTcd with him to such effect that the injured limb was 
 soon lotioned and bandaged in a manner which made David inor- 
 dinately proud of himself. Once, as he was examining his handi- 
 work, it occurred to him that it was Mr. Ancrum who had taught 
 him to use his fingers neatly. Mr. Ancrum ! At the thought of 
 his name the young man felt an inward shrinking, as though 
 from contact with a cold and alien order of things. How hard 
 to realise, indeed, that the same world contained Manchester with 
 its factories and chapels, and this perfumed forest, this little 
 overgrown house ! 
 
 Afterwards, as he sat beside her, reading, as quiet as a 
 mouse, so that she might sleep if tho tumble-down Empire sofa 
 did but woo her that way, she suddenly put up her arm and drew 
 him down to her. 
 
 ' Who taught you all this— this tenderness ? ' she said to him, 
 in a curious wistful tone, as though her question were the out- 
 come of a long reverie. ' Was it your mother ? ' 
 
 David started. He had never spoken to her or to anyone of 
 his mother, and he could not bring himself to do so now. 
 
 ' My mother died when I was five years old,' he said reluc- 
 tantly. ' Why don't you go to sleep, little restless thing ? Is the 
 bandage right ? ' , . , ^ 
 
 'Quite. I can imagine,' she said presently in a low tone, 
 letting him go, ' I can imagine one might grow so dependent on 
 all this cherishing, so horribly dependent ! ' 
 
 ' Well, and why not ? ' he said, taking up her hand and kissmg 
 it. ' What are we made for, but to be your bondslaves ? ' 
 
 She drew her hand away, and let it fall beside her with an 
 impatient sigh. The poor boy looked at her with frightened eyes. 
 Then some quick instinct came to the rescue, and his expression 
 changed completely. 
 
344 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 'I have thougbt it all out,' he began, speaking with a brisk, 
 business-like air, ' what I shall do at Manchester, and when I get 
 back here.' 
 
 And he hung over her, chattering and laughing about his 
 plans. What did she say to a garret and a studio somewhere 
 near the Qiiai St. -Michel, in the Quartier Latin, rooms whence 
 they might catch a glimpse of the Seine and Notre-Dame, where 
 she would be within easy reach of Taranne's studio, and the 
 Luxembourg, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and the Louvre, 
 rooms where after their day's work they might meet, shut out 
 the world and let in heaven — a home consecrate at once to art 
 and love ? 
 
 The quick bright words flowed without a check ; his eye 
 shone as though it caught the light of the future. But she lay 
 turned away from him, silent, till at last she stopped him with a 
 restless gesture. 
 
 ' Don't— don't talk like that ! As soon as one dares to reckon 
 on Him — le bon T)ieu strikes — just to let one know one's place. 
 And don't drive me mad about my art ! You saw me try to 
 draw this morning ; you might be quiet about it, I think, par 
 pitie ! If I ever had any talent — which is not likely, or I should 
 have had some notices of my pictures by this time — it is all dead 
 and done for.' 
 
 And turning quite away from him, sbe buried her face in the 
 cushion. 
 
 ' Look here,' he said to her, smiling and stooping, ' shall I 
 tell you something ? I forgot it till now.' 
 
 She shook her head, but he went on : 
 
 ' You remember this morning while I was waiting for you, 
 I went into the inn to ask about the way to the Gorges 
 d'Affremont. I had your painting things with me. I didn't 
 know whether you wanted them or not, and I laid them down on 
 the table in the eour, while I went in to speak to madame. 
 Well, when I came out, there were a couple of artists there, 
 those men who have been here all the time painting, and they 
 had undone the strap and were looking at the sketch — you know, 
 that bit of beechwood with the rain coming on. I rushed at 
 them. But they only grinned, and one of them, the young man 
 with the fair moustache, sent you his compliments. You must 
 have, he said, " very remarkable dispositions indeed." Perhaps 
 I looked as if I knew that before ! Whose pupil were you ? 1 
 told him, and he said I was to tell \o\\ to stick to Taranne. You 
 were one of the peintres cle temperament, and it was they 
 especially who must learn their grammar, and learn it from the 
 classics ; and the other man., the old bear who never speaks to 
 anybody, nodded and looked at the sketch again, and said it was 
 "amusing — not bad at all," and you might make something of 
 it for the next Salon.' 
 
 Cunning David ! By this time Elise had her arm round his 
 neck, and was devouring his face with her keen eyes. Every- 
 
CHAP. VIII STORM AND STRESS 345 
 
 thing was shaken off-the pain of ^er foot melanchol>, fatigue 
 -and F.ll tlie horizons of the soul were bright again. She had a 
 new idea t-what if she were to combine his portrait with the 
 beech^ood sketch, and make something large and important of 
 ff ? TTp Ind the head of a poet-the forest was m its most 
 poeti ? mlent Why not pose him at the foot of the great 
 beech to tiieleft, give him a book dropping from his hand, and 
 
 ''\m'^?rrest' of the day she talked or sketched ii^^cessantly 
 She would hardly be persuaded to give her bandaged foot the 
 Sternoon's rest, and by eight o'clock next morning they were 
 nif to the forest, she limping along with a stick. ^ 
 
 T^^^ three days of perfect bliss followed The picture 
 nrom sed excellentlv. Elise was in the most hopeful mood, alert 
 S merry as a bird. And when they w^re driven home by 
 huter he work still went on. For they had unied their op 
 attic into a studio, and here as long as the light lasted she toded 
 SnVi"s?lin' with the head and the difficulties of the figure. But 
 2^'f It^nnined to make it substantially a picture enplein 
 air Her mind was full of all the daring conceptions and ideals 
 :?^ich were then emerging in art, -%i^^.^^-.%-f ' , ^wt 
 decline of Romanticism. The passion for hght, foi tiuth, was, 
 she eclared penetrating, and revolutionising the who e artistic 
 world Scr^ had a studio to the south; she also would 
 
 ' ^'it'the' en^of the third day she threw herself on him in a 
 passion of gratitude and delight, lifting her soft mouth to be 
 
 ^'^^^Bmbrasse-moi! Emhrasse-moi ! Blague apart-je com- 
 
 ^^^^^^X^^^c^S'aLt their little garden till past mid- 
 night, hand close in hand. She cou d talk of nothing but lei 
 piSture, and he, feeling himself doubly necessary and delightful 
 to her overflowed with happiness and praise. 
 
 But next day things went less well. She was torn, over- 
 come by he difficulties of her task. Working now in the forest 
 now at home, the lights and values ^^^^ ^^^^^'f'^.^X^Z^i 
 tone had neither an indoor nor ^\«^^f ^^^^ ^l,^^^!^l^,^^^^,n ^^^^ 
 renaint certain parts, work only out of ^o^is. Ihen all me 
 tomTnts of the outdoor painter began : wind, which put her m 
 «n^?vous fever and rain, which, after the long spell of fine 
 leather begin to come down on them, and drive them into 
 
 ^^^Soon she was in despair. She had been too ambitious. The 
 lanSeshS have been the principal thing, the figure only 
 ndioated a suggestion in the middle distance. She had carried 
 it too far it fmight with its surroundings ; the pic ure had no 
 unitv no repose. Oh, for some advice ! How cou d one pull 
 sul'^kthiTuirough 'without help? In three minutes Taranne 
 would tell her what was wrong. 
 
346 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iii 
 
 In twenty-four hours more she had fretted herself ill. The 
 picture was there in the corner, turned to the wall ; he could only 
 just prevent her from driving her palette-knife through it. And 
 she was sitting on the edge of the sofa, silent, a book on her 
 knee, her hands hanging beside her, and her feverish eyes w^an- 
 dering — wandering round the room, if only they might escape 
 from David, might avoid seeing him — or so he believed. Horri- 
 ble ! It was borne in upon him that in this moment of despair he 
 was little more to her than the witness, the occasion, of her 
 discomfiture. 
 
 Oh ! his heart was sore. But he could do nothing. Caresses, 
 encouragements, reproaches, were alike useless. For some time 
 she would make no further attempts at drawing ; nor would she 
 be wooed and comforted. She held him passively at arm's 
 length, and he could make nothing of her. It was the middle of 
 their third week ; still almost the half left of this month she had 
 promised him. And already it was clear to him that he and love 
 had lost their first hold, and that she w^as consumed with the 
 unspoken wish to go back to Paris, and the atelier. Ah, no ! — 
 no ! With a fierce yet dumb tenacity he held her to her bargain. 
 Those weeks were his ; they represented his only hope for the 
 future ; she should not have them back. 
 
 But he, too, fell into melancholy and silence, and on the 
 afternoon when this change in him first showed itself she was, 
 for a time, touched, ashamed. A few pale smiles returned for 
 him, and in the evening, as he was sitting by the open window, a 
 newspaper on his knee, staring into vacancy, she came up to him, 
 knelt beside him, and drew his half-reluctant arm about her. 
 Neither said anything, but gradually her presence there, on his 
 breast, thrilled through all his veins, filled his heart to bursting. 
 The paper slid away ; he put both arms about her, and bowed his 
 head on hers. She put up her small hand, and felt the tears on 
 bis cheek. Then a still stronger repentance woke up in her. 
 
 ^ Pauvre enfant!'' she said, pushing herself away from him, 
 and tremulously drying his eyes. ' Poor Monsieur David — I 
 make you very unhappy ! But I warned you— oh, I warned you ! 
 What evil star made you fall in love with me ? ' 
 
 In answer he found such plaintive and passionate things to 
 say to her that she was fairly melted, and in the end there was 
 an effusion on both sides, which seemed to bring back their 
 golden hours. But at bottom, David's sensitive instinct, do what 
 he would to silence it, told him, in truth, that all was changed. 
 He was no longer the happy and triumphant lover. He was the 
 beggar, living upon her alms. 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 Next morning David went across to the village shop to buy some 
 daily necessaries, and found a few newspapers lying on the 
 counter. He bought a Debats, seeing that there was a long 
 
CHAP. IX STORM AND STRESS 347 
 
 critique of the Salon in^it, and hurried home with it to Elise. She 
 tore it open and rushed through the article, putting him aside 
 that he might not look over her. Her face blanched as she read, 
 and at the end she flung the paper from her, and tottering to a 
 chair sat there motionless, staring straight before her. David, 
 beside himself with alarm, and finding caresses of no avail, took 
 up the paper from the floor. 
 
 ' Let it alone ! ' she said to him with a sudden imperiour 
 gesture. ' There is a wiiole paragraph about Breal — her fortune 
 is made. La voila lancee — arrivee I And of me, not a line, not 
 a mention ! Three or four pupils of Taranne — all beginners — 
 but my name — nowhere ! Ah, but no — it is too much ! ' 
 
 Her little foot beat the ground, a hurricane was rising wdthin 
 her. 
 
 David tried to laugh the matter off. ' The man who wrote 
 the wretched thing had been hurried — was an idiot, clearly, and 
 what did one man's opinion matter, even if it were paid for at so 
 much a column ? ' 
 
 'Mais, tais-toi, done f ^ she cried at last, turning upon him in 
 a fury. ' Can't you see that everything for an artist — especially 
 a woman — depends on Wie protections she gets at the beginning? 
 How can a girl — helpless — without friends — make her way by 
 herself? Some one mast hold out a hand, and for me it seems 
 there is no one — no one ! ' 
 
 The outburst seemed to his common sense to imply the most 
 grotesque oblivion of her success in the Salon, of Taranne's kind- 
 ness — the most grotesque sensitiveness to a few casual lines of 
 print. But it wrung his heart to see her agitation, her pale face, 
 the handkerchief she w^as twisting to shreds in her restless hand.<. 
 He came to plead with her — his passion lending him eloquence. 
 Let her but trust herself and her gift. She had the praise of 
 those she revered to go upon. How should the carelessness of a 
 single critic affect her? Imbeciles! — they would be all with her, 
 at her feet, some day. Let her despise them then and now ! But 
 his extravagances only made her impatient. 
 
 ' Nonsense ! ' she said, drawing her hand away from him ; ' I 
 am not made of such superfine stuff — I never pretended to be ! 
 Do you think I should be content to be an unknown genius ? 
 Never ! — I must have my fame counted out to me in good current 
 coin, that all the w^orld may hear and see. It may be vulgar — I 
 don't care ! it is so. Ah., mon Dieu ! ' and she began to pace the 
 room with wild steps, 'and it is my fault — my fault ! If I were 
 there on the spot, I should be remembered — they would have to 
 reckon with me — I could keep my claim in sight. But I have 
 thrown away everything — wasted everything — everything !'' 
 
 He stood with his back to the window, motionless, his hand 
 on the table, stooping a little forward, looking at her with a 
 passion of reproach and misery ; it only angered her ; she lost 
 all self-control, and in one mad moment she avenged on his poor 
 heart all the wounds and vexations of her vanity. Wliy had he 
 
348 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book in 
 
 ever persuaded her ? Why iiad he brought her away and hung a 
 fresh burden on her life which she could never bear? WIjj^ had 
 he done her this irreparable injury — taken all simplicity and 
 directness of aim from her — weakened her energies at their 
 source ? Her only milieu was art, and he had made her desert 
 it ; her only power was the painter's power, and it was crippled, 
 the fresh spring of it was gone. It was because she felt on her 
 the weight of a responsibility, and a claim she was not made for. 
 She was not made for love— for love at least as he understood it. 
 And he had her word, and would hold her to it. It was madness 
 for both of them. It was stifling — killing her ! 
 
 Then she sank on a chair, in a passion of desperate tears. 
 Suddenly, as she sat there, she heard a movement, and looking 
 up she saw David at the door. He turned upon her for an 
 instant, with a dignity so tragic, so true, and yet so young, that 
 she was perforce touched, arrested. She held out a treihbling 
 hand, made a little cry. But he closed the door softly, and was 
 gone. She half raised herself, then fell back again. 
 
 'If he had beaten me,' she said to herself with a strange 
 smile, ' I could have loved him. 3£ais ! ' 
 
 She was all day alone. When he came back it was already 
 evening ; the stars shone in the June sky, but the sunset light 
 was still in the street and on the upper windows of the little 
 house. As he opened the garden gate and shut it behind him, 
 he saw the gleam of a lamp behind the acacia, and a light figure 
 beside it. He stood a moment wrestling with himself, for he was 
 wearied out, and felt as if he could bear no more. Then he 
 moved slowly on. 
 
 Elise was sitting beside the lamp, her head bent over some- 
 thing dark upon her lap. She had not heard the gate open, and 
 she did not hear his steps upon the grass. He came closer, and 
 saw, to his amazement, that she was busy with a coat of his — an 
 old coat, in the sleeve of which he had torn a great rent the day 
 before, while he was dragging her and himself through some 
 underwood in the forest. She — who loathed all womanly arts, 
 who had often boasted to him that she hardly knew how to use a 
 needle ! 
 
 In moving nearer, he brushed against the shrubs, and she 
 heard him. She turned her head, smiling. In the mingled light 
 she looked like a little white ghost, she was so pale and her eyes 
 so heavy. When she saw him, she raised her finger with a 
 childish, aggrieved air, and put it to her lips, rubbing it softly 
 against them. 
 
 * It does prick so ! ' she said plaintively. 
 
 He came to sit beside her, his chest heaving. 
 
 ' Why do you do that— for me ? ' 
 
 She shrugged her shoulders and worked on without speaking. 
 Presently she laid down her needle and surveyed him. 
 
 ' Where have you been all day ? Have you eaten nothing, 
 poor friend ? ' 
 
CHAP. IX STORM AND STRESS 349 
 
 He tried to remember. 
 
 ' I think not ; I have been in the forest.' 
 
 A little quiver ran over her face ; she pulled at her needle 
 violently and broke the thread. 
 
 ' Finished ! ' she said, throwing down the coat and springing 
 up. 'Don't tell your tailor who did it ! I am for perfection in 
 all things — a has V amateur ! Come in, it is supper-time past. I 
 will go and hurry Madame Pyat. Tii dots avoir une faim de 
 loup. ' 
 
 He shook his head, smiling sadly. 
 
 ' I tell you, you are hungry, you shall be hungry ! ' she cried, 
 suddenly flinging her arm round his neck, and nestling her fair 
 head against his slioulder. Her voice was half a sob. 
 
 ' Oh, so I am I — so I am ! ' he said, wdth a wild emphasis, and 
 would have caught her to him. But she slipped aw^ay and ran 
 before him to the house, turning at the window with the sweet- 
 est, frankest gesture to bid him follow. 
 
 They passed the evening close together, she on a stool leaning 
 against his knee, he reading aloud Alfred de Musset's Nidt de 
 Mai. At one moment she was all absorbed in the verse, carried 
 away by it ; great battle-cry tliat it is ! calling the artist from 
 the miseries of his own petty fate to the lordship of life and 
 nature as a whole ; the next she had snatched the book out of 
 his hands and was correcting his accent, bidding him speak after 
 her, put his lips so. ISTever had she been so charming. It was 
 the coaxing charm of the softened child that cannot show its 
 penitence enough. Every now and then she fell to pouting 
 because she could not move him to gaiety. But in reality his 
 sad and passive gentleness, the niask of feelings which would 
 otherwise have been altogetlier beyond his control, served him 
 with her better than any gaiety could have done. 
 
 Gaiety ! it seemed to him his heart was broken. 
 
 At night, after a troubled sleep, he suddenly woke, and 
 sprang up in an agony. Gone! was she gone already ? For that 
 was what her sweet ways meant. Ah, he had known it all 
 along ! 
 
 Where was she? His wild eyes for a second or two saw 
 nothing but the landscape of his desolate dream. Then gradually 
 the familiar forms of the room emerged from the gloom, and 
 there — against the further wall — she lay, so still, so white, so 
 gracious ! Her childish arm, bare to the elbow, was thrown 
 round her head, her soft waves of hair made a confusion on the 
 pillow. After her long day of emotion she was sleeping pro- 
 foundly. Whatever cruel secret her heart might hold, she was 
 there still, his yet. for a few hours and days. He was persuaded 
 in his own mind that her penitence had been the mere fruit of a 
 compromise with herself, their month had still eight days to run, 
 then — adieu! Art and liberty should reclaim their own. Mean- 
 while why torment the poor boy, who must any way take it 
 hardly ? 
 
350 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVP: book hi 
 
 He lay there for long, raised upon his arm, his haggard look 
 fixed on the sleeping form which by-and-by the dawn illuminated. 
 His life was concentrated in that form, that light breath. He 
 thought with repulsion and loathing of all that had befallen 
 him before he saw her— with anguish and terror of those days 
 and nights to come when he should have lost her. For in the 
 deep stillness of the rising day there fell on him the strangest 
 certainty of this loss. That gift of tragic prescience which was 
 in his blood had stirred in him— he knew his fate. Perhaps the 
 gift itself was but the fruit of a rare power of self- vision, self- 
 appraisement. He saw and cursed his own timid and ignorant 
 youth. How could he ever have hoped to hold a creature of such 
 complex needs and passions ? In the pale dawn he sounded the 
 very depths of self-contempt. 
 
 But when the day was up and Elise was chattering and flit- 
 ting about the house as usual without a word of discord or part- 
 ing, how was it possible to avoid reaction, the re-birth of hope ? 
 She talked of painting again, and that alone, after these long 
 days of sullen alienation from her art, was enough to bring the 
 brightness back to their little menage and to dull that strange 
 second sight of David's. He helped her to set her palette, to 
 choose a new canvas ; he packed her charcoals, he beguiled some 
 cold meat and bread out of Madame, and then before the heat 
 they set out together for the Bas Breau. 
 
 Just as they started he searched his pockets for a knife of 
 hers which was missing, and thrusting his hand into a breast 
 pocket which he seldom used, he brought out some papers at 
 which he stared in bewilderment. 
 
 Then a shock went through him ; for there was Mr. Gurney's 
 letter, the letter in which the cheque for 600Z. had been enclosed, 
 and there was also that faded scrap of Sandy's writing which 
 contained the father's last injunction to his son. As he held the 
 papers he remembered — what he had forgotten for weeks— that 
 on the morning of his leaving Manchester he had put them care- 
 fully into this breast pocket, not liking to leave things so interest- 
 ing to him behind him, out of his reach. Never had he gi^ien a 
 thought to them since ! He looked down at them, half ashamed, 
 and his eye caught the words :— ' Hay it on Mm now Fni dyiny 
 to look after her. She's not like otl\er children; she'll ivant it. 
 Let him' see her married to a decent man, and give her wliaVs 
 honestly hers. I trust it to him. That little lad—' and then 
 came the fold of the sheet. 
 
 'I have found the knife,' cried Elise from the gate. 'Be 
 quick ! ' 
 
 He pushed the papers back and joined her. The day was 
 already hot, and they hurried along the burning street into the 
 shade of the forest. Once in the Bas Breau Elise was not long in 
 finding a subject, fell upon a promising one indeed almost at once, 
 and was soon at work. This time there were to be no figures, 
 
CHAP. IX STORM AND STRESS 351 
 
 unless indeed it might be a dim pair of woodcutters in the middle 
 distance, and the whole picture was to be an impressionist dream 
 of early summer, finished entirely out of doors, as rapidly and 
 cleanly as possible. David lay on the ground under the blasted 
 oak and watched her, as she sat on her camp-stool, bending for- 
 ward, looking now up, now down, using her charcoal in bold 
 energetic strokes, her lip compressed, her brow knit over some 
 point of composition. The little figure in its pink cotton w^as so 
 daintily pretty, so full of interest and wilful charm, it might well 
 have filled a lover's eye and chained his thoughts. But David 
 was restless and at times absent. 
 
 'Tell me what you know of that man Montjoie?' he asked 
 her at last, abruptly. ' I know you disliked him.' 
 
 She paused, astonished. 
 
 ' Why do you ask ? Dislike— I detest and despise him. I told 
 you so.' 
 
 ' But what do you know of him ? ' he persisted. 
 
 ' No good ! ' she said quickly, going back to her work. Then 
 a light broke upon her, and she turned on her stool, her two 
 hands on her knees. 
 
 ' Tiens ! — you are thinking of your sister. You have had 
 news of her?' 
 
 A conscious half-remorseful look rose into her face. 
 
 ' No, I have had no news. I ought to have had a letter. I 
 wrote, you remember, that first day here. Perhaps Louie has 
 gone home already,' he said, w^ith constraint. 'Tell me anyway 
 what you know.' 
 
 ' Oh, he ! — w^ell, there is only one w^ord for him — he is a 
 brute !^ said Elise, drawing vigorously, her colour rising. 'Any 
 woman will tell you that. Oh, he has plenty of talent,— he 
 might be anything. Carpeaux took him up at one time, got him 
 commissions. Five or six years ago there was quite a noise about 
 him for two or three Salons. Then people began to drop him. 
 I believe he was the most mean, ungrateful animal towards those 
 who had been kind to him. He drinks besides — he is over head 
 and ears in debt, always wanting money, borrowing here and 
 there, then locking his door for weeks, making believe to be out 
 of town — only going out at night. As for his ways with women ' 
 — she shrugged her shoulders — ' Was your sister still sitting to 
 him when we left, or was it at an end ? Hasn't your sister been 
 sitting to him for his statue ? ' 
 
 She paused again and studied him with her shrewd, bright 
 eyes. 
 
 He coloured angrily. 
 
 ' I believe so — I tried to stop it — it was no use.' 
 
 She laughed out. 
 
 'No — I imagine she does what she wants to do. Well, we 
 all do, mon ami ! After all '—and she shrugged her shoulders 
 again — ' I suppose she can do what I did ? ' 
 
 ' What you did 1 ' 
 
352 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 She went on drawing in sliarp deliberate strokes ; her breath 
 came fast. 
 
 ' He met me on the stairs one night — it was just after I had 
 taken the atelier. I knew no one in the house— I was quite 
 defenceless there. He insulted me— I had a little walking-stick 
 in. my hand, my cousin had given me— I struck him with it across 
 the face twice, three times— if you look close you will see the 
 mark. You may imagine he tells fine stories of me when he gets 
 the chance. Oh ! je m'enfiche I ' 
 
 The scorn of the last gesture was unmeasured. 
 ' Canaille !' said David, between his teeth. ' If you had told 
 me this ! ' 
 
 Her expression changed and softened. 
 
 ' You asked me no questions after that quarrel we had in the 
 Louvre,' she said, excusing herself. 'You will understand it 
 is not a reminiscence one is exactly proud of; I did speak to 
 Madame Cervin once—' 
 
 David said nothing, but sat staring before him into the far 
 vistas of the wood. It seemed strange that so great a smart 
 and fear as had possessed him since yesterday, should allow of 
 any lesser smart within or near it. Yet that scrap of tremulous 
 writing weighed heavy. Where was Louie ; why had she not 
 written ? So far he had turned impatiently away from the 
 thought of her, reiterating that he had done his best, that she 
 had chosen her own path. Now in this fragrant quiet of the 
 forest the quick vision of some irretrievable wreck presented 
 itself to him ; he thought of Mr. Ancrum — of John— and 
 a cold shudder ran through him. In it spoke the conscience of 
 a lifetime. 
 
 Elise meanwhile laid aside her charcoal, began to dash in 
 some paint, drew back presently to look at it from a distance, 
 and then, glancing aside, suddenly threw down her brushes, 
 and ran up to David. 
 
 She sat dov/n beside him, and with a coaxing, childish 
 gesture, drew his arm jibout her. 
 
 ' Ta me fais pitie, mon ami!.'' she said, looking up into his 
 face. ' Is it your sister ? Go and find her — I will wait for you.' 
 He turned upon her, his black eyes all passion, his lips 
 struggling with speech. 
 
 ' My place is liere,' he said. ' My life is here ! ' 
 Then, as she was silent, not knowing in her agitation what to 
 say, he broke out : 
 
 ' What was in your mind yesterday, Elise ? what is there 
 to-day? There is something — something I ivill know.' 
 
 She was frightened by his look. Never did fear and grief 
 speak more plainly from a human face. The great deep within 
 had broken up. 
 
 'I was sorry,' she said, trembling, 'sorry to have hurt you. 
 I wanted to make up.' 
 
 He flung her hand away from him with an impatient gesture. 
 
cm^j. IX STORM AND STRESS 353 
 
 ' There was" more than that ! ' he said violently ; ' will you be 
 like all the rest— betray me without a sign ? ' 
 
 ' David ! ' 
 
 She bit her lip proudly. Then the tears welled up into her 
 grey eyes, and she looked round at him— hesitated— began and 
 stopped again — then broke into irrevocable confession. 
 
 ' David '.—Monsieur David '.—how can it go on ? Voyons — I 
 said to myself yesterday — I am torturing him and myself — I 
 cannot make him happy— it is not in me— not in my destiny. 
 It must end — it must, — it must^ for both our sakes. But then 
 first, — first — ' 
 
 'Be quiet!' he said, laying an iron hand on her arm. 'I 
 knew it all. ' 
 
 And he turned aw^ay from her, covering his face. 
 
 This time she made no attempt to caress him. She clasped 
 her hands round her knees and remained quite still gazing— yet 
 seeing nothing — into the green depths which five minutes before 
 had been to her a torturing ecstasy of colour and light. The 
 tears which had been gathering fell, the delicate lip quivered. - 
 
 Struck by her silence at last, he looked up— watched her a 
 moment — then he dragged himself up to her and knelt beside 
 her. 
 
 ' Have I made you so miserable ? ' he said, under his breath. 
 
 ' It is— it is — the irreparableness of it all,' she answered, half 
 sobbing. ' No undoing it ever, and how a woman glides into it, 
 how lightly, knowing so little ! — thinking herself so wise ! And 
 if she has deceived herself, if she is not made for love, if she 
 has given herself for so little — for an illusion — for a dream that 
 breaks and must break — how dare the 7na7i reproach her, after 
 all?' 
 
 She raised her burning eyes to him. The resentment in 
 them seemed to be more than individual, it was the resentment 
 of the woman, of her sex. 
 
 She stabbed him to the heart by what she said — by what she 
 left unsaid. He took her little cold hand, put it to his lips- 
 tried to speak. 
 
 ' Don't,' she said, drawing it away and hiding her face on her 
 knees. 'Don't say anything. It is not you, it is God and 
 Nature that I accuse.' 
 
 Strange, bitter word !— word of revolt ! He lay on his face 
 beside her for many minutes afterwards, tasting the bitterness 
 of it, revolving those other words she had said — 'an illusion— a 
 dream that hrea'ks—imist break: Then he made a last effort. 
 He came close to her, laid his arm timidly round her shoulders, 
 bent his cheek to hers. 
 
 ' Elise, listen to me a little. You say the debt is on my side 
 —that is true — true— a thousand times true ! I only ask you, 
 implore you, to let me pay it. Let it be as you please— on what 
 terms you please— servant or lover. All I pray for is to pay- 
 that debt, with my life, my heart.' 
 
354 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 She shook her head softly, her faee still hidden. 
 
 'When I am with you,' she said, as though the words were 
 wrung out of her, ' I must be a woman. You agitate me, you 
 divide my mind, and my force goes. There are both capacities 
 in me, and one destroys the other. And I want — I want my 
 art!' 
 
 She threw back her head with a superb gesture. But he did 
 not flinch. 
 
 ' You shall have it,' he said passionately, ' have it abundantly. 
 Do you think I want to keep you for ever loitering here ? Do you 
 think I don't know what ambition and will mean ? that I am only 
 fit for kissing ? ' 
 
 He stopped almost with a smile, thinking of that harsh strug- 
 gle to know and to have, in which his youth had been so far 
 consumed night and day. Then words rushed upon him again, 
 and he went on with a growing power and freedom. 
 
 ' I never looked at a woman till I saw you ! — never had a 
 whim, a caprice. I have eaten my heart out with the struggle 
 first for bread, then for knowledge. But when you came across 
 me, then the world w^as all made new, and I became a new 
 creature, your creature.' 
 
 He touched her face with a quick, tender hand, laid it against 
 his breast, and spoke so, bending piteously down to her, within 
 reach of her quivering mouth, her moist eyes : — 
 
 ' Tell me this, Elise — answer me this ! How can there be 
 great art, great knowledge, only from the brain, — without pas- 
 sion, without experience ? You and I have been living what 
 Musset, what Hugo, what Shakespeare wrote,' and he struck the 
 little volume of Musset beside him. ' Is not that worth a summer 
 month? not worth the artist's while? But it is nearly gone. 
 You can't wonder that I count the moments of it like a miser ! 
 I have had a hard life, and this has transfigured it. Whatever 
 happens now in time or eternity, this month is to the good — for 
 me and for you, Elise ! — yes, for you, too ! But when it is over, — 
 see if I hold you back ! We will work together— climb — wrestle, 
 together. And on what terms you please, — mind that, — only 
 dictate them. I deny your "illusion," your "dream that 
 breaks." You have been happy ! I dare to tell you so. But 
 part now, — shirk our common destiny, — and you will indeed 
 have given all for nothing, while I — ' 
 
 His voice sank. She shook her head again, but as she drew^ 
 herself gently away she was stabbed by the haggardness of the 
 countenance, the pleading pathos of the eyes. His gust of speech 
 had shaken her too — revealed new points in him. She bent for- 
 ward quickly and laid her soft lips to his, for one light swift 
 moment. 
 
 ' Poor boy ! ' she murmured, ' poor poet ! ' 
 
 'Ah, that was enough!' he said, the colour flooding his 
 cheeks. ' That healed— that made all good. Will you hide 
 nothing from me, Elise — will you promise ? ' 
 
CHAP. IX STORM AND STRESS 355 
 
 ' Anything,' she said with a curious accent, ' anything — if you 
 will but let me paint.' 
 
 He sprang up, and put her things in order for her. They 
 stood looking at the sketch, neither seeing much of it. 
 
 ' I must have some more cobalt,' she said wearily. ' Look, my 
 tube is nearly done. ' 
 
 Yes, that was certain. He must get some more for her. 
 Where could it be got ? No nearer than Fontainebleau, alas ! 
 where there was a shop which provided all the artists of the 
 neighbourhood. He was eagerly ready to go— it would take him 
 no time. 
 
 ' It will take you between two and three hours, sir, in this 
 heat. But oh, I am so tired, I will just creep into the fern there 
 while you are away, and go {o sleep. Give me that book and 
 that shawl.' 
 
 He made a place for her between the spurs of a great oak- 
 root, tearing the brambles away. She nestled into it, with a sigh 
 of satisfaction. ' Divine ! Take your food — I want nothing but 
 the air and sleep. Adieu, adieu ! ' 
 
 He stood gazing down upon her, his face all tender lingering 
 and remorse. How white she was, how fragile, how shaken by 
 this storm of feeling he had forced upon her ! How could he 
 leave her ? 
 
 But she waved him away impatiently, and he went at last, 
 going first back to the village to fetch his purse which was not in 
 his pocket. 
 
 As he came out of their little garden gate, turning again 
 towards the forest which he must cross in order to get to Fon- 
 tainebleau, he became aware of a group of men standing in front 
 of the inn. Two of them were the landscape artists already 
 slightly known to him, who saluted him as he came near. The 
 other was a tall fine-looking man, with longish grizzled hair, a 
 dark commanding eye, the rosette of the Legion of Honour at his 
 buttonhole, and a general look of irritable power. He wore a 
 wide straw hat and holland overcoat, and beside him on the 
 bench lay some artist's paraphernalia. 
 
 All three eyed David as he passed, and he was no sooner a 
 few yards away than they were looking after him and talking, 
 the new-comer asking questions, the others replying. 
 
 ' Oh, it is she ! ' said the stranger impatiently, throwing away 
 his cigar. ' Auguste's description leaves me no doubt of it, and 
 the woman at the house in the Rue Chantal where I had the 
 caprice to inquire one day, when she had been three weeks away, 
 told me they were here. It is annoying. Something might have 
 been made of her. Now it is finished. A handsome lad all the 
 same ! — of a rare type. Non !—je me suis trompe — en devenant 
 femme, elle n'a pas cesse d^etre artiste ! ' 
 
 The others laughed. Then they all took up their various 
 equipments, and strolled off smoking to the forest. The man 
 from Paris was engaged upon a large historical canvas represent- 
 
856 THE HISTORY OP DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 ing an incident in the life of Diane de Poitiers. The incident 
 had Diane's forest for a setting, but liis trees did not satisfy him, 
 he had come down to make a few fresh studies on the spot. 
 
 David walked liis four miles to Fontainebleau, bought his 
 cobalt, and set his face homewards about three o'clock. When 
 he was halfway home, he turned aside into a tangle of young 
 beechwood, parted the branches, and found a shady corner where 
 he could rest and think. The sun was very hot, the high road 
 was scorched by it. But it was not heat or fatigue that had made 
 him pause. 
 
 So far he had walked in a tumult of conflicting ideas, emotions, 
 terrors, torn now by this memory, now by that — his mind tra- 
 versed by one project after another. But now that he was so 
 near to meeting her again, though he pined for her, he suddenly 
 and pitifully felt the need for some greater firmness of mind and 
 will. Let him pause and think ! Where was he with her ? — 
 what were his real, tangible hopes and fears ? Life and death 
 depended for him on these days — these few vanishing days. 
 And he was like one of the last year's leaves before him, whirled 
 helpless and will-less in the dust-storm of the road ! 
 
 He had sat there an unnoticed time when the sound of some 
 heavy carriage approaching roused him. From his green covert 
 he could see all that passed, and instinctively he looked up. It 
 was the Barbizon diligence going in to meet the five o'clock train 
 at Fontainebleau, a train which in these lengthening days very 
 often brought guests to the inn. The correspondance had been 
 only begun during the last week, and to the dwellers at Barbizon 
 the afternoon diligence had still the interest of novelty. With the 
 perception of habit David noticed that there was no one outside ; 
 but though the rough blinds were most of them drawn down he 
 thought he perceived some one inside — a lady. Strange that 
 anyone should prefer the stifling interieur who could mount 
 beside the driver with a parasol ! 
 
 The omnibus clattered past, and with the renewal of the wood- 
 land silence his mind plunged heavily once more into the agonised 
 balancing of hope and fear. But in the end he sprang up with a 
 renewed alertness of eye and step. 
 
 Despair? Impossible ! — so long as one had one's love still in 
 one's arms — could still plead one's cause, hand to hand, lip tc 
 lip. He strode homewards — running sometimes — the phrases of 
 a new and richer eloquence crowding to his lips. 
 
 About a mile from Barl)izon, the path to the Bas Breau 
 diverges to the right. He sped along it, leaping the brambles in 
 his path. Soon he was on the edge of the great avenue itself, 
 looking across it for that spot of colour among the green made 
 by her light dress. 
 
 But there was no dress, and as he came up to the tree where 
 he had left her, he saw to his stupefaction that there was no one 
 there — nothing, no sign of her but the bracken and brambles he 
 had beaten down for her some three hours before, and the trodden 
 
CHAP. IX STORM AND STRESS 357 
 
 grass where her easel had been. Something showed on the 
 ground. He stooped and noticed the empty cobalt-tube of the 
 mornino" 
 
 Of c'ourse she had grown tired of waiting and had gone home. 
 But a great terror seized him. He turned and ran along the 
 path they had traversed in the morning making for the road ; 
 past the inn which seemed to have been struck to sleep by the 
 sun, past Millet's studio on the left, to the little overgrown door 
 in the brick wall. 
 
 No one in the garden, no one in the little salon, no one 
 upstairs ; Madame Pyat was away for the day, nursing a daughter- 
 in-law. In all the house and garden there was not a sound or 
 sign of life but the cat asleep on the stone step of the kitchen, 
 and the bees humming in the acacias. 
 
 ' Elise I ' he called, inside and out, knowing already, poor 
 fellow, in his wild despair that there could be no answer— that 
 all was over. 
 
 But there was an answer. Elise was no untaught heroine. 
 She played her part through. There was her letter, propped up 
 against 'the gilt clock on the sham marble cheminee. 
 
 He found it and tore it open. ^ t 7^ 
 
 ' You will curse me, but after a time you will forgive. I could 
 not go on. Taranne found me in the forest, just half an hour 
 after you left me. I looked up and saw him coming across the 
 grass He did not see me at first, he was looking about for a 
 subiect. I would have escaped, but there was no way. Then at 
 last he saw me. He did not attack me, he did not persuade me, 
 he onlv took for granted it was all over,— my Art ! I must know 
 best, of course ; but he was sorry, for I had a gift. Had I seen 
 the notice of my portrait in the "Temps," or the little mention in 
 the "Fio-aro"? Oh, yes, Breal had been very successful, and 
 deserved^to be. It was a brave soul, devoted to art, and art had 
 rewarded her. , ^. ^ ^ -, ■ . ^^ 
 
 ' Then I showed him my sketch, trembhng— to stop his talk 
 —every word he said stabbed me. A nd he shrugged his shoulders 
 quickly ; then, as though recollecting himself, he put on a civil 
 face all in a moment, and paid me compliments. To an amateur 
 he is always civil. I was all white and shaking by this time. 
 He turned to go away, and then I broke down. I burst into tears 
 —I said I was coming back to the a^eZ/er— what did he mean by 
 taking such a cruel, such an insolent tone with me ? He would 
 not be moved from his polite manner. He said he was glad to 
 hear it ; mademoiselle would be welcome ; but just as though 
 we were complete strangers. He wlio has befriended me and 
 taught me, and scolded me since I was fourteen ! I could not 
 bear it. I caught him by the arm. I told him he should tell me 
 all he thought. Had I really talent ?-a future ? 
 
 ' Then he broke out in a torrent— he made me afraid ot him— 
 yet I adored him ! He said I had more talent than any other 
 pupil he had ever had ; that I had been his hope and interest tor 
 
358 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 six years ; that he had taught me for nothing — befriended me— 
 worked for me, behind the scenes, at the 8alon ; and all because 
 he knew that I must rise, must win myself a name, that w^heu I 
 had got the necessary technique I should make one of the poetical 
 impressionist painters, who are in the movement, who sway the 
 public taste. But I must give all myself — my days and nights — 
 my thoughts, and brain, and nerves. Other people might have 
 adventures and paint the better. Not I, — I was too highly 
 strung— for me it was ruin. ^' C'est un mattre severe — VArt^^^ 
 he said, looking like a god. ^^ Avec celui-la on ne transige pas. 
 Ah! Dieu.je le connais, mot!'" I don't know wiiat he meant; 
 but there has been a tragedy in his life ; all the world knows 
 that. 
 
 'Then suddenly he took another tone, called me pauvre 
 enfant, and apologised. Why should I be disturbed? I had 
 chosen for my own happiness, no doubt. What was fame or the 
 high steeps of art compared even with an amour de jeanesse ? 
 He had seen you, he said, — une tete supeihe — des epaules de lion 1 
 I was a woman ; a young handsome lover was worth more to me, 
 naturally, than the drudgeries of art. A few^ years hence, when 
 the pulse was calmer, it might have been all very well. Well ! I 
 must forgive him ; he was my old friend. Then he wrung my 
 hand, and left me. 
 
 ' Oh, David, David, I must go ! I must. My life is im- 
 prisoned here with you — it beats its bars. Why did I ever let 
 you persuade me — move me \ And I should let you do it again. 
 When you are there I am weak. I am no cruel adventuress, I 
 can't look at you and torture you. But what I feel for you is 
 not love — no, no, it is not, poor boy ! Who was it said " A love 
 which can be tamed is no love " ? But in three days — a week — 
 mine had grown tame — it had no fears left. I am older than you, 
 not in years, mais dans Vdme — there is what parts us. 
 
 ' Oh ! I must go — and you must not try to find me. I shall 
 be quite safe, but with people you know nothing about. I shall 
 write to Madame Pyat for my things. You need have no trouble. 
 
 ' Very likely I shall pass you on the way, for if I hurry I can 
 catch the diligence. But you will not see me. Oh, David, I put 
 my arms round you ! I press my face against you. I ask you 
 to forgive me, to forget me, to work out your own life as I work 
 out mine. It will soon be a dream — this little house — these 
 summer days ! I have kissed the chair you sat in last night, the 
 book you read to me. Cest dejafini ! Adieu! adieu!'' 
 
 He sat for long in a sort of stupor. Then that maddening 
 thought seized him, stung him into life, that she had actually 
 passed him, that he had seen her, not knowing. That little 
 indistinct figure in the interieur., that was she. 
 
 He sprang up, in a blind anguish. Pursuit ! the diligence was 
 slow, the trains doubtful, he might overtake her yet. He dashed 
 into the street, and into the Fontainebleau road. After he had 
 run nearly a mile, he plunged into a path which he believed wa« 
 
CHAP. X STORM AND STRESS 359 
 
 a short cut. It led through a young and dense oak wood. He 
 rushed on, seeing nothing, bruising himself and stumbling. At 
 last a projecting branch struck him violently on the temple. He 
 staggered, put up a feeble hand, sank on the grass against a 
 trunk, and fainted. 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 It was between five and six o'clock in the morning. In the 
 Tuileries Gardens flowers, grass, and trees were drenched in 
 dew, the great shadow of the Palace spread grey and cool over 
 terraces and slopes, while beyond the young sun had already 
 shaken off all cumbering mists, and was pouring from a cloudless 
 sky over the river with its barges and swimming-baths, over the 
 bridges and the quays, and the vast courts and fagades of the 
 Louvre. Yet among the trees the air was still exquisitely fresh, 
 the sun still a friend to be welcomed. The light morning wind 
 swept the open, deserted spaces of the Gardens, playing merrily 
 with the dust, the leaves, the fountains. Meanwhile on all sides 
 the stir of the city was beginning, mounting slowly and steadily 
 like a swelling tone. 
 
 On a bench under one of the trees in the Champs-Elysees sat 
 a young man asleep. He had thrown himself against the back of 
 the bench, his cheek resting on the iron, one hand on his knee. 
 It was David Grieve ; the lad's look showed that his misery was 
 still with him, even in sleep. 
 
 He was dreaming, letting fall here and there a troubled and 
 disconnected word. In his dream he was far from Paris- 
 walking after his sheep among the heathery slopes of the Scout, 
 climbing towards the grey smithy among the old mill-stones, 
 watching the Red Brook slide by over its long, shallow steps of 
 orange grit, and the Downfall oozing and trickling among its 
 tumbled blocks. Who was that hanging so high above the ravine 
 on that treacherous stone that rocked with the least touch ? Louie 
 —mad girl !— come back. Ah ! too late— the stone rocks, falls ; 
 he leaps from block to block, only to see the light dress disappear 
 into the stony gulf below. He cries— struggles— wakes. 
 
 He sat up, wrestling with himself, trying to clear his torpid 
 brain. Where was he? His dream-self was still roaming the 
 Scout ; his outer eye was bewildered by these alleys, these orange- 
 trees, these statues— that distant arch. 
 
 Then the hideous, undefined cloud that was on him took 
 shape. Ehse had left him. And Louie, too, was gone— h-e knew 
 not where, save that it was to ruin. When he had arrived the 
 night before at the house in the Rue Chantal, Madame Menchat 
 could tell him nothing of Mademoiselle Delaunay, who had not 
 been heard of. Then he asked, his voice dying in his throat 
 before the woman's hard and cynical stare— the stare of one who 
 found the chief savour of life in the misfortunes of her kind— he 
 
360 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GEifiVE book m 
 
 asked for his sister and the Cervins. The Cervius were staging 
 at Sevres with relations, and were expected home again in a day 
 or two ; Mademoiselle Louie ? — well. Mademoiselle Louie was not 
 with them. Had she gone back to England ? Mais non ! A 
 trunk of hers was still in the Cervins' vestibule. Did Madame 
 Merichat know anything about her ? the lad asked, forcing him- 
 self to it, his blanched face turned away. Then the woman 
 shrugged her shoulders and spoke out. 
 
 If he really must know, she thought there was no doubt at all 
 that where Monsieur Montjoie was. Mademoiselle Louie was too. 
 Monsieur Montjoie had paid the arrears of his rent to the proprie- 
 taire, somehow or other, and had then made a midnight flitting 
 of it so as to escape other creditors who were tired of waiting for 
 his statue to be finished. He had got a furniture van there at 
 night, and he and the driver and her husband between them had 
 packed most of the things from the studio, and M. Montjoie had 
 gone off in the van about one o'clock in the morning. But of 
 course she did not know his address ! she said so half-a-dozen 
 times a day to the persons who called, and it was as true as 
 gospel. Why, indeed, should M. Montjoie let her or anyone else 
 know, that he could help ? He had gone into hiding to keep 
 honest people out of their money— that was what it meant. 
 
 Well, and the same evening Mademoiselle Louie also dis- 
 appeared. Madame Cervin had been in a great way, but she and 
 mademoiselle had already quarrelled violently, and madame 
 declared that she had no fault in the matter and that no one 
 could be held responsible for the doings of such a minx. She 
 believed that madame had written to monsieur. Monsieur had 
 never received it ? Ah, well, that was not surprising ! Ko one 
 could ever read madame's writing, though it made her temper 
 very bad to tell her so. 
 
 Could he have Madame Cervin's address ? Certainly. She 
 wrote it out for him. As to his old room ?— no, he could not go 
 back to it. 
 
 Monsieur Dubois had lately come back, with some money 
 apparently, for he had paid his loijer just as the landlord was 
 going to turn him out. But he was not at home. 
 
 Then she looked her questioner up and down, with a cool, 
 inhuman curiosity working in her small eyes. So M'selle Elise 
 had thrown him over already ? That was sharp work ! As for 
 the rest of her news, her pessimism was interested in observing 
 his demeanour under it. Certainly he did not seem to take it 
 gaily; but what else did he expect with his sister?— 'Je vous 
 demands ! ' 
 
 The young man dropped his head and went out, shrinking 
 togethei into the darkness. She called her husband to the door, 
 and the two peered after him into the lamp-lit street, dissecting 
 him, his mistress, and his sister with knifeUke tongues. 
 
 David went away and walked up and down the streets, the 
 quays, the bridges, hour after hour, feeling no fatigue, till sud- 
 
CHAP. X STORM AND STRESS 361 
 
 denly, just as the dawn was coming on, he sank heavily on to the 
 seat in the Champs-Elysees. The slip with Madame Cervin's 
 address on it dropped unheeded from his relaxing hand. His 
 nervous strength was gone, and he had to sit and bear his anguish 
 without the relief of frenzied motion. 
 
 Now, after his hour's sleep, he w^as somewhat revived, ready 
 to start again— to search again ; but where ? whither ? ^ome- 
 ivliere in this vast, sun-wrapped Paris was Elise, waking, perhaps, 
 at this moment and thinking of him with a smile and a tear. He 
 would find her, come what would ; he could not live without her ! 
 Then into his wild passion of loss and desire there slipped 
 again that cold, creeping thought of Louie— ruined, body and 
 soul— ruined in this base and dangerous Paris, while he still car- 
 ried in his breast that little scrap of scrawled paper ! And why 1 
 Because he had flung her to the wolves without a thought, that 
 he and Elise might travel to their goal unchecked. ' My God ! ' 
 
 The sense of some one near him made him look up. He saw 
 a girl stopping near the seat w^hom in his frenzy he for an instant 
 took for Louie. There was the same bold, defiant carriage, the 
 same black hair and eyes. He half rose, with a cry. 
 
 The girl gave a quick, coarse laugh. She had been hurrying 
 across the Avenue tow^ards the nearest bridge when she saAv him ; 
 now she came up to him with a hideous jest. David saw her face 
 full, caught the ghastly suggestions of it— its vice, its look of 
 mortal illness wrecking and blurring the cheap prettiness it had 
 once possessed, and beneath all else the fierceness of the hunted 
 creature. His whole being rose in repulsion ; he waved her away, 
 and she went, still laughing. But his guilty mind went with her, 
 making of her infamy tlxe prophecy and foretaste of another's. 
 
 He hurried on again, and again had to rest for faintness' sake, 
 while the furies returned upon him. It seemed as though every 
 passer-by were there only to scourge and torture him ; or, rather, 
 out of the moving spectacle of human life which began to flow 
 past him with constantly increasing fulness, that strange selective 
 poet-sense of his chose out the figures and incidents which bore 
 upon his own story and worked into his own drama, passing by 
 the rest. A group of persons presently attracted him who had 
 just come apparently from the Pvive Gauche, and were making 
 for the Rue Royale. They consisted of a man, a woman, and a 
 child The child was a tiny creature in a preposterous feathered 
 hat as large as itself. It had just been put down to w\alk by its 
 father, and was dragging contentedly at its mother's hand, suck- 
 m^ a crust.' The man had a bag of tools on his shoulder and was 
 clearly an artisan going to work. His wife's face was turned to 
 him and they were talking fast, lingering a little m the sunshine 
 like people who had a few minutes to spare and were enjoying 
 them. The man had the blanched, unwholesome look of the 
 city workman who lives a sedentary life in foul air, and was, 
 moreover, undersized and noways attractive, save perhaps for the 
 keen amused eyes with which he was listening to his wife's chatter. 
 
363 THE HISTORY OF DaVID GRIEVE book ill 
 
 The great bell of ISTotre-Dame chimed in the distance. The 
 man straightened himself at once, adjusted his bag of tools, and 
 hurried off, nodding to his wife. 
 
 She looked after him a minute, then turned and came slowly 
 along the alley towards the bench where David sat, idly watching 
 her. The heat was growing steadily, the child was heavy on her 
 hand, and she was again clearly on the way to motherhood. The 
 seat invited her, and she came up to it. 
 
 She sat down, panting, and eyed her neighbour askance, de- 
 tecting at once how handsome he was, and how unshorn and 
 haggard. Before he knew where he was, or how it had begun, 
 they were talking. She had no shyness of any sort, and, as it 
 seemed to him, a motherly, half -contemptuous indulgence for his 
 sex, as such, which fitted oddly with her young looks. Very soon 
 she was asking him the most direct questions, which he had to 
 parry as best he could. She made out at once that he was a 
 foreigner and in the book trade, and then she let him know by a 
 passing expression or two that naturally she understood why he 
 was lounging there in that plight at that hour in the morning. 
 He had been keeping gay company, of course, and had but just 
 emerged from some nocturnal orgie or other. And then she 
 shrugged her strong shoulders with a light, pitiful air, as though 
 marvelling once more for the thousandth time over the stupidity 
 of men who w^ould commit these idiocies, would waste their money 
 and health in them, say what women would. 
 
 Presently he discovered that she was giving him advice of 
 different kinds, counselling him above all to find a good wife who 
 would work and save his wages for him. A decent marriage was 
 in truth an economy, though young men would never believe it. 
 
 David could only stare at her in return for her counsels. The 
 difference between his place at that moment in the human comedy 
 and hers was too great to be explained ; it called only for silence 
 or a stammering commonplace or two. Yet for a few moments 
 the neighbourhood of her and her child was pleasant to him. She 
 had a good comely head, which was bare under the sun, a little 
 shawl crossed upon her ample bust, and a market-basket on her 
 arm. The child was playing in the fine gravel at her feet, pausing 
 every now and then to study her mother's eye with a furtive 
 gravity, while the hat fell back and made a still more fantastic 
 combination than before with the pensive little face. 
 
 Presently, tired of her play, she came to stand by her mother's 
 knee, laying her head against it. 
 
 ' Mon petit ange ! que tu es gentille ! ' said the mother in a 
 low, rapid voice, pressing her hand on the child's cheek. Then, 
 turning back to David, she chattered on about the profit and loss 
 of married life. All that she said w^as steeped in prose — in the 
 prose especially of sous and francs; she talked of rents, of the 
 price of food, of the state of wages in her husband's trade. Yet 
 every here and there came an exquisite word, a flash. It seemed 
 that she had been very ill with her first child. She did not mince 
 
CHAP. X STORM AND STRESS 363 
 
 matters much even with this young man, and David gathered 
 that she had not only been near dying, but that her illness had 
 made a moral epoch in her life. She was laid by for three months; 
 work was slack for her husband ; her own earnings, for she was a 
 skilled embroideress working for a great linen-shop in the Rue 
 Vivienne, were no longer forthcoming. Would her husband put 
 up with it, with the worries of the baby, and the menage, and the 
 sick wife, and that sharp pinch of want into the bargain, from 
 which during two years she had completely protected him ? 
 
 'I cried one day,' she said simply; 'I said to him, "You're 
 just sick of it, ain't you? Well, I'm going to die. Go and 
 shift for yourself, and take the baby to the Enfants Trotives. 
 Alors—'' ' 
 
 She paused, her homely face gently lit up from withm. ' He 
 is not a man of words — Jules. He told me to be quiet, called 
 me petite sotte. "Haven't you slaved for two years?" he said. 
 "Well, then, lie still, can't yowl— faut hien que chaciin prenne 
 son tour ! " ' 
 
 She broke off, smiling and shaking her head. Then glancing 
 round upon her companion again, she resumed her motherly 
 sermon. That was the good of being married ; that there was 
 some one to share the bad times with, as well as the good. 
 
 'But perhaps,' she inquired briskly, 'you don't believe in 
 being married ? You are for V union lihre f ' 
 
 She spoke like one touching on a long familiar question— as 
 much a question indeed of daily life and of her class as those 
 other matters of wages and food she had been discussing. 
 
 A slow and painful red mounted into the Englishman's cheek. 
 ' I don't know,' he said stupidly. ' And you ? ' 
 ' No, no ! ' she said emphatically, twice, nodding her head. 
 'Oh, I was brought up that way. My father was a Red— an 
 Anarchist— a great man among them ; he died last year. He 
 said that liberty was everything. It made him mad when any of 
 his friends accepted Vunion legale— ioM him it was a treason. 
 He never married my mother, though he was faithful to her all 
 his life. But for me—' she paused, shaking her head slowly. 
 ' Well, I had an elder sister— that says everything. Faut pas 
 enparler ; it makes me melancholy, and one must keep up one's 
 spirits when one is like this. It is three years since she died ; 
 she was my father's favourite. When they buried her— she died 
 in the hospital— I sat down and thought a little. It was abomi- 
 nable what she had suffered, and I said to myself, "Why ? " ' 
 
 The child swayed backward against her knee, so absorbed was 
 it in its thumb and the sky, and would have fallen but that she 
 caught it with her housewife's hand, being throughout mindful 
 of its slightest movement. 
 
 '"Why?" I said. She was a good creature— a bit foolish 
 perhaps, but she would have worked the shoes off her feet to 
 please anybody. And they had treated her— but like a dog ! It 
 bursts one's heart to think of it, and I said to myself,— Ze 
 
364 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book in 
 
 mariage c^est la justice ! it is nothing but that. It is not what 
 the priests say — oh ! not at all. But it strikes me like that — c'est 
 la justice ; it is nothing but that ! ' 
 
 And she looked at him vvith the bright fixed eyes of one whose 
 thoughts are beyond their own expressing. He interrupted her, 
 wondering at the harsh rapidity of his own voice. ' But if it is 
 the woman who will be free ? — who will have no bond ? ' 
 
 Her expression changed, became shrewd, inquisitive, personal. 
 
 ' Well, then ! ' she said with a shrug, and paused. ' It is 
 because one is ignorant, you see, or one is bad — on pent toujours 
 etre une coquine ! And one forgets— one thinks one can be always 
 young, and love is all pleasure— and it is not true ! one gets old 
 — and there is the child — and one may die of it.' 
 
 She spoke with the utmost simplicity, yet mth a certain 
 intensity. Evidently she had a natural pride in her philosophy 
 of life, as though in a possession of one's own earning and 
 elaborating. She had probably expressed it often before in much 
 the same terms, and with the same verbal hitches and gaps. 
 
 The young fellow beside her rose hastily, and bade her good 
 morning. She looked mildly surprised at such an abrupt 
 departure, but she was not offended. 
 
 'Good day, citizen,' she said, nodding to him. *I disturb 
 you?' 
 
 He muttered something and strode away. 
 
 How much time had that wasted of this irrecoverable day that 
 was to set him on Elise's track once more ! The first post had 
 been delivered by this time. Elise must either return to her studio 
 or remove her possessions ; anyhow, sooner or later the Merichats 
 must have information. And if they were forbidden to speak, 
 well, then they must be bribed. 
 
 That made him think of money, and in a sudden panic he 
 turned aside into a small street and examined his pockets. 
 Nearly four napoleons left, after allowing for his debt to Madame 
 Pyat, which must be paid that day. Even in his sick, stunned 
 state of the evening before, when he was at last staggering on 
 again, after his fall, to the Fontainebleau station, he had remem- 
 bered to stop a Barbizon man whom he came across and give him 
 a pencilled message for the deserted madame. He had sent her 
 the Rue Chantal address, there would be a letter from her this 
 morning. And he must put her on the watch, too — Elise could 
 not escape him long. 
 
 But he must have more money. He looked out for a sta- 
 tioner's shop, went in and wrote a letter to John, which he posted 
 at the next post-office. 
 
 It was an incoherent scrawl, telling the lad to change the 
 cheque he enclosed in Bank of England notes and send them to 
 the Rue Chantal, care of Madame Merichat. He was not to 
 expect him back just yet, and was to say to any friend who might 
 inquire that he was still detained. 
 
CHAP. X STORM AND STRESS 365 
 
 That letter, with the momentary contact it involved with his 
 Manchester life, brought down upon him again the thought of 
 Louie. But this time he flung it from him with a fierce impa- 
 tience. His brain, indeed, was incapable of dealing with it. 
 Remorse ? rescue ? there would be time enough for that by-and- 
 by. Meanwhile— to find Elise ! 
 
 And for a week he spent the energies of every thought and 
 every moment on this mad pursuit. Of these days .of nightmare 
 he could afterwards remember but a few detached incidents here 
 and there. 
 
 He recollected patrols up and down the Rue Chantal ; talks 
 with Madame Merichat ; the gleam in her eyes as he slipped his 
 profitless bribes into her hand ; visits to Taranne's atelier, where 
 the concierge at last grew suspicious and reported the matter 
 withm ; and finally an interview with the artist himself, from 
 which the English youth emerged no nearer to his end than 
 before, and crushed under the humiliation of the gi-eat man's 
 advice. He could vaguely recall the long pacings of the Louvre : 
 the fixed scrutiny of face after face ; vain chases ; ignominious 
 retreats ; and all the wretched stages of that slow descent into a 
 bottomless despair ! 
 
 At last there was a letter— the long-expected letter to Madame 
 Merichat, directing the removal of Mademoiselle Delaunay's pos- 
 sessions from the Rue Chantal. It was written by a certain M 
 Pmiodan, who did not give his address, but who declared himself 
 authorised by Mademoiselle Delaunay to remove her effects, and 
 named a day when he would himself superintend the process and 
 produce his credentials. David passed the time after the arrival 
 of this letter in a state of excitement which left him hardly 
 master of his actions. He had a room at the top of a wretched 
 little hotel close to the Nord station, but he hardly ate or slept. 
 The noises of Paris were agony to him night and day ; he lived in 
 a perpetual nausea of mind and body, hardly able at times to dis- 
 tinguish between the images of the brain and the impressions 
 coming from without. 
 
 Before the day came, a note was brought to him from the Rue 
 Chantal. It was from M. Pimodan, and requested an interview. 
 
 'I should be glad to see you on Mademoiselle Delaunay's 
 behalf. Will you meet me in the Garden of the Luxembourg 
 in front of the central pavilion, at three o'clock to-morrow ? 
 
 'GrUSTAVE PiMODAN.' 
 
 Before the hour came David was already pacing up and down 
 the blazing gravel in front of the Palace. When M. Pimodan 
 came the Englishman in an instant recognised the cousin— the 
 lanky fellow with the spectacles, who had iniured his eves by 
 reading. ^ 
 
 As soon as he had established this identification— and the two 
 
aee the history of DAVID grieve book m 
 
 men had hardly exchanged half-a-dozen sentences before the flash- 
 ing inward argument was complete — a feeling of enmity arose in 
 his mind, so intense that he could hardly keep himself still, could 
 hardly bring his attention to bear on what he or his companion 
 was saying. He had been brought so low that, with anyone else, 
 he must have broken into appeals and entreaties. With this man 
 —No! 
 
 As for M. Pimodan, the first sight of the young Englishman 
 had apparently wrought in him also some degree of nervous 
 shock ; for the hand which held his cane fidgeted as he walked. 
 He had the air of a person, too, who had lately gone through 
 mental struggle ; the red rims of the eyes under their large spec- 
 tacles might be due either to chronic w^eakness or to recent sleep- 
 lessness. 
 
 But however these things might be, he took a perfectly mild 
 tone, in w^hich David's sick and irritable sense instantly detected 
 the note of various offensive superiorities — the superiority of 
 class and the superiority of age to begin with. He said in the 
 first place that he was Mademoiselle Delaunay's relative, and that 
 she had commissioned him to act for her in this very delicate 
 matter. She was well aware — had been aware from the first day 
 — that she was watched, and that M. Grieve was moving heaven 
 and earth to discover her w^hereabouts. She did not, however, 
 intend to be discovered ; let him take that for granted. In her 
 view all was over — their relation was irrevocably at an end. She 
 wished now to devote herself wholly and entirely to her art, with- 
 out disturbance or distraction from any other quarter whatever. 
 Might he, under these circumstances, give M. Grieve the advice 
 of a man of the world, and counsel him to regard the matter in 
 the same light ? 
 
 David walked blindly on, playing with his watch-chain. In 
 the name of God whom and what was this fellow talking about 'i 
 At the end of ten minutes' discourse on M. Pimodan's part, and 
 of a few rare monosyllables on his own, he said, straightening his 
 young figure with a nervous tremor : 
 
 ' What you say is perfectly useless — I shall find her.' 
 
 Then a sudden angry light leapt into the cousin's eyes. 
 
 ' You will not find her ! ' he said, drawing a sharp breath. 
 'It shows how little you know her, after all— compared with 
 those who — No matter ! Oh, you can persecute and annoy her ! 
 No one doubts that. Y^ou can stand between her and all that she 
 now cares to live for — her art. But you can do nothing else; 
 and you will not be allowed to do that long, for she is not alone, 
 as you seem to think. She will be protected. There are resources, 
 and we shall employ them ! ' 
 
 The cousin had gone beyond his commission. David guessed 
 as much. He did not believe that Elise had set this man on to 
 threaten him. What a fool ! But he merely said with a sarcastic 
 dryness, endeavouring the while to steady his parched lips and 
 his eyelids swollen with weariness •- 
 
CHAP. X STORM AND STRESS 367 
 
 ' A la bonne Tieure ! — employ them. Well, sir, you know, 1 
 believe, where Mademoiselle Delaunay is. I wish to know. You 
 will not inform me. I therefore pursue my own way, and it is 
 useless for me to detain you any longer. ' 
 
 ' Know where she is ! ' cried the other, a triumphant flash 
 passing across his sallow student's face ; ' I have but just parted 
 from her.' 
 
 But he stopped. As a physician, he was accustomed to notice 
 the changes of physiognomy. Instinctively he put some feet of 
 distance between himself and his companion. Was it agony or 
 rage he saw ? 
 
 But David recovered himself by a strong effort. 
 
 ' Go and tell her, then, that I shall find her,' he said with a 
 shaking voice. ' I have many things to say to her yet.' 
 
 '■ Absurd ! ' cried the other angrily. ' Very well, sir, we know 
 what to expect. It only remains for us to take measures accord- 
 ingly.' 
 
 And drawing himself up he walked quickly away, looking 
 back every now and then to see whether he were followed or no. 
 
 'Supposing I did track him,' thought David vaguely, 'what 
 would he do ? Summon one of the various gardiens in sight ? ' 
 
 He had, however, no such intention. What could it have 
 ended in but a street scuffle ? Patience ! and he would find Elise 
 for himself in spite of that prater. 
 
 Meanwhile he descended the terrace, and threw himself, worn 
 out, upon the first seat, to collect his thoughts again. 
 
 Oh, this summer beauty : — this festal moment of the great 
 city ! Palace and Garden lay under the full June sun. The 
 clipped trees on the terraces, statues, alleys, and groves slept in 
 the luminous dancing air. All the normal stir and movement of 
 the Garden seemed to have passed to-day into the leaping and 
 intermingling curves of the fountains ; the few figures passing 
 and repassing hardly disturbed the general impression of heat 
 and solitude. 
 
 For hours David sat there, head down, his eyes on the gravel, 
 his hands tightly clasped between his knees. When he rose at 
 last it was to hurry down the Rue de Seine and take the nearest 
 bridge and street northwards to the Quartier Montmartre. He 
 had been dreaming too long ! and yet so great by now was his 
 confusion of mind that he was no nearer a fresh plan of opera- 
 tions than when the cousin left him. 
 
 When he arrived at Madame Merichat's loge it was to find that 
 no new development had occurred. Elise' s possessions were still 
 untouched ; neither she nor M. Pimodan had given any further 
 sign. The concierge^ however, gave him a letter which had just 
 arrived for him. Seeing that it bore the Manchester postmark, 
 he thrust it into his pocket unread. 
 
 When he entered the evil-smelling passage of his hotel, a 
 gargon emerged from the restaurant, dived into the salle de 
 lecture^ and came out with an envelope, which he gave to the 
 
368 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iii 
 
 Englishman. It had been left by a messenger five minutes before 
 monsieur arrived. David took it, a singing in his ears ; mounted 
 to the first landing, where the gas burnt at midday, and read 
 it. 
 
 ' Gustave tells me you would not listen to him. Do you want 
 to make me curse our meeting? Be a man and leave me to 
 myself ! While I know that you are on the watch I shall keep 
 away from Paris— ^;o^7a tout. I shall eat my heart out,— I shall 
 begin to hate you,— you will have chosen it so. Only understand 
 this : I will never see you again, for both our sakes, if I can help 
 it. Believe what I say — believe that what parts us is a fate 
 stronger than either of us, and go ! Oh ! you men talk of love— 
 and at bottom you are all selfish and cruel. Do you want to 
 break me more than I am already broken ? Set me free !— will 
 you kill both my youth and my art together ? ' 
 
 He carefully refolded the letter and put it into its envelope. 
 Then he turned and went downstairs again towards the street. 
 But the same frowsy waiter who had given him his letter was on 
 the watch for him. In the morning monsieur had commanded 
 some dinner. Would he take it now ? 
 
 The man's tone was sulky. David understood that he was not 
 considered a profitable customer of the hotel — that, considering 
 his queer ways, late hours, and small spendings, they would 
 probably be glad to be rid of him. With a curious submission 
 and shrinking he followed the man into the stifling restaurant 
 and sat down at one of the tables. 
 
 Here some food was brought to him, which he tried to eat. 
 But in the midst of it he was seized with so great a loathing, that 
 he suddenly rose, so violently as to upset a plate of bread beside 
 him, and make a waiter spring forward to save the table itself. 
 He pushed his way to the glass-door into the street, totally uncon- 
 scious of the stir his behaviour was causing among the stout 
 women in bonnets and the red-faced men with napkins tucked 
 under their chins who were dining near, fumbled at the handle, 
 and tottered out. 
 
 ' Quel animal 1 ' said tlie enraged dame du comptoir, who had 
 noticed the incident. ' Marie ! '—this to the sickly girl who sat 
 near with the books in front of her, ' enter that plate, and charge 
 it high. To-morrow I shall raise the price of his room. One 
 must really finish with him. Cest un fou ! ' 
 
 Meanwhile David, revived somewhat by the air, was already 
 in the Boulevard, making for the Opera and the Rue Royale. It 
 was not yet seven, the Salon would be still open. The distances 
 seemed to him interminable— the length of the Rue Royale, the 
 expanse of the Place de la Concorde, the gay and crowded ways 
 of the Champs-Elysees. But at last he was mounting the stairs 
 and battling through the rooms at the top. He looked first at 
 the larger picture which had gained her the mention honorable. 
 It was a study of factory girls at their work, unequal, impatient, 
 but full of a warm inventive talent— full of her. He knew its 
 
CHAP. X STORM AND STRESS 369 
 
 history — the small difficulties and triumphs of it, the adventures 
 she had gone through on behalf of it— by heart. That fair-haired 
 girl in the corner was studied from herself ; the tint of the hair, 
 the curve of the cheek were exact. He strained his eyes to look, 
 searching for this detail and that. His -heart said farewell — that 
 was the last, the nearest he should ever come to her on this earth ! 
 Next year ? Ah, he would give much to see her pictures of next 
 year, with these new perceptions she had created in him. 
 
 He stood a minute before the other picture, the portrait — a 
 study from one of her comrades in the atelier — and then he 
 wound his way again through the thronged and suffocating rooms, 
 and out into the evening. 
 
 The excessive heat of the last few days was about to end in 
 storm. A wide tempestuous heaven lay beyond the Arc de 
 Triomphe ; the red light struck down the great avenue and into 
 the faces of those stepping westvrards. The deep shade under 
 the full-leafed trees — how thinly green they were still against the 
 sky that day when she vanished from him beside the arch and 
 their love began ! — was full of loungers and of playing children ; 
 the carriages passed and repassed in the light. So it had been, 
 the enchanting never-ending drama, before this spectator entered 
 - — so it would be when he had departed. 
 
 He turned southwards and found himself presently on the 
 Quai de la Conference, hanging over the river in a quiet spot 
 where few people passed. 
 
 His frenzy of will was gone, and his last hope with it. Elise 
 had conquered. Her letter had brought him face to face with 
 those realities which, during this week of madness, he had simply 
 refused to see. He could pit himself against her no longer. 
 When it came to the point he had not the nerve to enter upon a 
 degrading and ignoble conflict, in which all that was to be won 
 was her hatred or her fear. That, indeed, would be the last and 
 worst ruin, for it would be the ruin, not of happiness or of hope, 
 but of love itself, and memory. 
 
 He took out her letter and re-read it. Then he searched for 
 some of the writing m.aterials he had bought when he had written 
 his last letter to Manchester, and, spreading a sheet on the parapet 
 of the river wall, he wrote : 
 
 ' Be content. I think now — I am sure — that we shall never 
 meet again. From this moment you will be troubled with me no 
 more. Only I tell you for the last time that you have done ill — 
 irrevocably ill. For what you have slain in yourself and me is 
 not love or happiness, but life itself — the life of life ! ' 
 
 Foolish, incoherent words, as they seemed to him, but he 
 could find no better. Confusedly and darkly they expressed the 
 cry, the inmost conviction of his being. He could come no 
 nearer at any rate to that desolation at the heart of him. 
 
 But now what next ? Manchester ? — the resumption and 
 expansion of his bookseller's life — the renewal of his old friend- 
 ships — the pursuit of money and of knowledge ? 
 
370 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 No. That is all done. The paralysis of will is complete. He 
 cannot drive himself home, back to the old paths. The disgust 
 with life has sunk too deep — the physical and moral collapse of 
 which he is conscious has gone too far. 
 
 ' Wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me from the 
 body of this death f ' 
 
 There, deep in the fibre of memory lie these words, and others 
 like them — the typical words of a religion which is still in some 
 sense the ineradicable warp of his nature, as it had been for 
 generations of his forefathers. His individual resources of speech, 
 as it were, have been overpassed ; he falls back upon the in- 
 herited, the traditional resources of his race. 
 
 He looked up. A last gleam was on the Invalides — on the 
 topmost roof of the Corps Legislatif ; otherwise the opposite bank 
 was already grey, the river lay in shade. But the upper air was 
 still aglow with the wide flame and splendour of the sunset ; and 
 beneath, on the bridges and the water and the buildings, how 
 clear and gracious was the twilight ! 
 
 ' Who shall deliver me f ' ' Deliver thyself / ' One instant, 
 and the intolerable pressure on this shrinking point of conscious- 
 ness can be lightened, this hunger for sleep appeased ! Nothing 
 else is possible — no future is even conceivable. His life in 
 flowering has exhausted and undone itself, so spendthrift has 
 been the process. 
 
 So he took his resolve. Then, already calmed, he hung over 
 the river, thinking, reviewing the past. 
 
 Six weeks — six weeks only ! — yet nothing in his life before 
 matters or counts by comparison. For this mood of deadly 
 fatigue the remembrance of all the intellectual joys and conquests 
 of the last few years has no savour whatever. Strange that the 
 development of one relation of life — the relation of passion — 
 should have been able so to absorb and squander the power of 
 living ! His fighting, enduring capacity, compared with that of 
 other men, must be small indeed. He thinks of himself as a 
 coward and a weakling. But neither the facts of the present nor 
 the face of the future are altered thereby. 
 
 The relation of sex — in its different phases — as he sees the 
 world at this moment, there is no other reality. The vile and 
 liideous phase of it has been present to him from the first moment 
 of his arrival in these Paris streets. He thinks of the pictures 
 and songs at the ' Trois Rats ' from which in the first delicacy 
 and flush of passion he had shrunk with so deep a loathing ; of 
 the photographs and engravings in the shops and the books on 
 the stalls ; of some of those pictures he had passed, a few minutes 
 before, in the Salon ; of that girl's face in the Tuileries Gardens. 
 The animal, the beast in human nature, never has it been so 
 present to him before ; for he has understood and realised it 
 while loathing it, has been admitted by his own passion to those 
 regions of human feeling where all that is most foul and all that 
 is most beautiful are generated alike from the elemental forces of 
 
CHAP. X STORM AND STRESS 371 
 
 life. And because he had loved Elise so finely and yet so humanly, 
 with a boy's freshness and a man's energy, this animalism of the 
 great city had been to him a perpetual nightmare and horror. His 
 whole heart had gone into Regnault's cry — into Regnault's protest. 
 For his own enchanted island had seemed to him often in the 
 days of his wooing to be but floating on the surface of a ghastly 
 sea, whence emerged all conceivalDle shapes of ruin, mockery, 
 terror, and disease. It was because of the tremulous adoration 
 which filled him from the beginning that the vice of Paris had 
 struck him in this tragical way. At another time it might have 
 been indifferent to him, might even have engulfed him. 
 
 But he ! — he had known the best of passion ! He laid his head 
 down on the wall, and lived Barbizon over again — day after day, 
 night after night. Now for the first time there is a pause in the 
 urging madness of his despair. All the pulses of his being 
 slacken ; he draws back as it were from his own fate, surveys it 
 as a whole, separates himself from it. The various scenes of it 
 succeed each other in memory, set always — incomparably set — in 
 the spring green of the forest, or under a charmed moonlight, or 
 amid the flowery detail of a closed garden. Her little figure 
 flashes before him — he sees her gesture, her smile ; he hears his 
 own voice and hers ; recalls the struggle to express, the poverty 
 of words, the thrill of silence, and that perpetual and exquisite 
 recurrence to the interpreting images of poetry and art. But no 
 poet had imagined better, had divined more than they in those 
 earliest hours had lived ! So he had told her, so he insisted now 
 with a desperate faith. 
 
 But, poor soul ! even as he insists, the agony within rises, 
 breaks up, overwhelms the picture. He lives again through the 
 jars and frets of those few burning days, the growing mistrust of 
 them, the sense of jealous terror and insecurity — and then through 
 the anguish of desertion and loss. He writhes again under the 
 wrenching apart of their half -fused lives — under this intolerable 
 ache of his own wound. 
 
 This the best of passion ! Why his whole soul is still athirst and 
 ahungered. Not a single craving of it has been satisfied. What 
 is killing him is the sense of a thwarted gift, a baffled faculty — 
 the faculty of self -spending, self -surrender. This, the best ? 
 
 Then the mind fell into a whirlwind of half -articulate debate, 
 from the darkness of which emerged two scenes — fragments — set 
 clear in a passing light of memory. 
 
 That workman and his wife standing together before the day's 
 toil — the woman's contented smile as her look clung to the mean 
 departing figure. 
 
 And far, far back in his boyish life — Margaret sitting beside 
 'Lias in the damp autumn dawn, spending on his dying weakness 
 that exquisite, ineffable passion of tenderness, of pity. 
 
 Ah ! from the very beginning he had been in love with loving. 
 He drew the labouring breath of one who has staked his all for 
 some long-coveted gain, and lost. 
 
372 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 Weil ! — Mr. Ancrum may be right — the English Puritan may 
 be right — ' sin ' and ' law ' may have after all some of those 
 mysterious meanings his young analysis liad impetuously denied 
 them — he and Elise may have been only dashing themselves 
 against the hard facts of the workVs order, while they seemed to 
 be transcending the common lot and spurning the common ways. 
 What matter now ! A certain impatient defiance rises in his 
 stricken soul. He has made shipwreck of this one poor oppor- 
 tunity of life — confessed ! now let the God behind it punish, if 
 God there be. ' The rest is silence.' With Elise in his arms, he 
 had grasped at immortality. Now a stubborn, everlasting ' Nay ' 
 possesses him. There is nothing beyond. 
 
 He gathered up his letter, folded it, and put it into the breast- 
 pocket of his coat. But in doing so his fingers touched once more 
 the ragged edges of a bit of frayed paper. 
 
 Louie ! 
 
 Through all these half -sane days and nights he had never once 
 thought of his sister. She had passed out of his life — she had 
 played no part even in the nightmares of his dreams. 
 
 But now ! — while that intense denial of any reality in the 
 universe beyond and behind this masque of life and things was 
 still vibrating through his deepest being, it was as though a hand 
 gently drew aside a curtain, and there grew clear before him, 
 slowly effacing from his eyes the whole grandiose spectacle of 
 buildings, sky, and river, that scene of the past which had worked 
 so potently both in his childish sense and in Beuben's maturer 
 conscience — the bare room, the iron bed, the dying man, one child 
 within his arm, the other a frightened baby beside him. 
 
 It was frightfully clear, clearer than it had ever been in any 
 normal state of brain, and as his mind lingered on it, uncon- 
 sciously shaping, deepening its own creation, the weird impression 
 grew that the helpless figure amid the bedclothes rose on its elbow, 
 opened its cavernous eyes, and looked at him face to face, at the 
 son whose childish heart had beat against his father's to the last. 
 The boy's tortured soul quailed afresh before the curse his own 
 "remorse called into those eyes. 
 
 He hung over the water pleading with the phantom— defend- 
 ing himself. Every now and then he found that he was speaking 
 aloud ; then he would look round with a quick, piteous terror to 
 see whether he had been heard or no, the parched lips beginning 
 to move again almost before his fear was soothed. 
 
 All his past returned upon him, with its obligations, its fetters 
 of conscience and kinship, so slowly forged, so often resisted 
 and forgotten, and yet so strong. The moment marked the 
 first passing away of the philtre, but it brought no recovery 
 \vitli it. 
 
 ' My God ! my God ! I tried., father — / tried. But she is 
 lost, lost — as I am ! ' 
 
 Then a thought found entrance and developed. He walked 
 up and down the quay, wrestling it out, returning slowly and 
 
CHAP. XI STORM AND STRESS 373 
 
 with enormous difficulty, because of his physical state, to some of 
 the normal estimates and relations of life. 
 
 At last he dragged himself off towards his hotel. He must 
 have some sleep, or how could these hours that yet remained be 
 lived through — his scheme carried out ? 
 
 On the way he went into a shop still open on the boulevard. 
 When he came out he thrust his purchase into his pocket, but- 
 toned his coat over it, and pursued his way northwards with a 
 brisker step. 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 Two days afterwards David stood at the door of a house in the 
 outskirts of the Auteuil district of Paris. The street had a half- 
 finished, miscellaneous air ; new buildings of the villa type were 
 mixed up with old and dingy houses standing in gardens, which 
 had been evidently overtaken by the advancing stream of Paris, 
 having once enjoyed a considerable amount of country air and 
 space. 
 
 It was at the garden gate of one of these older houses that 
 David rang, looking about him the while at the mean irregular 
 street and the ill-kept side-walks with their heaps of cinders and 
 refuse. 
 
 A powerfully built woman appeared, scowling, in answer to 
 the bell. At first she flatly refused the new-comer admission. 
 But David was prepared. He set to work to convince her that he 
 was not a Paris creditor, and, further, that he was well aware M. 
 Montjoie was not at home, since he had passed him on the other 
 side of the road, apparently hurrying to the railway station, only 
 a few minutes before. He desired simply to see madame. At 
 this the woman's expression changed somewhat. She showed, 
 however, no immediate signs of letting him in, being clearly 
 chosen and paid to be a watch-dog. Then David brusquely put 
 his hand in his pocket. Somehow he must get this harridan out 
 of the way at once ! The same terror was upon him that had 
 been upon him now for many days and nights— of losing com- 
 mand of himself, of being no more able to do what he had to do. 
 
 The creature studied him, put out a greedy palm, developed a 
 smile still more repellent than her brutality, and let him in. 
 
 He found himself in a small, neglected garden ; in front of 
 him, to the right, a wretched, weather-stained house, bearing 
 every mark of poverty and dilapidation, while to the left there 
 stret"ched out from the house a long glass structure, also in miser- 
 able condition— a sculptor's studio, as he guessed. 
 
 His guide led him to the studio-door. Madame was there a 
 few minutes ago. As they approached, David stopped. 
 
 'I will knock. You may go back to the house. I am 
 madame's brother.' 
 
 She looked at him once more, reluctant. Then, ni the clearer 
 light of the garden, the likeness of the face to one she already 
 
374 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 knew struck her with amazement ; she turned and went off, 
 muttering. 
 
 David knocked at the door ; there was a movement within, 
 and it was cautiously opened. 
 
 ' Monaiear eat sorti. — You ' ' 
 
 The brother and sister were face to face. 
 
 David closed the door behind him, and Louie retreated slowly, 
 her hands behind her, her tall figure drawing itself up, her face 
 setting into a frowning scorn. 
 
 ' You .^— what are you here for ? We have done with each 
 other ! ' 
 
 For answer David went up to a stove which was feebly burn- 
 ing in the damp, cheerless place, put down his hat and stick, and 
 bent over it, stretching out his hands to the warmth. A chair was 
 beside it, and on the chair some scattered bits of silk and velvet, 
 out of which Louie was apparently fashioning a hat. 
 
 She stood still, observing him. She was in a loose dress of 
 some silky Oriental material, and on her black hair she wore a 
 red close-fitting cap with a fringe of golden coins dropping 
 lightly and richly round her superb head and face. 
 
 ' What is the matter with you ? ' she asked him grimly, after a 
 minute's silence. ' She has left you— that's plain ! ' 
 
 The young man involuntarily threw back his head as though 
 he had been struck, and a vivid colour rushed into his cheek. 
 But he answered quickly : 
 
 'We need not discuss my affairs. I did not come here to 
 speak of them. They are beyond mending. I came to see — 
 before I go — whether there is anything I can do to help you. ' 
 
 ' Much obliged to you ! ' she cried, flinging herself down on 
 the edge of a rough board platform, whereon stood a fresh and 
 vigorous clay-study, for which she had just been posing, to judge 
 from her dress. Beyond was the Maenad. And in the distance 
 loomed a great block of marble, upon which masons had been 
 working that afternoon. 
 
 ' I am greatly obliged to you ! ' she repeated mockingly, 
 taking the crouching attitude of an animal ready to attack. ' You 
 are a pattern brother. ' 
 
 Her glowing looks expressed the enmity and contempt she was 
 at the moment too excited to put into words. 
 
 David drew his hand across his eyes with a long breath. How 
 was he to get through it, this task of his, with this swollen, aching 
 brain and these trembling limbs ? Louie must let him speak ; he 
 bitterly felt his physical impotence to wrestle with her. 
 
 He went up to her slowly and sat down beside her. She drew 
 away from him with a violent movement. But he laid his hand 
 upon her knee— a shaking hand which his impatient will tried 
 in vain to steady. 
 
 ' Louie, look at me ! ' he commanded. 
 
 She did so unwillingly, but the proud repulsion of her lip did 
 not relax. ^ 
 
CHAP. XI STORM AND STRESS 375 
 
 * Well, I dare say you look pretty bad. Whose fault is it ? 
 everybody else but you knew what the creature was worth. Ask 
 anybody ! ' 
 
 The lad's frame straightened and steadied. He took his hand 
 from her knee. 
 
 ' Say that kind of thing again,' he said calmly, * and I walk 
 straight out of that door, and you set eyes on me for the last time. 
 That would be what you want, I dare say. All I wish to point 
 out is, that you would be a great fool. I have not come here to- 
 day to waste words, but to propose something to your advantage 
 — your money-advantage,' he repeated deliberately, looking round 
 the dismal building with its ill-mended gaps and rents, and its 
 complete lack of the properties and appliances to which the 
 humblest modern artist pretends. ' To judge from what I heard 
 in Paris, and what I see, money is scarce here.' 
 
 His piteous sudden wish to soften her, to win a kind word 
 from her, from anyone, had passed away. He was beginning to 
 take command of her as in the old days. 
 
 ' Well, maybe we are hard up,' she admitted slowly. ' People 
 are such brutes and won't wait, and a sculptor has to pay out 
 for a lot of things before he can make anything at all. But that 
 statue will put it all right,' and she pointed behind her to the 
 Maenad. ' It's me — it's the one you tried to put a stopper on.' 
 
 She looked at him darkly defiant. She was leaning back on 
 one arm, her foot beating with the trick familiar to her. For 
 reckless and evil splendour the figure was unsurpassable. 
 
 ' When he sells that,' she went on, seeing that he did not 
 answer, ' and he will sell it in a jiffy — it is the best he's ever done 
 — there'll be heaps of money. ' 
 
 David smiled. 
 
 'For a week perhaps. Then, if I understand this business 
 aright — I have been doing my best, you perceive, to get informa- 
 tion, and M. Montjoie seems to be better known than one 
 supposed to half Paris — the game will begin again.' 
 
 ' Never you mind,' she broke in, breathing quickly. ' Give 
 me my money — the money that belongs to me — and let me 
 alone. ' 
 
 ' On one condition,' he said quietly. ' That money, as you 
 remember, is in my hands and at my disposal. ' 
 
 ' Ah ! I supposed you would try to grab it ! ' she cried. 
 
 Even he was astonished at her violence — her insolence. The 
 demon in her had never been so plain, the woman never so 
 effaced. His heart dropped within him like lead, and his whole 
 being shrank from her. 
 
 ' Listen to me ! ' he said, seizing her strongly by the hand, 
 while a light of wrath leapt into his changed and bloodshot eyes. 
 ' This man will desert you ; in a year's time he will have tired of 
 you ; what'll you do then ? ' 
 
 ' Manage for myself, thank you ! without any canting inter- 
 ference from you. I have had enough of that. ' 
 
376 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 ' And fall again,' he said, releasing her, and speaking with a 
 deliberate intensity ; ' fall again— from infamy to infamy ! ' 
 She sprang up. 
 ' Mind yourself ! ' she cried. 
 
 Miserable moment ! As he looked at her he felt that that 
 weapon of his old influence with, her which, poor as it was, he had 
 relied on iu the last resort all his life, had broken in his hand. 
 His own act had robbed it of all virtue. That pang of ' irrepa- 
 rableness' which had smitten Elise smote him now. All was 
 undone — all was done ! 
 
 He buried his face in his hands an instant. When he lifted it 
 again, she was standing with her arms folded across her chest, 
 leaning against an iron shaft which supported part of the roof. 
 
 ' You had better go ! ' she said, still in a white heat. ' Why 
 you ever came I don't know. If you won't give me that money, 
 I shall get it somehow.' 
 
 Suddenly, as she spoke, everything— the situation, the subject 
 of their talk, the past— seemed to be wiped out of David's brain. 
 He stared round him helplessly. Why were they there— what 
 had happened ? ^ ^. . 
 
 This blankness lasted a certain number of seconds. Then it 
 passed away, and he painfully recovered his identity. But the 
 experience was not new to him— it would recur— let him be 
 quick. 
 
 This time a happier instinct served him. He, too, rose and 
 went up to her. 
 
 ' We are a pair of fools,' he said to her, half bitterly, half 
 gently ; ' we reproach and revile each other, and all the time I 
 am come to give you not only what is yours, but all— all I have- 
 that it may stand between you and— and worse ruin.' 
 
 ' Ruin ! ' she said, throwing back her head and catchmg at the 
 wwd; 'speak for yourself! If I am Montjoie's mistress, Elise 
 Delaunay was yours. Don't preach. It won't go down.' 
 
 ' I have no intention of preaching— don't alarm yourself,' he 
 replied quietly, this time controlling himself without difficulty. 
 ' I have only this to say. On the day when you become Montjoie's 
 wife, all our father's money— all the six hundred pounds Mr. 
 Gurney paid over to me in January, shall be paid to you.' 
 She started, caught her breath, tried to brazen it out. 
 'What is this idiocy for?' she asked coldly. 'What does 
 marrying matter to you ? ' . -, •, 
 
 He sank down again on the chair by the stove, bemg, mdeed, 
 unable to stand. 
 
 ' Perhaps I can't tell you,' he said, after a pause, shadmg his 
 face from her with his hand ; ' perhaps I could not make plain to 
 myself what I feel. But this I know— that this man with whom 
 you are living here is a man for whom nobody has a good word. 
 I want to give you a hold over him. But first !— stop a moment,' 
 —he dropped his hand and looked up eagerly, ' w ill you leave 
 liini- leave him at once ? I could arrange that. ' 
 
CHAP. XI STORM AND STRESS " 377 
 
 'Make your mind easy,' she said shortly; 'he suits me— I 
 stay. I went with him, well, because I was dull— and bec.msc I 
 wanted to make you smart for it, if you're keen to know !— but if 
 you think I am anxious to go home, to be cried over by Dora and 
 lectured by you, you're vastly mistaken. I can manage him ! I 
 have my hold on him — he knows very well what I am worth to 
 him.' 
 
 She threw her head back superbly against the iron shaft., 
 putting one arm round it and resting her hot cheek against it as 
 though for coolness. 
 
 ' Why should we argue ? ' he said sharply — after a wretched 
 silence. ' I didn't come for that. If you won't leave him I have 
 only this to say. On the day he marries you, if the evidence of 
 the marriage is satisfactory to an English lawyer I have dis- 
 covered in Paris and whose address I will give you, six hundred 
 pounds will be paid over to you. It is there now, in the lawyer's 
 hands. If not, I go home, and the law does not compel me to 
 hand you over one farthing.' 
 
 She was silent, and began to pace up and down. 
 'Montjoie despises marriage,' she said presently. 
 ' Try whether he despises money too,' said David, and could 
 not for the life of him keep the sarcastic note out of his voice. 
 She bit her lip. 
 
 ' And when, if it is done, must this precious thing be 
 settled?' 
 
 ' If your marriage does not take place within a month, Mr. 
 O'Kelly— I will leave you his r.ddress,' he put his hand into his 
 pocket — ' has orders to return the money—' 
 
 ' To whom ? ' she inquired, struck by his sudden break. 
 ' To me, of course,' he said slowly. ' Is it perfectly plain ? do 
 you understand ? Now, then, listen. I have inquired what the 
 law is — you will have to be married both at the mairie and by the 
 chaplain at the British embassy.' 
 
 She stopped suddenly in her walk and confronted him. 
 ' If I am married at all,' she said abruptly, ' I shall be married 
 as a Catholic' 
 
 ' A Catholic ! ' David stared at her. She enjoyed his asto- 
 nishment. 
 
 ' Oh, I have had that in my mind for a long time,' she said 
 scornfully. ' There is a priest at that church with the steps, you 
 know, near that cemetery place on the hill, who is very much 
 interested in me indeed. He speaks English. I used to go to 
 confession. Madame Cervin told me all about it, and how to do 
 it ; I did it exact ! Oh, if I am to be married, that will make it 
 plain sailing enough. It was awkward — while — ' 
 
 She broke off and sat down again beside him, pondering and 
 smiling as he had seen her do in Manchester, when she had the 
 prospect of a new dress or some amusement that excited her. 
 
 ' How have you been able to think about such things ? ' he 
 asked her, marvelling. 
 
378 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ui 
 
 ' Think about them ! What was the good of that ? It's the 
 churches I like, and the priests. Now there is something to see 
 in the Paris churches, like the Madeleine — worth a dozen St. 
 Damian's, — you may tell Dora that. The flowers and the dresses 
 and the music — they are something like. And the priests — ' 
 
 She smiled again, little meditative smiles, as though she were 
 recalling her experiences. 
 
 'Well, I don't know that there's much about them,' she said 
 at last ; ' they're queer, and they're awfully clever, and they want 
 to manage you, of course.' 
 
 She stopped, quite unable to express herself any more fully. 
 But it was evident that the traditional relation of the Catholic 
 priest to his penitent had been to her a subject of curiosity and 
 excitement — that she would gladly know more of it. 
 
 David could hardly believe his ears. He sat lost at first in 
 the pure surprise of it, in the sense of Louie's unlikeness to any 
 other human creature he had ever seen. Then a gleam of satis- 
 faction arose. He had heard of the hold on women possessed by 
 the Catholic Church, and maintained by her marvellous, and on 
 the whole admirable, system of direction. For himseli, he would 
 have no priests of whatever Church. But his mind harboured 
 none of the common Protestant rules and shibboleths. In God's 
 name, let the priests get hold of this sister of his ! — if they could 
 — when he — 
 
 ' Marry this man, then ! ' he said to her at last, breaking the 
 silence abruptly, ' and square it with the Church, if you want 
 to.' 
 
 ' Oh, indeed ! ' she said mockingly. ' So you have nothing to 
 say against my turning Catholic? I should like to see Uncle 
 Reuben's face. ' 
 
 Her voice had the exultant mischief of a child. It was evi- 
 dent that her spirits were rising, that her mood towards her 
 brother was becoming more amiable. 
 
 ' Nothing,' he said dryly, replying to her question. 
 
 Then he got up and looked for his hat. She watched him 
 askance. ' What are you going for ? I could get you some tea. 
 Ife won't be in for hours. ' 
 
 ' I have said what I had to say. These ' — taking a paper from 
 his pocket and laying it down, ' are all the directions, legal and 
 other, that concern you, as to the marriage. I drew them up 
 this morning, with Mr. O'Kelly. I have given you his address. 
 You can communicate with him at any time.' 
 
 ' I can write to you, I suppose ? ' 
 
 'Better write to him,' he said quietly, 'he has instructions. 
 He seemed to me a good sort.' 
 
 ' Where are you going ? ' 
 
 ' Back to Paris, and then — home.' 
 
 She placed herself in his way, so that the sunny light of the 
 late afternoon, coming mostly from behind her, left her face in 
 shadow. 
 
CHAP. XI STORM AND STRESS 379 
 
 ' Whatll you do without that money ? ' she asked abruptly. 
 He paused, getting together his answer with difficulty. 
 'I have the stock, and there is something left of the sixty 
 pounds Uncle Reuben brought. I shall do.' 
 
 ' Hell muddle it all,' she said roughly. ' What's the good ? 
 And she folded her arms across her with the recklessness of 
 one quite ready and eager, if need be, to fight her own battle, 
 with her own weapons, in her own way. 
 
 'Get Mr. O'Kelly to keep it, if you can persuade him, and 
 draw it by degrees. I'd have made a trust of it, if it had been 
 enough ; but it isn't. Twenty-four pounds a year : that's all 
 you'd get, if we tied up the capital.' . . -. i 
 
 She laughed. Evidently her acquaintance with Montjoie had 
 enlarged her notions of money, which were precise and acute 
 enough before. , , . -, T,n v. 
 
 'He spends that in a supper when he's m cash. Ill be 
 curious to see whether, all in a lump, it'll be enough to make him 
 marry -me. Still, he is precious hard up : he don't stir out till 
 dark, he's so afraid of meeting people.' _ 
 
 ' That's my hope,' said David heavily, hardly knowing what he 
 said. 'Good-bye.' _ „ ^ x x- 
 
 ' Hope ! ' she re-echoed bitterly. ' What d'you want to tie me 
 to him for, for good and all ? ' . x-u i. 
 
 And, turning away from him, she stared, frowning, through 
 the dingy glass door into the darkening garden. In her mmd 
 there was once more that strange uprising swell of reaction— ot 
 hatred of herself and life. 
 
 Why, indeed ? David could not have answered her question. 
 He only knew that there was a blind instinct in him driving him 
 to this, as the best that remained open— the only amende possible 
 for what had been so vilely done by himself, by her, and by the 
 man who had worked out her fall for a mere vicious whim. 
 There was no word in any mouth, it seemed to him, of his being 
 in love with her. . . -, . 
 
 There were all sorts of whirling thoughts m his mmd— frag- 
 ments cast up by the waves of desolate experience he had been 
 passing through— inarticulate cries of warning, judgment, pam. 
 But he could put nothing into words. 
 ' Good-bye, Louie ! ' 
 She turned and stood looking at him. 
 ' What made you get ill ? ' she inquired, eyeing him. 
 His thirsty heart drank in the change of tone. 
 ' I don't sleep,' he said hurriedly. ' It's the noise. The Nord 
 station is never quiet. Well, mind you've got to bring thjst off. 
 Keep the papers safe. Good-bye, for a long time.' 
 
 ' I can come over when I want ? ' she said half sullenly. 
 ' Yes,' he assented, ' but you won't want.' 
 He drew her by the hand, with a solemn tremulous feehng, 
 and kissed her on the cheek. He would have liked to give her 
 their father's dying letter. It was there, in his coat-pocket. But 
 
380 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iij 
 
 he shrank from the emotion of it. No, he must go. He had 
 done all he could. 
 
 She opened the door for him, and took him to the garden-gate 
 in silence. 
 
 'When I'm married,' she said shortly, 'if ever I am — Lord 
 knows ! — you can tell Uncle Reuben and Dora ? ' 
 
 ' Yes. Good-bye. ' 
 
 The gate closed behind him. He went away, hurrying towards 
 the Auteuil station. 
 
 When he landed again in the Paris streets, he stood irresolute. 
 
 ' One more look,' he said to himself, ' one more.' 
 
 And he turned down the Rue Chantal. There was the familiar 
 archway, and the light shining behind the porter's door. Was 
 her room already stripped and bare, or w^as the broken glass — 
 poor dumb prophet ! — still there, against the wall ? 
 
 He wandered on through the lamp-lit city and the crowded 
 pavements. Elise — the wraith of her — went with him, hand in 
 hand, ghost with ghost, amid this multitude of men. Sometimes, 
 breaking from this dream-companionship, he w^ould wake with 
 terror to the perception of his true, his utter loneliness. He was 
 not made to be alone, and the thought that nowhere in this great 
 Paris w^as there a single human being to whose friendly eye or 
 hand he might turn him in his need, swept across him from time 
 to time, contracting the heart. Dora — Mr. Ancrum — if they 
 knew, they would be sorry. 
 
 Then again indifference and blankness came upon him, and he 
 could only move feebly on, seeing everything in a blur and mist. 
 After these long days and nights of sleeplessness, semi-starvation, 
 and terrible excitement, every nerve w'as sick, every organ out of 
 gear. 
 
 The lights of the Tuileries, the stately pile of the Louvre, under 
 a grey driving sky. — There would be rain soon — ah, there it 
 came ! the great drops hissing along the pavement. He pushed 
 on to the river, careless of the storm, soothed, indeed, by the cool 
 dashes of rain in his face and eyes. 
 
 The Place de la Concorde seemed to him as day, so brilliant 
 was the glare of its lamps. To the right, the fairyland of the 
 Champs-Elysees, the trees tossing under the sudden blast ; in 
 front, the black trench of the river. On, on — let him see it all — ■ 
 gather it all into his accusing heart and brain, and then at a 
 stroke blot out the inward and the outward vision, and ' cease 
 upon the midnight with no pain' ! 
 
 He walked till he could walk no more ; then he sank on a dark 
 seat on the Quai Saint-Michel, cursing himself. Had he no nerve 
 left for the last act — was that wiiat this delay, this fooling meant ? 
 Coward ! 
 
 But not here ! not in these streets — this publicity ! Back — to 
 the little noisome room. There lock the door, and make an end ! 
 
 On the way northward, at the command of a sudden caprice, 
 he sat down outside a blazing cafe on the Boulevard and ordered 
 
CHAP. XI STORM AND STRESS 381 
 
 absinthe, which he had never ^asted. While he waited he looked 
 round on the painted women, on the men escorting them, on 
 the loungers with their newspapers and cigars, the shouting, 
 supercilious waiters. But all the little odious details of the scene 
 escaped him ; he felt only the touchingness of his human com- 
 radeship, the yearning of a common life, bruised and wounded 
 but still alive within him. 
 
 Then he drank the stuff they gave him, loathed it, paid and 
 st..ggered on. When he reached his hotel he crept upstairs, 
 dreading to meet any of the harsh-faced people who frowned as 
 he passed them. He had done abject things these last three days 
 to conciliate them — tipped the waiter, ordered food, not that he 
 might eat it but that he might pay for it, bowed to the landlady 
 — all to save the shrinking of his sore and quivering nerves. In 
 vain ! It seemed to him that since that last look from Elise as 
 she nestled into the fern, there had b3en no kindness for him in 
 human eyes — save, perhaps, from that woman with the child. 
 
 As he dragged himself up to his fourth floor, the stimulant he 
 had taken began to work upon his starved senses. The key was 
 in his door, he turned it and fell into his room, while the door, 
 with the key still in it, swung to behind him. Guiding himself 
 by the furniture, he reached the only chair the room possessed — 
 an arm-chair of the commonest and cheapest hotel sort, which, 
 because of the uncertainty of its legs, thefenwie de cha?nhre had 
 propped up against the bed. He sat down in it and his head fell 
 back on the counterpane. There was much to do. He had to write 
 to John about the sale of his stock and the^payment of his debts. 
 He had to put his father's letter into an envelope for Louie, to 
 send all the papers and letters he had on him and a last message 
 to Mr, Ancrum, and then to post these letters, so that nothing 
 private might fall into the hands of the French police, who would, 
 of course, open his bag. 
 
 While these thoughts were rising in him, a cloud came over 
 the brain, bringing with it, as it seemed, the first moment of ease 
 which had been his during this awful fortnight. Before he yielded 
 himself to it he thrust his hand into his coat-pocket with a sudden 
 vague anxiety to feel what was there. But even as he withdrew 
 his fingers they relaxed ; a black object came with them, and fell 
 unheeded, first on his knee, then on to a coat lying on the floor 
 between him and the window. 
 
 A quarter of an hour afterwards there was a stir and voices 
 on the landing outside. Some one knocked at the door of No. 
 139. No answer. ' The key is in the door. Ouvrez do }ic/^ cried 
 the waiter, as he ran downstairs again to the restaurant, which 
 was still crowded. The visitor opened the door and peeped in. 
 Some quick words broke from him. He rushed in and up to the 
 bed. But directly the heavy feverish breathing of the figure in 
 the chair caught his ear his look of sudden horror relaxed, and 
 he fell back, looking at the sleeping youth. 
 
 It was a piteous sight he saw ! Exhaustion, helplessness. 
 
383 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 sorrow, physical injury, and moral defeat, were written in every 
 line of the poor drawn face and shrunken form. The brow was 
 furrowed, the breathing hard, the mouth dry and bloodless. 
 Upon the mind of the new-comer, possessed as it was with the 
 image of what David Grieve had been two short months before, 
 the effect of the spectacle was presently overwhelming. 
 
 He fell on his knees beside the sleeper. But as he did so, he 
 noticed the black thing on the floor, stooped to it, and took it up. 
 That it should be a loaded revolver seemed to him at that moment 
 the most natural thing in the world, little used as he personally 
 was to such possessions. He looked at it carefully, took out the 
 two cartridges it contained, put them into one pocket and the 
 revolver into the other. 
 
 Then he laid his arm round the lad's neck. 
 
 ' David ! ' 
 
 The young man woke directly and sat up, shaking with terror 
 and excitement. He pushed his visitor from him, looking at him 
 with defiance. Then he slipped his hand inside his coat and 
 sprang up with a cry. 
 
 ' David ! — dear boy — dear fellow ! ' 
 
 The voice penetrated the lad's ear. He caught his visitor and 
 dragged him forward to the light. It fell on the twisted face and 
 wet eyes of Mr. Ancrum. So startling was the vision, so poignant 
 were the associations which it set vibrating, that David stood 
 staring and trembling, struck dumb. 
 
 'Oh, my poor lad ! my poor lad ! John wanted me to come 
 yesterday, and I delayed. I was a selfish wretch. Now I will 
 take you home.' 
 
 David fell again upon his chair, too feeble to speak, too feeble 
 even to weep, the little remaining colour ebbing from his cheeks. 
 The minister used all his strength, and laid him on the bed. Then 
 he rang and made even the callous and haughty madame, who 
 was presently summoned, listen to and obey him while he sent 
 for brandy and a doctor, and let the air of the night into the 
 stifling room. 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 In two or three days the English doctor who was attending 
 David strongly advised Mr. Ancrum to get his charge home. 
 The fierce strain his youth had sustained acting through the 
 nervous system had disordered almost every bodily function, and 
 the collapse which followed Mr. Ancrum's appearance was severe. 
 He would lie in his bed motionless and speechless, volunteered no 
 confidence, and showed hardly any rallying power. 
 
 ^ ' Get him out of this furnace and that doghole of a room,' 
 said the doctor. 'He has come to grief here somehow— that's 
 plain. You won't make anything of him till you move him.' 
 
 When the lad was at last stretched on the deck of a Channel 
 steamer speeding to the English coast, and the sea breeze had 
 
CHAP XII STORM AND STRESS 383 
 
 brought a faint touch of returning colour to his cheek, he asked 
 the question he had never yet had the physical energy to ask. 
 
 ' Why did you come, and how did you find me ? ' 
 
 Then it appeared that the old cashier at Heywood's bank, who 
 had taken a friendly interest in the young bookseller since the 
 opening of his account, had dropped a private word to John in 
 the course of conversation, which had alarmed that youth not a 
 little. His own last scrawl from David had puzzled and dis- 
 quieted him, and he straightway marched off to Mr. Ancrum to 
 consult. Whereupon the minister wrote cautiously and affection- 
 ately to David asking for some prompt and full explanation of 
 things for his friends' sake. The letter was, as we know, never 
 opened, and therefore never answered. Whereupon John's jea- 
 lous misery on Louie's account and Mr. Ancrum's love for David 
 had so worked that the minister had broken in upon his scanty 
 savings and started for Paris at a few hours' notice. Once in the 
 Rue Chantal he had come easily on David's track. 
 
 Naturally he had inquired after Louie as soon as David was in 
 a condition to be questioned at all. The young man hesitated a 
 moment, then he said resolutely, ' She is married,' and would say 
 no more. Mr, Ancrum pressed" the matter a little, but his patient 
 merely shook his head, and the sight of him as he lay there on 
 the pillow was soon enough to silence the minister. 
 
 On the evening before they left Paris he called for a telegraph 
 form, wrote a message and paid the reply, but Mr. Ancrum saw 
 nothing of either. When the reply arrived David crushed it in 
 his hand with a strange look, half bitterness, half relief, and 
 flung it behind a piece of furniture standing near. 
 
 Now, on the cool, wind-swept deck, he seemed more inclined 
 to talk than he had been yet. He asked questions about John 
 and the Lomaxes— he even inquired after Lucy, as to whom the 
 minister who had lately improved an acquaintance with Dora and 
 her father, begun through David, could only answer vaguely that 
 he believed she was still in the south. But he volunteered no- 
 thing about his own affairs or the cause of the state in which 
 Mr. Ancrum had found him. 
 
 Every now and then, indeed, as they stood together at the 
 side of the vessel, David leaning heavily against it, his words 
 would fail him altogether, and he would be left staring stupidly, 
 the great black eyes widening, the lower lip falling— over the 
 shifting brilliance of the sea. 
 
 Ancrum was almost sure too that in the darkness of their 
 last night in Paris there had been, hour after hour, a sound of 
 hard and stifled weeping, mingled with the noises from the 
 street and from the station ; and to-day the youth in the face 
 was more quenched than ever, in spite of the signs of reviving 
 health. There had been a woman in the case, of course : Louie 
 might have misbehaved herself ; but after all the world is so 
 made that no sister can make a brother suffer as David had 
 evidently suffered — and then there was the revolver ! About this 
 
384 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 last, after one or two restless movements of search, which Mr. 
 Ancrum interpreted, David had never asked, and the minister, 
 timid man of peace that he was, had resold it before leaving. 
 
 Well, it was a problem, and it must be left to time. Mean- 
 while Mr. Ancrum was certainly astonished that any love affair 
 should have had such a destructive volcanic power with the lad. 
 For it was no mere raw and sensuous nature, no idle and morbid 
 brain. One would have thought that so many different aptitudes 
 and capacities would have kept each other in check. 
 
 As they neared Manchester, David grew plainly restless and 
 ill at ease. He looked out sharply for the name of each succeed- 
 ing town, half turning afterwards, as though to speak to his 
 companion ; but it was not till they were v.'ithin ten minutes of 
 the Central Station that he said — 
 
 ' John will want to know about Louie. She is married,— as I 
 told you, — to a French sculptor. I have handed over to her all 
 my father's money — that is why I drew it out.' 
 
 Mr. Ancrum edged up closer to him — all ears — waiting for 
 more. But there was nothing more. 
 
 ' And you are satisfied ? ' he said at last. 
 
 David nodded and looked out of window intently. 
 
 ' What is the man's name ? ' 
 
 David either did not or would not hear, and Mr. Ancrum let 
 him alone. But the news was startling. So the boy had stripped 
 himself, and must begin the world again as before ! What had 
 that minx been. after ? 
 
 Manchester again. David looked out eagerly from the cab, 
 his hand trembling on his knee, beads of perspiration on his face. 
 
 They turned up the narrow street, and there in the distance 
 to the right was the stall and the shop, and a figure on the steps. 
 Mr. Ancrum had sent a card before them, and John was on the 
 watch. 
 
 The instant the cab stopped, and before the driver could 
 dismount, John had opened the door. Putting his head in he 
 peered at the pair inside, and at the opposite seat, with his small 
 short-sighted eyes. 
 
 ' Where is she ?' he said hoarsely, barring the way. 
 
 Mr. Ancrum looked at his companion. David had shrunk 
 back into the corner, with a white hangdog look, and said no- 
 thing. Tlie minister interposed. 
 
 'David will tell you all,' he said gently. 'First help me in 
 with him, and the bags. He is a sick man.' 
 
 With a huge effort John controlled himself, and they got 
 inside. Then he shut the shop door and put his back against it. 
 
 'Tell me where she is,' he repeated shortly. 
 
 ' She is married,' David said in a low voice, but looking up 
 from the chair on which he had sunk. ' By now — she is mar- 
 ried. I heard by telegram last night that all was arranged for 
 to-day. ' 
 
 The lad opposite mnd(} a sharp, inarticulate sound which 
 
CHAP. XII STORM AND STRESS 385 
 
 startled the rainister's ear. Then clutching the handle of the 
 door, he resumed sharply — 
 'Who has she married?' 
 
 The assumption of the right to question was arrogance itself 
 — strange in the dumb, retiring creature whom the minister had 
 hitherto known only as David's slave and shadow ! 
 
 'A French sculptor,' said David steadily, but propping his 
 head and hand against the counter, so as to avoid John's stare— 
 ' a man called Montjoie. I was a brute— I neglected her. She 
 got into his hands. Then I sent for all my money to bribe him 
 to marry her. And he has.' 
 
 ' You — you hlackyuard ! ' cried John. 
 
 David straightened instinctively under the blow, and his eyes 
 met John's for one fierce moment. Then Mr. Ancrum thought he 
 would have fainted. The minister took rough hold of John by 
 the shoulders. 
 
 ' If you can't stay and hold your tongue,' he said, ' you must 
 go. He is worn out with the journey, and I shall get him to 
 bed. Here's some money : suppose you run to the house round 
 the corner, in Prince's Street; ask if they've got some strong 
 soup, and, if tliey have, hurry back with it. Come— look sharp. 
 And — one moment — you've been sleeping here, I suppose? 
 Well, I shall take your room for a bit, if that'll suit you. This 
 fellow'U have to be looked after. ' 
 
 The little lame creature spoke like one who meant to have his 
 way. John took the coin, hesitated, and stumbled out. 
 
 For days afterwards there was silence between him and David, 
 except for business directions. He avoided being in the shop 
 with his employer, and would stand for hours on the step, 
 ostensibly watching the stall, but in reality doing no business 
 that he could help. Whenever Mr. Ancrum caught sight of him 
 he was leaning against the wall, his hat slouched over his eyes, 
 his hands in his pockets, utterly inert and listless, more like a 
 log than a human being. Stiirhe was no less stout, lumpish, 
 and pink-faced than before. His fate might have all the tragic 
 quality ; nature had none the less inexorably endowed him with 
 the externals of farce. 
 
 Meanwhile David dragged himself from his bed to the shop 
 and set to work to pick up dropped threads. The customers, who 
 had been formerly interested in him, discovered his return, and 
 came in to inquire Mdiy he had been so long away, or, in the case 
 of one or two, whether he had executed certain commissions in 
 Paris. The explanation of illness, however, circulated from the 
 first moment by Mr. Ancrum, and perforce adopted— though 
 with an inward rage and rebellion— by David himself, was amply 
 sufficient to cover his omissions and inattentions, and to ease his 
 resumption of his old place. His appearance indeed was still 
 ghastly. The skin of the face had the tightened, transparent 
 look of weakness ; the eyes, reddened and sunk, showed but 
 little of their old splendour between the blue circles beneath and 
 
386 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book m 
 
 the heavy brows above ; even the hair seemed to have lost its 
 boyish curl, and fell in harsh, troublesome waves over the fore- 
 head, whence its owner was perpetually and impatiently thrusting 
 it back. All the bony structure of the face had been emphasised 
 at the expense of its young grace and bloom, and the new indi- 
 cations of moustache and beard did but add to its striking and 
 painful black and white. And the whole impression of change 
 w^as completed by the melancholy aloofness, the shrinking distrust 
 with which eyes once overflowing with the frankness and eager- 
 ness of one of the most accessible of human souls now looked out 
 upon the w^orld. 
 
 'Was it fever?' said a young Owens College professor who 
 had taken a lively interest from the beginning in the clever lad's 
 venture. ' Upon my word ! you do look pulled down. Paris 
 may be the first city in the world— it is an insanitary hole all the 
 same. So you never found time to inquire after those Moliere 
 editions for me ? ' 
 
 David racked his brains. What was it he had been asked to 
 do ? He remembered half an hour's talk on one of those early 
 days with a bookseller on the Quai Voltaire— was it about this 
 commission? He could not recall. 
 
 ' No, sir,' he said, stammering and flushing. ' I believe I did 
 ask somewhere, but I can't remember.' 
 
 'It's very natural, very natural,' said the professor kindly. 
 ' Never mind. I'll send you the particulars again, and you can 
 keep your eyes open for me. And, look here, take your business 
 easy for a while. You'll get on — you're sure to get on — if you 
 only recover your health.' 
 
 David opened the door for him in silence. 
 
 The reawakening of his old life in him was strange and slow. 
 When he first found himself back among his books and catalogues, 
 his ledgers and business memoranda, he was bewildered and im- 
 patient. What did these elaborate notes, with their cabalistic 
 signs and abbreviations — whether as to the needs of customers, 
 or the whereabouts of books, or the history of prices — mean or 
 matter ? He was like a man who has los^t a sense. Then the 
 pressure of certain debts which should have been met out of the 
 money in the bank first put some life into him. He looked into 
 his financial situation and found it grave, though not desperate. 
 All hope of a large and easy expansion of business was, of course, 
 gone. The loss of his capital had reduced him to the daily shifts 
 and small laborious accumulations with which he had begun. 
 But this factor in his state was morally of more profit to him at 
 the moment than any other. With such homely medicines nature 
 and life can often do most for us. 
 
 Such was Ancrum's belief, and in consequence he showed a 
 very remarkable wisdom during these early days of David's 
 return. 
 
 ' As far as I can judge, there has been a bad shake to the 
 heart in more senses than one,' had been the dry remark of the 
 
CHAP. XII STORM AND STRESS 387 
 
 Paris doctor ; * and as for nervous system, it's a mercy he's got 
 any left. Take care of him, but for Heaven's sake don't make 
 an invalid of him— that would be the finish.' 
 
 So that Ancrum offered no fussy opposition to the resumption 
 of the young man's daily work, though at first it produced a con- 
 stant battle with exhaustion and depression. But never day or 
 night did the minister forget his charge. He saw that he ate and 
 drank ; he enforced a few common sense remedies for the nervous 
 ills which the moral convulsion had left behind it, ills which the 
 lad in his irritable humiliation would fain have hidden even from 
 him ; above all he knew how to say a word which kept Dora and 
 Daddy and other friends away for a time, and how to stand be- 
 tween David and that choked and miserable John. 
 
 He had the strength of mind also to press for no confidence and 
 to expect no thanks. He had little fear of any further attempts 
 at suicide, though he would have found it difficult perhaps 
 to explain why. But instinctively he felt that for all practical 
 purposes David had been mad when he found him, and that he 
 was mad no longer. He was wretched, and only a fraction of 
 his mind was in Manchester and in his business— that was plain. 
 But, in however imperfect a way, he was again master of himself ; 
 and the minister bided his time, putting his ultimate trust in one 
 of the finest mental and physical constitutions he had ever known. 
 In about ten days David took up his hat one afternoon and, 
 for the first time, ventured into the streets. On his return he 
 was walking down Potter Street in a storm of wind and rain, 
 when he ran against some one who was holding an umbrella right 
 in front of her and battling with the weather. In his recoil he 
 saw that it was Dora. 
 
 Dora too looked up, a sudden radiant pleasure in her face 
 overflowing her soft eyes and lips. 
 
 ' Oh, Mr. Grieve ! And are you really better? ' 
 ' Yes,' he said briefly. ' May I walk with you a bit ?' 
 ' Oh no !— I don't believe you ought to be out in such weather. 
 I'll just come the length of the street with you.' 
 
 And she turned and walked with him, chattering fast, and of 
 course, from the point of view of an omniscience which could 
 not have been hers, foolishly. Had he liked Paris?— what he 
 saw of it at least before he had been ill ?— and how long had he 
 been ill? Why had he not let Mr. Ancrum or some one know 
 sooner ? And would he tell her more about Louie ? She heard 
 that she was married, but there was so much she, Dora, wanted 
 to hear. 
 
 To his first scanty answers she paid in truth but small heed, 
 for the joy of seeing him again was soon effaced by the painful 
 impression of his altered aspect. The more she looked at him, 
 the more her heart went out to him ; her whole being became an 
 effusion of pity and tenderness, and her simplest words, maidenly 
 and self-restrained as she was, were in fact charged with some- 
 thing electric, ineffable. His suffering, his neighbourhood, her 
 
388 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 own sympathy — she was taken up, overwlielmed by these general 
 impressions. Inferences, details escaped her. 
 
 But as she touched on the matter of Louie, and they were now 
 at his own steps, he said to her hurriedly — 
 
 ' Walk a little further, and I'll tell you. John's in there.' 
 
 She opened her eyes, not understanding, and then demurred 
 a little on the ground of his health and the rain. 
 
 ' Oh, I'm all right,' he said impatiently. ' Look here, will 
 you walk to Chetham's Library ? There'll be a quiet place there, 
 in the reading room — sure to be — where we can talk.' 
 
 She assented, and very soon they were mounting the black 
 oak stairs leading to this old corner of Manchester. At the top 
 of the stairs they saw in the distance, at the end of the passage 
 on to which open the readers' studies, each with its Ihiing of 
 folios and its oaken lattice, a librarian, who nodded to David, 
 and took a look at Dora. Further on they stumbled over a small 
 boy from the charity school who wished to lionise them over the 
 whole building. But when he had been routed, they found the 
 beautiful panelled and painted reading-room quite empty, and 
 took possession of it in peace. David led the way to an oriel 
 window he had become familiar with in the off-times of his first 
 years at Manchester, and they seated themselves there with a low 
 sloping desk between them, looking out on the wide rain-swept 
 yard outside, the buildings of the grammar-school, and the black 
 mass of the cathedral. 
 
 Manchester had never been more truly Manchester than on 
 this dark July afternoon, with its low shapeless clouds, its 
 darkness, wind, and pelting rain. David, staring out through 
 the lozenge panes at the familiar gloom beyond, was suddenly 
 carried by repulsion into the jnidst of a vision which was an 
 agony— of a spring forest cut by threadlike paths ; of a shade- 
 less sun ; of a white city steeped in cliarm, in gaiety. 
 
 Dora watched him timidly, new perceptions and alarms 
 dawning in her. 
 
 ' You were going to tell me about Louie,' she said. 
 
 He returned to himself, and abruptly turned with his back to 
 the window, so that he saw the outer world no more. 
 
 ' You lieard that she was married ? ' 
 
 'Yes.' 
 
 'She has married a brute. It was partly my fault. I 
 wanted to be rid of her ; she got in my way. This man was in 
 the same house ; I left her to herself, and partly, I believe, to 
 spite me, she went off with him. Then at the last when she 
 wouldn't leave him I made her marry him. I bribed him to 
 marry her. And he did. I had just enough money to make it 
 worth his while. But he will ill-treat her ; and she won't stay 
 with him. She will go from bad to worse.' 
 
 Dora drew back, with her hand on the desk, staring at him 
 with incredulous horror. 
 
 ' But you were ill ? ' she stammered. 
 
CHAP. XII STORM AND STRESS 389 
 
 He shook his head. 
 
 ' Never mind my being ill. I wanted you to know, because 
 you were good to her, and I'm not going to be a hypocrite to 
 you. Nobody else need know anything but that she's married, 
 which is true. If I'd looked after her it mightn't have happened 
 —perhaps. But I didn't look after her— I couldn't.' 
 
 His face, propped in his hands, was hidden from her. She 
 was in a whirl of excitement and tragic impression— under- 
 standing something, divining more. 
 
 'Louie was always so self-willed,' she said trembling. 
 ' Aye. That don't make it any better. You remember all 1 
 told you about her before? You know we didn't get on; she 
 wasn't nice to me, and I didn't suit her, I suppose. But all this 
 year, I don't know why, she's been on my mind from morning 
 till night ; I've always felt sure, somehow, that she would come 
 to harm ; and the worrying oneself about her — well ! it has 
 seemed to grow into one's very bones.'— Ee threw out the last 
 words after a pause, in which he had seemed to search for some 
 phrase wherewith to fit the energy of his feeling. 'I took her 
 to Paris to keep her out of mischief. I had much rather have 
 gone alone ; but she would not ask you to take her in, and I 
 couldn't leave her w^ith John. Well, then, she got in my way— 
 I told you— and I let her go to the dogs. There— it's done— done ! ' 
 He turned on his seat, one hand drumming the desk, while 
 his eyes fixed themselves apparently on the portrait of Sir 
 Humphry Chetham over the carved mantelpiece. His manner 
 was hard and rapid ; neither voice nor expression had any of 
 the simplicity or directness of remorse. 
 
 Dora remained silent looking at him ; her slender hands 
 were pressed tight against either cheek ; the tears rose slowly 
 till they filled her grey eyes. 
 
 ' It is very sad,' she said in a low voice. 
 There was a pause. 
 
 * Yes— it's sad. So are most things in this world, perhaps. 
 All natural wants seem just to lead us to misery sooner or later. 
 And who gave them to us— who put us here— with no choice but 
 just to go on blundering from one muddle into another ? ' 
 
 Their eves met. It was as though he had remembered her 
 religion, and could not, in his bitterness, refrain from an indirect 
 fling at it. 
 
 As for her, what he said was strange and repellent to her. 
 But her forlorn passion, so long trampled on, cried within her ; 
 her pure heart was one prayer, one exquisite throb of pain and 
 pity. 
 
 'Did some one deceive you?' she asked, so low that the 
 words seemed just breathed into the air. 
 'No, — I deceived myself.' 
 
 Then as he looked at her an impulse of confession crossed his 
 mind. Sympathy, sincerity, womanly sweetness, these things he 
 had always associated with Dora Lomax. Instinctively he had 
 
390 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GSIEVE book hi 
 
 chosen her for a friend long ago as soon as their first foolish 
 spars were over. 
 
 But the impulse passed away. He thought of her severity, 
 her religion, her middle-class canons and judgments, which 
 perhaps were all the stricter because of Daddy'^ laxities. What 
 common ground between her and his passion, between her and 
 Elise ? No ! if he must speak— if, in the end, he proved too 
 weak to forbear wholly from speech — let it be to ears more 
 practised, and more human ! 
 
 So he choked back his words, and Dora felt instinctively that 
 he w^ould tell her no more. Her consciousness of this was a 
 mingled humiliation and relief ; it wounded her to feel that she 
 had so little command of him ; yet she dreaded what he might 
 say. Paris was a wicked place — so the world reported. Her 
 imagination, sensitive. Christianised, ascetic, shrank from what 
 he might have done. Perhaps the woman shrank too. Instead, 
 she threw herself upon the thought, the bliss, that he was there 
 again beside her, restored, rescued from the gulf, if gulf there 
 had been. 
 
 He went back to the subject of Louie, and told her as much 
 as a girl of Dora's kind could be told of what he himself knew 
 of Louie's husband. In the course of his two days' search for 
 them, which had included an interview with Madame Cervin, he 
 had become tolerably well acquainted with Montjoie's public 
 character and career. Incidentally parts of the story of Louie's 
 behaviour came in, and for one w^ho knew her as Dora did, her 
 madness and wilfulness emerged, could be guessed at, little as 
 the brother intended to excuse himself thereby. How, indeed, 
 should he excuse himself ? Louie's character was a fixed quan- 
 tity to be reckoned on by all who had dealings with her. One 
 might as well excuse oneself for letting a lunatic escape by the 
 pretext of his lunacy. Dora perfectly understood his tone. Yet 
 in her heart of hearts she forgave him— for she knew not what ! 
 —became his champion. There was a dry sharpness of self- 
 judgment, a settled conviction of coming ill in all he said which 
 wrung her heart. And how blanched he w^as by that unknown 
 misery ! How should she not pity, not forgive ? It was the 
 impotence of her own feeling to express itself that swelled her 
 throat. And poor Lucy, too — ah ! poor Lucy. 
 
 Suddenly, as he was speaking, he noticed his companion more 
 closely, the shabbiness of the little black hat and jacket, the new 
 lines round the eyes and mouth. 
 
 ' You have not been well,' he said abruptly. ' How has your 
 father been going on?' 
 
 She started and tried to answer quietly. But her nerves had 
 been shaken by their talk, and by tlmt inw^ard play of emotion 
 which had gone on out of his sight. Quite unexpectedly she broke 
 down, and covering her eyes with one hand, began to sob gently. 
 
 'I can't do anything with him now, poor father,' she said, 
 when she could control herself. ' He w^on't listen to me at all. 
 
CHAP. XII STORM AND STRESS 391 
 
 The debts are beginning to be dreadful, and the business is going 
 down fast. I don't know what we shall do. And it all makes 
 him worse — drives him to drink.' 
 
 David thought a minute, lifted out of himself for the first time. 
 
 ' Shall I come to-night to see him ? ' 
 
 ' Oh do ! ' she said eagerly ; ' come about nine o'clock. I will 
 tell him— perhaps that will keep him in.' 
 
 Then she went into more details than she had yet done ; 
 named the creditors who were pressing ; told how her church- 
 work, though she worked herself blind night and day, could do 
 but little for them ; how both the restaurant and the reading • 
 room were emptying, and she could now get no servants to stay, 
 but Sarah, because of her father's temper. 
 
 It seemed to him as he listened that the story, with its sickened 
 hope and on-coming fate, was all in some strange way familiar ; 
 it or something like it was to have been expected ; for him the 
 strange and jarring thing now would have been to find a happy 
 person. He was in that young morbid state when the mind hangs 
 its own cloud over the universe. 
 
 But Dora got up to go, tying on her veil with shaking hands. 
 She was so humbly grateful to him that he was sorry for her— 
 that he could spare a thought from his own griefs for her. 
 
 As they went down the dark stairs together, he asked after 
 Lucy. She was now staying with some relations at Wakely, a 
 cotton town in the valley of the Irwell, Dora said ; but she would 
 probably go back to Hastings for the winter. It was now settled 
 that she and her father could not get on ; and the stepmother 
 that was to be— Purcell, however, was taking his time— was 
 determined not to be bothered with her. 
 
 David listened with a certain discomfort. ' It was what she 
 did for me,' he thought, ' that set him against her for good and 
 all. Old brute ! ' 
 
 Aloud he said : '-I wrote to her, you know, and sent her that 
 book. She did write me a queer letter back— it was all dashes 
 and splashes — about the street-preachings on the beach, and a 
 blind man who sang hymns. I can't remember why she hated 
 him so particularly ! ' 
 
 She answered his faint smile. Lucy was a child for both of 
 them. Then he took her to the door of the Parlour, noticing, as 
 he parted from her, how dingy and neglected the place looked. 
 
 Afterwards— directly he had left her— the weight of his pain 
 which had been lightened for an hour descended upon him again, 
 shutting the doors of the senses, leaving him alone within, face 
 to face with the little figure which haunted him day and night. 
 During the days since his return from Paris the faculty of pro- 
 jective imagination, which had endowed his childhood with a 
 second world, and peopled it with the incidents and creatures of 
 his books, had grown to an abnormal strength. Behind the stage 
 on which he was now painfully gathering together the fragments 
 of his old life, it created for him another, where, amid scenes 
 
392 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 richly set and lit with perpetual summer, he lived with Elise, 
 walked with her, watched her, lay at her feet, quarrelled with 
 her, forgave her. His drama did not depend on memory alone, 
 or rather it w^as memory passing into creation. Within its bounds 
 he w^as himself and not himself ; his part was loftier than any he 
 had ever played in reality ; his eloquence was no longer tongue- 
 tied— it flowed and penetrated. His love might be cruel, but he 
 was on her level, nay, her master ; he could reproach, wrestle 
 with, command her ; and at the end evoke the pardoning flight 
 into each other's arms — confession— rapture. 
 
 Till suddenly, poor fool ! a little bolt shot from the bow of^ 
 memory— the image of a diligence rattling along a white road— 
 or of black rain-beaten quays, with their lines of wavering lamps 
 —or of a hideous upper room with blue rep furniture where one 
 could neither move nor breathe— would strike his dream to frag- 
 ments, and as it fell to ruins within him, his whole being would 
 become one tumult of inarticulate cries— delirium— anguish— 
 with which the self at the heart of all seemed to be wrestling for 
 life. ' 
 
 It was so to-day after he left Dora. First the vision, the 
 enchantment— then the agony, the sob of desolation which could 
 hardly be kept dow^n. He saw nothing in the streets. He walked 
 on past the Exchange, where an unusual crowd was gathered, 
 elbowing his way through it mechanically, but not in truth know- 
 ing that it was tliere. 
 
 When he reached the shop he ran past John, who was reading 
 a newspaper, up to his room and locked tlie door. 
 
 About an hour afterwards Mr. Ancrum came in, all excite- 
 ment, a batch of papers under his arm. 
 
 ' It is going to be war, John ! War— I tell you ! and such a 
 war. They'll be beaten, those braggarts, if there's justice in 
 heaven, the streets are all full ; I could hardly get here ; 
 everybody talking of how it will affect Manchester. Time 
 enough to think about that ! What a set of selfish beasts we all 
 are ! Where's David ? ' 
 
 ' Come in an hour ago ! ' said John sullenly ; ' he went 
 upstairs. ' 
 
 ' Ah, he will have heard— the placards are all over the place.' 
 
 The minister went upstairs and knocked at David's door. 
 
 ' David ! ' 
 
 ' All right,' said a voice from inside. 
 
 ' David, what do you think of the news ?' 
 
 ' What news ? ' after a pause. 
 
 ' Whv, the war, man ! Haven't you seen the evening paper ?' 
 
 No answer. The minister stood listening at the door. Then 
 a tender look dawned in his odd grey face. 
 
 'David, look here, Til push you the paper under the door. 
 You're tired, I suppose— done yourself up with your w\alk ? ' 
 
 ' I'll be down to supper,' said the voice from inside, shortly. 
 ' Will you push iu the paper ? ' 
 
CHAr. XTi STORM AND STKESS 393 
 
 The minister descended, and sat by himself in the kitchen 
 thinking. He was a wiser man now than when he had gone out, 
 and not onlv as to that reply of the King of Prussia to tlie 
 French ultimatum on the subject of the HohenzoUern candi- 
 dature. 
 
 For he had met Barbier in the street. How to keep the 
 voluble Frenchman from bombarding David in his shattered 
 state had been one of Mr. Ancrum's most anxious occupations 
 since his return. It had been done, but it had been difficult. 
 For to whom did David owe his first reports of Paris if not to 
 the old comrade who had sent him there, found him a lodging, 
 and taught liim to speak French so as not to disgrace himself 
 and his countrv ? However, Ancrum had found means to inter- 
 cept Barbier's first visit, and had checkmated his attempts ever 
 since. As a natural result, Barbier was extremely irritable. 
 Blness— stuff ! The lad had been getting into scrapes— that he 
 would swear. 
 
 On this occasion, when Ancrum stumbled across him, he 
 found Barbier, at first bubbling over with the war news ; torn 
 different ways ; now abusing the Emperor for a eoclion and a 
 foil, prophesying unlimited disaster for France, and sneering at 
 the ranting crowds on the boulevards ; the next moment spouting 
 the same anti-Prussian madness with which his whole unfortu- 
 nate countrv was at the moment infected. In the midst of his 
 gallop of talk, however, the old man suddenly stopped, took off 
 his hat, and running one excited hand through his bristling tufts 
 of grey hair pointed to Ancrum with the other. 
 
 ' Halte la ! ' he said, ' I know what your young rascal has 
 been after. I know, and I'll be bound you don't. Trust a lover 
 for hoodwinking a priest. Come along here.' 
 
 And putting his arm through Ancrum's, he swept him away, 
 repeating, as they walked, the substance of a letter from his 
 precious nephew, in which the Barbizon episode as it appeared to 
 the inhabitants of No. 7 Pvue Chantal and to the students of 
 Taranne's atelier de femmes was related, with every embellish- 
 ment of witticism and hlague that the imagination of a French 
 rapin could suggest. Mademoiselle Delaunay was not yet re- 
 stored, according to the writer, to the atelier which she adorned. 
 ' On criait au scandale,' mainly because she was such a clever 
 little animal, and the others envied and hated her. She had 
 removed to a studio near the Luxembourg, and Taranne was 
 said to be teaching her privately. Meanwhile Dubois requested 
 his dear uncle to supply him with information as to V autre; it 
 would be gratefully received by an appreciative circle. As for 
 la soeiir de Vautre, the dear uncle no doubt knew that she had 
 migrated to the studio of Monsieur Montjoie, an artist whose 
 little affairs in the genre had already, before her advent, attained 
 a high degree of interest and variety. On a review of all the 
 circumstances, the dear uncle would perhaps pardon the writer 
 If he were less disposed than before to accept those estimable 
 
394 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 views of tlie superiority of the English morale to the French, 
 which had been so ably impressed upon him during his visit to 
 Manchester. 
 
 For after a very short stay at Brussels the nephew had boldly 
 and suddenly pushed over to England, and had spent a fortnight 
 in Barbier's lodgings reconnoitering his uncle. As to the uncle. 
 Xavier had struck him, on closer inspection, as one of the most 
 dissolute young reprobates he had ever beheld. He had preached 
 to him like a father, holding up to him the image of his own 
 absent favourite, David Grieve, as a brilliant illustration of what 
 could be achieved even in this wicked world by morals and 
 capacity. And in the intervals he had supplied the creature 
 with money and amused himself with his jf7(2?mV?.me from morning 
 till night. On their parting the uncle had with great frankness 
 confessed to the nephew the general opinion he had formed of 
 his character ; all the same they were now embarked on a tolera- 
 bly frequent correspondence ; and Dubois' ultimate chance of 
 obtaining his uncle's savings, on the chasse of which he had 
 come to England, would have seemed to the cool observer by no 
 means small. 
 
 'But now, look here,' said Barbier, taking off his spectacles 
 to wipe away the ' merry tear ' which dimmed them, after the 
 recapitulation of Xavier's last letter, ' no more nonsense ! I 
 come and have it out with that young man. I sent him to Paris, 
 and I'll know what he did there. He's not made of burnt sugar. 
 Of course he's broken his heart — we all do. Serve him right.' 
 
 'It's easy to laugh,' said Ancrum dryly, ' only these young 
 fellows have sometimes an uncomfortable way of vindicating 
 their dignity by shooting themselves.' 
 
 Barbier started and looked interrogative. 
 
 ' Now suppose you listen to me,' said the minister. 
 
 And the two men resumed their patrol of Albert Square while 
 Ancrum described his rescue of David. The story was simply 
 told but impressive. Barbier whistled, stared, and surrendered. 
 Nay, he went to the other extreme. lie loved the absurd, but 
 he loved the romantic more. An hour before, David's adven- 
 tures had been to him a subject of comic opera. As Ancrum 
 talked, they took on 'the grand style,' and at the end he could 
 no more have taken liberties with his old pupil than with the 
 hero of the Ntiit de Mai. He became excited, sympathetic, de- 
 clamatory, tore open old sores, and Mr. Ancrum had grepst diffi- 
 culty in getting rid of him. 
 
 So now the minister was sitting at home meditating. Through 
 the atmosphere of mockery with which Dubois had invested tliQ 
 story he saw the outlines of it with some clearness. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 In the midst of his meditations, however, the minister did not 
 forget to send John out for David's supper, and when David 
 
CHAP. XIII STORM AND STRESS 395 
 
 appeared, white, haggard, and exhausted, it was to find himself 
 thought for with a care like a woman's. The lad, being sick and 
 irritable, showed more resentment than gratitude ; pushed away 
 his food, looking sombrely the while at the dry bread and tea 
 which formed the minister's invariable eveniug meal as though 
 to ask when he was to be allowed his rational freedom again to 
 eat or fast as he pleased. He scarcely answered Ancrum's re- 
 marks about the war, and finally he got up heavily, saying he 
 was going out. 
 
 ' You ought to be in your bed,' said Ancrum, protestmg 
 almost for the first time, ' and it's there you will be— tied by the 
 leg—if you don't take a decent care of yourself.' 
 
 David took no notice and went. He dragged himself to the 
 German Athenaeum, of which he had become a member in the 
 first flush of his inheritance. There were the telegrams from 
 Paris, and an eager crowd reading and discussing them. As he 
 pushed his way in at last and read, the whole scene rose before 
 him as though he were there— the summer boulevards with their 
 trees and kiosks, the moving crowds, the shouts, the ' Marseil- 
 laise'— the blind infectious madness of it all. And one short 
 fortnight ago, what man in Europe could have guessed that such 
 a day was already on the knees of the gods ? 
 
 Afterwards, on the way to the Parlour, he talked to Elise 
 about it,— placing her on the boulevards with the rest, and 
 himself beside her to guard her from the throng. Hour by hour, 
 this morbid gift of his, though it tortured him. provided an 
 outlet for passion, saved him from numbness and despair. 
 
 When he got to Dora's sitting-room he found Daddy sitting 
 there, smoking sombrely over the empty grate. He had expected 
 a flood of questions, and had steeled himself to meet them. 
 Nothing of the sort. The old man took very little notice of him 
 and his travels. Considering the petulant advice with which 
 Daddy had sent him off, David was astonished and, in the end, 
 piqued. He recovered the tongue which he had lost for Ancrum, 
 and was presently discussing the war like anybody else. Remi- 
 niscences of the talk amid which he had lived during those Paris 
 weeks came back to them ; and he repeated some of them which 
 bore on the present action of Napoleon III. and his ministry, 
 with a touch of returning fluency. He was, in fact, playing for 
 Daddy's attention. 
 
 Daddy watched him silently with a wild" and furtive eye. 
 At last, looking round to see whether Dora was there, and find- 
 ing that she had gone out, he laid a lean long hand on David's 
 knee. 
 
 'That'll do, Davy. Davy, why were you all that time 
 away ? ' 
 
 The young man drew himself up suddenly, brought back to 
 realities from this first brief moment of something like forgetful- 
 ness. He tried for his common excuse of illness ; but it stuck in 
 his throat. 
 
396 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 *I can't tell you, Daddy,' be said at last, slowly. 'I might 
 tell you lies, but I won't. It concerns myself alone.' 
 
 Daddy still bent forward, his peaked wizard's face peering 
 at his companion. 
 
 ' You've been in trouble, Davy ?' 
 
 ' Yes, Daddy. But if you ask me questions I shall go.' 
 
 He spoke with a sudden fierce resolution. 
 
 Daddy paid no attention. He threw himself back in his chair 
 with a long breath. 
 
 ' Bedad, and I knew it, Davy ! But sorrow a bit o' pity will 
 you get out o' me, my boy^sorrow a bit ! ' 
 
 He lay staring at his companion with a glittering hostile 
 look. 
 
 ' By the powers ! ' he said presently, ' to be a gossoon of 
 twenty again and throubled about a woman ! ' 
 
 David sprang up. 
 
 'Well, Daddy, Til bid you good night ! I wanted to hear 
 something about your own affairs, which don't seem to be flour- 
 ishing. But ni wait till Miss Dora's at home.' 
 
 ' Sit down, sit down again ! ' cried Lomax angrily, catching 
 him by the arm. ' Til not meddle with you. Yes, we're in a bad 
 way, a deuced bad way, if you listen to Dora. If it weren't for 
 her I'd have walked myself *^off long ago and let the devil take the 
 creditors. ' 
 
 David sat down and tried to get at the truth. But Daddy 
 turned restive, and now invited the traveller's talk he had before 
 repelled. He fell into his own recollections of the Paris streets 
 in '48, and his vanity enjoyed showing this slip of a fellow that 
 old Lomax was well acquainted with France and French politics 
 before he was born. 
 
 Presently Dora came in, saw that her father had been beguiled 
 into foregoing his usual nocturnal amusements, and looked soft 
 gratitude at David. But as for him, he had never realised so 
 vividly the queer aloofness and slipperiness of Daddy's nature, 
 nor the miserable insecurity of Dora's life. Such men were not 
 meant to have women depending on them. 
 
 He went downstairs pondering what could be done for the old 
 vagabond. Drink had indeed made ravages since he had seen 
 him last. For Dora's sake the young man recalled with eagerness 
 some statements and suggestions in a French treatise on ' L'Al- 
 coolisme ' he chanced to have been turning over among his foreign 
 scientific stock. Dora, no doubt, had invoked the parson ; he 
 would endeavour to bring in the doctor. And there was a young 
 one, a frequenter of the stall in Birmingliam Street, not as yet 
 overburdened with practice, who occurred to him as clever and 
 likely to lielp. 
 
 Nor did he forget his purpose. The very next morning he got 
 hold of the young man in question. Out came the French book, 
 which contained the record of a famous Frenchman's experiments, 
 and the two hung over it together in David's little back room, 
 
CHAP. XIII STORM AND STRESS 397 
 
 till the doctor's views of booksellers and their probable minds 
 were somewhat enlarged, and David felt sometliing of the old 
 intellectual glow w-hich these scientific problems of mind and 
 matter had awakened in him during the winter. Then he walked 
 his physician off to Daddy during the dinner hour and boldly 
 introduced him as a friend. The young doctor, having been 
 forewarned, treated the situation admirably, took up a jaunty 
 and jesting tone, and, finally, putting morals entirely aside, 
 invited Daddy to consider himself as a scientific case, and deal 
 with himself as such for the benefit of knowledge. 
 
 Daddy was feeling ill and depressed ; David struck him as an 
 ' impudent varmint,' and the doctor as little better ; but the lad's 
 solicitude nevertheless flattered the old featherbrain, and in the 
 end he fell into a burst of grandiloquent and self-excusing confi- 
 dence. The doctor played him ; prescribed ; and when he and 
 David left together it really seemed as though the old man from 
 sheer curiosity about and interest in his own symptoms would 
 probably make an attempt to follow the advice given him. 
 
 Dora came in while the three were still joking and discussing. 
 Her face clouded as she listened, and when David and the doctor 
 left she gave them a cool and shrinking good-bye which puzzled 
 Dcvvid. 
 
 Daddy, however, after a little while, mended considerably, 
 developed an enthusiasm for his self-appointed doctor, and, what 
 was still better, a strong excitement about his own affairs. When 
 it came to the stage of a loan for the meeting of the more pressing 
 liabilities, of fresh and ingenious efforts to attract customers, 
 and of a certain gleam of returning prosperity, David's concern 
 for his old friend very much dropped again. His former vivid 
 interest in the human scene and the actors in it, as such, was not 
 yet recovered ; in these weeks weariness and lassitude overtook 
 each reviving impulse and faculty in turn. 
 
 He was becoming more and more absorbed, too, by the news 
 from France. Its fii-st effect upon him was one of irritable repul- 
 sion. Barbier and Hugo had taught him to loathe the Empire ; 
 and had not he and she read Les Chdtiments together, and 
 mocked the Emperor's carriage as it passed them in the streets ? 
 The French telegrams in the English papers, with their accounts 
 of the vapouring populace, the wild rhetoric in the Chamber, and 
 the general outburst of fanfaronnade^ seemed to make the 
 French nation one with the Empire in its worst aspects, and, as 
 we can all remember, set English teeth on edge. David devoured 
 the papers day by day, and his antagonism grew, partly because, 
 in spite of that strong gravitation of his mind towards things 
 expansive, emotional, and rhetorical, the essential paste of him 
 was not French but English — but mostly because of other and 
 stronger reasons of which he was hardly conscious. During that 
 fortnight of his agony in Paris all that sympathetic bond between 
 the great city and himself which had been the source of so much 
 pleasure and excitement to him during his early days with Elise 
 
398 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE BOOK ill 
 
 had broken down. The glamour of happiness torn away, he had 
 seen, beneath the Paris of his dream, a greedy brutal Paris from 
 which his sick senses shrank in fear and loathing. The grace, 
 the spell, was gone— he was alone and miserable ! — and amid the 
 gaiety, the materialism, the selfish vice of the place he had 
 moved for days, an alien and an enemy, the love within him 
 turning to hate. 
 
 So now his mortal pain revenged itself. They would be beaten 
 —this depraved and enervated people !— and his feverish heart 
 rejoiced. But Elise ? His lips quivered. What did the war 
 matter to her except so far as its inconveniences were concerned ? 
 What had la patrie any more than Vamoiir to do with art? He 
 put the question to her in his wild evening walks. It angered 
 him that as the weeks swept on, and the great thunderbolts 
 began to fall— Wissembourg, Forbach, Worth— his imagination 
 would sometimes show her to him agitated and in tears. No 
 pity for him ! why this sorrow for France ? Absurd ! let her go 
 paint while the world loved and fought. In '48, while monarchy 
 and republic were wrestling it out in the streets of Paris, was not 
 the landscape painter Chintreuil quietly sketching all the time 
 just outside one of the gates of the city ? There was the artist 
 for you. 
 
 Meanwhile the growing excitement of the war, heightened 
 and poisoned by this reaction of his personality, combined with 
 his painful efforts to recover his business to make him for a time 
 more pale and gaunt than ever. Ancrum remonstrated in vain. 
 He would go his way. 
 
 One evening — it was the day after Worth — he was striding 
 blindly up the Oxford Eoad when he ran against a man at the 
 corner of a side street. It was Bar bier, coming out for the last 
 news. 
 
 Barbier started, swore, caught him by the arm, then fell back 
 in amazement. 
 
 ' Cest toi ? bon Dleii f^ 
 
 David, who had hitherto avoided his old companion with the 
 utmost ingenuity, began hurriedly to inquire whether he was 
 going to look at the evening's telegram. 
 
 ' Yes— no — w^hat matter ? You can tell me. David, my lad, 
 Ancrum told me you had been ill, but — ' 
 
 The old man slipped his arm through that of the youth and 
 looked at him fixedly. His own face was all furrowed and 
 drawn, the eyes red. 
 
 ' Out; tu es change,^ he said at last with a sudden quivering 
 breath, almost a sob, ' like everything, — like the world ! ' 
 
 And hanging down his head he drew the lad on, down the 
 little street, towards his lodging. 
 
 ' Come in ! Fll ask no questions. Oh, come in ! I have the 
 French papers ; for three hours I have been reading them alone. 
 Come in or I shall go mad ! ' 
 
 And they discussed the w^ar, the political prospect, and Bar- 
 
CHAP. XIII STORM AND STRESS 399 
 
 bier's French letters till nearly midnight. AU the exile's nation- 
 ality had revived, and so lost was he in weeping over France he 
 had scarcely breath left wherewith to curse the Empire. In the 
 presence of a grief so true, so poignant, wherein all the man's 
 little tricks and absurdities had for the moment melted out of 
 sight, David's own seared and bitter feeling could find no voice. 
 He said not a word that could jar on his old friend. And Bar- 
 bier, like a child, took his sympathy for granted and abused the 
 'heartless hypocritical' English press to him with a will. 
 
 The days rushed on. David read the English papers in town, 
 then walked up late to Barbier's lodgings to read a French batch 
 and talk. Gravelotte was over, the siege was approaching. In 
 that strange inner life of his, David with Elise beside him looked 
 on at the crashing trees in the Bois de Boulogne, at the long 
 lines of carts laden with household stuff and fugitives from the 
 zone militaire flocking into Paris, at the soldiers and horses 
 camping in the Tuileries Gardens, at the distant smoke-clouds 
 amid the woods of Issy and Meudon, as village after village 
 flamed to ruins. 
 
 One night — it was a day or two after Sedan — in a corner of 
 the Constitutionnel^ he found a little paragraph : — 
 
 'M. Henri Regnault and M. Clairin, leaving their studio at 
 Tangiers to the care of the French Consul, have returned to 
 Paris to offer themselves for military service, from which, as 
 holder of the prix de Rome, M. Regnault is legally exempt. To 
 praise such an act would be to insult its authors. France — our 
 bleeding France ! — does but take stern note that her sons are 
 faithful.' 
 
 David threw the paper down, made an excuse to Barbier, and 
 went out. He could not talk to Barbier, to whom everything 
 must be explained from the beginning, and his heart was full. 
 He wandered out towards Fallowfield under a moon which gave 
 beauty and magic even to these low, begrimed streets, these 
 jarring, incongruous buildings, thinking of Regnault and that 
 unforgotten night beside the Seine. The young artist's passage 
 through the Louvre, the towering of his great head above the 
 crowd in the ' Trois Rats,' and that outburst under the moon- 
 light — everything, every tone, every detail, returned upon him. 
 
 ' Tlie great France — tJte iindyiitg France — ' 
 
 And now for France — ah !— David divined the eagerness, the 
 passion, with which it had been done. He was nearer to the 
 artist than he had been two months before — nearer to all great 
 and tragic things. His recognition of the fact had in it the 
 start of a strange joy. 
 
 So moved was he, and in such complex ways, that as he 
 thought of Regnault with that realising imagination which was 
 his gift, the whole set of his feeling towards France and the war 
 wavered and changed. The animosity, the drop of personal gall 
 in his heart, disappeared, conjured by Regnault's look, by Reg- 
 nault's act. The one heroic figure he had seen in France began 
 
400 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book in 
 
 now to stand to him for the nation. He walked home doing 
 penance in his heart, passionately renewing the old love, the old 
 homage, in this awful presence of a stricken people at bay. 
 
 And Elise came to him, in the moonlight, leaning upon him, 
 with soft, approving eyes— 
 
 Ah ! where was she — where — in this whirlwind of the national 
 fate ? where was her frail life hidden ? was she still in this Paris, 
 so soon to be ' begirt with armies ' ? • 
 
 Four days later Barbier sent a note to Ancrum : ' Come and 
 see me this afternoon at six o'clock. Say nothing to Grieve.' 
 
 A couple of hours afterwards Ancrum came slowly home to 
 Birmingham Street, where he was still lodging. David had just 
 put up the shop-shutters, John had departed, and his employer 
 was about to retire to supper and his books in the baclij 
 kitchen. 
 
 Ancrum went in and stood with his back to the fire which 
 John had just made for the kettle and the minister's tea, when 
 David came in with an armful of books and shut the door be- 
 hind him. Ancrum let him put down his cargo, and then 
 walked up to him. 
 
 'David,' he said, laying his hand with a timid gesture on the 
 other's shoulder, ' Barbier has had some letters from Paris to-day 
 — the last he will get probably— and among them a letter from 
 his nephew.' 
 
 David started, turned sharp round, shaking off the hand. 
 ' It contains some news which Barbier thinks you ought to 
 know. Mademoiselle Elise Delaunay has married suddenly — 
 married her cousin, Mr. Pimodan, a young doctor.' 
 
 The shock blanched every atom of colour from David's face. 
 He tried wildly to control himself, to brave it out with a des- 
 perate ' Why not?' But speech failed him. He walked over to 
 the mantelpiece and leant against it. The room swam with 
 liim, and the only impression of which for a moment or two he 
 was conscious was that of the cheerful singing of the kettle. 
 
 'She would not leave Paris,' said Ancrum in a low voice, 
 standing beside him. 'People tried to persuade her — nothing 
 would induce her. Then this young man, who is said to have 
 been in love with her for years, urged her to marry him — to 
 accept his protection really, in view of all that might come. 
 Dubois thinks she refused severnl times, but anyway two days 
 ago they were married, civilly, with only the legal witnesses,' 
 
 David moved about the various things on the mantelpiece 
 with restless lingers. Then he straightened himself. 
 'Is that all?' he asked, looking at the minister. 
 'All,' said Ancrum, who haxl, of course, no intention of 
 repeating any of Dubois' playful embroideries on the facts. 
 ' You will be glad, won't you, that she should have some one to 
 protect her in such a strait ? ' — he added, after a minute's pause, 
 his eyes on the fire. 
 
CHAP. XIII STORM AND STRESS 401 
 
 'Yes,' said the other after a moment. 'Thank you. Won't 
 you have your tea ?' 
 
 Mr. Ancrum swallowed his emotion, and they sat down to table 
 in silence. David played with some food, took one tiling up after 
 another, laid it down, and at last sprang up and seized his hat. 
 
 'Going out again?' asked the minister, trembling, he knew 
 not why. 
 
 The lad muttered something. Instinctively the little lame 
 fellow, who was closest to the door, rushed to it and threw 
 himself against it. 
 
 'David, don't— don't go out alone — let mo go with you ! ' 
 
 'I want to go out alone,' said David, his lips shaking. 
 ' Why do you interfere with me ? ' 
 
 ' Because — ' and the short figure drew itself up, the minister's 
 voice took a stern deep note, ' because when a man has once 
 contemplated the sin of self-murder, those about him have no 
 right to behave as though he were still like other innocent and 
 happy people ! ' 
 
 David stood silent a moment, every limb trembling. Then 
 his mouth set, and he made a step forward, one arm raised. 
 
 ' Oh, yes ! ' cried Ancrum, 'you may fling me out of the w^ay. 
 My weakness and deformity are no match for you. Do, if you 
 have the heart ! Do you think I don't know that I rescued you 
 from despair — that I drew you out of the very jaws of death? 
 Do you think I don't guess that the news I have just given you 
 withers the heart in your breast ? You imagine, I suppose, that 
 because I am deformed and a Sunday-school teacher, because 
 I think something of religion, and can't read your French 
 books, I cannot enter into what a man is and feels. Try me I 
 When you were a little boy in my class, my life was already 
 crushed in me — my tragedy was over. I have come close to 
 passion and to sin ; I'm not afraid of yours ! You are alive here 
 to-night, David Grieve, because I went to look for, you on the 
 mountains— lost sheep that you were — and found you, by God's 
 mercy. You never thanked me — I knew you couldn't. Instead 
 of your thanks I demand your contidence, here — now. Break 
 down this silence between us. Tell me what you have done to 
 bring your life to this pass. You have no father— I speak in his 
 place, and I deserve that you should trust and listen to me ! ' 
 
 David looked at him with amazement— at the worn misshapen 
 head thrown haughtily back— at the arms folded across the chest. 
 Then his pride gave way, and that intolerable smart within could 
 no longer hide itself. His soul melted within him ; teai's began 
 to rain over his clieeks. He tottered to the fire and sat down, 
 instinctively spreading his hands to the })laze, that word 'father' 
 echoing in "his ears ; "and by midnight ^Mr. Ancrum knew all the 
 story, or as much of it a.s man could tell to man. 
 
 From this night of confession and of storm there emerged at 
 ieast one result — the beginnings of a true and profitable bond 
 
402 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 between David and Ancrum. Hitherto there had been expendi- 
 ture of interest and affection on the minister's side, and a certain 
 responsiveness and friendly susceptibility on David's ; but no 
 true understanding and contact, mind with mind. But in these 
 agitated hours of such talk as belongs only to the rare crises of 
 life, not only did Ancrum gain an insight into David's inmost 
 nature, with all its rich, unripe store of feefings and powers, 
 deeper than any he had possessed before, but David, breaking 
 through the crusts of association, getting beyond and beneath 
 the Sunday-school teacher and minister, came for the first time 
 upon the real man in his friend, apart from trappings — cast off 
 the old sense of pupilage, and found a brother instead of a monitor. 
 
 There came a moment when Ancrum, laying his hand on 
 David's knee, told his own story in a few bare sentences, each of 
 them, as it were, lightning on a dark background, revealing some 
 few things with a ghastly plainness, only to let silence and mys- 
 tery close again upon the wdiole. And there came another 
 moment when the little minister, carried out of himself, fell into 
 incoherent sentences, full of obscurity, yet often full of beauty, 
 in which for the first time David came near to the living voice of 
 religion speaking in its purest, intensest note. Christ was the 
 burden of it all ; the religion of pain, sacrifice, immortality ; the 
 religion of chastity and self-repression. 
 
 ' Life goes from test to test, David ; it's like any other 
 business — the more you know the more's put on you. And 
 this test of the man with the woman — there's no other cuts 
 so deep. Aye, it parts the sheep from the goats. A man's 
 failed in it — lost his footing — rolled into hell, before he knows 
 where he is. "On this stone if a man fall" — I often put 
 those words to it — there's all meanings in Scripture. Yes, you've 
 stumbled, David — stumbled badly, but not more. There's mercy 
 in it ! You must rise again — you can. Accept yourself ; accept 
 the sin even ; bear with yourself and go forward. That's what 
 the Church says. Nothing can be undone, but break your pride, 
 do penance, and all can be forgiven. 
 
 ' But you don't admit the sin ? A man has a right to the 
 satisfaction of his own instincts. You asked a free consent and 
 got it. What is law but a convention for miserable people who 
 don't know how to love ? Who was injured ? 
 
 'David, that's the question of a fool. Were you and she the 
 first man and woman in the world that ever loved ? That's 
 always the way ; each man imagines the matter is still for his 
 deciding, and he can no more decide it than he can tamper with 
 the fact that fire burns or w^ater drowns. All these centuries the 
 human animal has fought with the human soul. And step by 
 step the soul has registered her victories. She has won them 
 only by feeling for the law and finding it — uncovering, bringing 
 into light, the firm rocks beneath her feet. And on these rocks 
 she rears her landmarks — marriage, the family, the State, the 
 Church. Neglect them, and you sink into the quagmire from 
 
CHAP. XIII STORM AND STRESS 403 
 
 which the soul of the race has been for generations struggling to 
 save you. Dispute them ! overthrow them— yes, if you can ! 
 You have about as much ciiance with them as you have with the 
 other facts and laws amid which you hve— physical or chemical 
 or biological. 
 
 ' I speak after the manner of men. If I were to speak after 
 the manner of a Christian, I should say other things. I should 
 ask how a man dare pluck from the Lord's hand, for his own 
 wild and reckless use, a soul and body for which He died ; how 
 he, the Lord's bondsman, dare steal his joy, carrying it ofiE by 
 himself into the wilderness, like an animal his prey, instead of 
 asking it at the hands, and under the blessing, of his Master ; 
 how he dare— 2^ man under orders, and member of the Lord's 
 body— forget the whole in his greed for the one— eternity in his 
 thirst for the present ! 
 
 ' But no matter. Christ is nothing to you, nor Scripture, nor 
 the Church—' 
 
 The minister broke off abruptly, his lined face working with 
 emotion and prayer. David said nothing. In this stage of the 
 conversation— the stage, as it were, of judgment and estimate- 
 he could take no part. The time for it with him had not yet 
 come. He had exhausted all his force in the attempt to explain 
 himself— an attempt which began in fragmentary question and 
 answer, and ended on his part in the rush of a confidence, an 
 ' Apologia,' representing, in truth, that first reflex action of the 
 mind upon experience, whence healing and spiritual growth were 
 ultimately to issue. But for the moment he could carry the 
 process no farther. He sat crouched over the flickering fire, say- 
 ing nothing, letting Ancrum soliloquise as he pleased. His mind 
 surged to and fro, indeed, as Ancrum talked between the poles 
 of repulsion and response. His nature was not as Ancrum's, and 
 every now and then the quick critical intellect flashed through 
 his misery, detecting an assumption, probing an hypothesis. But 
 in general his feeling gave way more and more. That moral 
 sensitiveness in him which in its special nature was a special 
 inheritance, the outcome of a long individualist development 
 under the conditions of English Protestantism, made him from 
 the first the natural prey of Ancrum's spiritual passion. As soon 
 as a true contact between them was set up, David began to feel 
 the religious temper and life in Ancrum draw him like a magnet. 
 Not the forms of the thing, but the thing itself. In it, or some- 
 thing like it, as he listened, his heart suspected, for the first 
 time, the only possible refuge from the agony of passion, the 
 only possible escape from this fever of desire, jealousy, and love, 
 in which he was consumed. 
 
 At the end he let Ancrum lead him up to bed and give him 
 the bromide the Paris doctor had prescribed. When Ancrum 
 softly put his head in, half an hour later, he was heavily asleep. 
 Ancrum's face gleamed ; he stole into, the room carrying a rug 
 and a pillow ; and when David woke in the morning it was 
 
404 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 to see the twisted form of the little minister stretched still and 
 soldierlike beside him on the floor. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 From that waking David rose and went about his work another 
 man. As he moved about in the shop or in the streets, he was 
 conscious of a gulf between his present self and his self of yester- 
 day, which he could hardly explain. Simply the whole atmosphere 
 and temperature of the soul was other, was different. He could 
 have almost supposed that some process had gone on within him 
 during the unconsciousness of sleep, of which he was now feeling 
 the results ; which had carried him on, without his knowing it, to 
 a point in the highroad of life, far removed from that point where 
 he had stood when his talk with Ancrum began. That world of 
 enervating illusion, that 'kind of ghastly dreaminess,' as John 
 Sterling called it, in which since his return he had lived with 
 Elise, was gone, he knew not how — swept away like a cloud from 
 the brain, a mist from the eyes. The sense of catastrophe, of 
 things irrevocable and irreparable, the premature ageing of the 
 whole man, remained— only the fever and the restlessness were 
 past. Memory, indeed, was not affected. In some sort the 
 scenes of his French experience would be throughout his life a 
 permanent element in consciousness ; but the persons concerned 
 in them were dead — creatures of the past. He himself had been 
 painfully re-born, and Pimodan's wife had no present personal 
 existence for him. He turned himself deliberately to his old life, 
 and took up the interests of it again one by one, but, as he soon 
 discovered, with an insight, a power, a comprehension which had 
 never yet been his. A moral and spiritual life destined to a rich 
 development practically began for him with this winter — this 
 awful winter of the agony of France. 
 
 His thoughts were often occupied now with Louie, but in a 
 saner way. He could no longer, without morbidness, take on 
 himself the whole responsibility of her miserable marriage. 
 Human beings after all are what they make themselves. But the 
 sense of his own share in it, and the perception of what her future 
 life was likely to be, made him steadily accept beforehand the 
 claims upon him which she was sure to press. 
 
 He had written to her early in September, when the siege was 
 imminent, offering her money to bring her to England, and the 
 protection of his roof during the rest of the war. And by a still 
 later post than that which brouglit the news of Elise's marriage 
 arrived a scrawl from Louie, written from a country town near 
 Toulouse, whither she and Montjoie had retreated — apparently 
 the sculptor's native place. 
 
 The letter was full of complaints— complaints of the war, 
 which was being mismanaged by a set of rogues and fools who 
 deserved stringing to the nearest tree ; complaints of her husband, 
 
CHAP. XIV STORM AND STRESS 405 
 
 who was a good-for-nothing brute ; and complaints of her own 
 health. She was expecting her confinement in the spring ; if she 
 got through it — which was not likely, considering the way in 
 which she was treated — she should please herself about staying 
 with such a man. He should not keep her for a day if she wanted 
 to go. M-eanwhile David might send her any money he could 
 spare. There was not much of the six hundred left — that she 
 could tell him ; and she could not even screw enough for baby- 
 clothes out of her husband. Very likely there would not be 
 enough to pay for a nurse when her time came. Well, then she 
 would be out of it — and a good job too. 
 
 Slie wished to be remembered to Dora ; and Dora w^as 
 especially to be told again that she needn't suppose St. Damian's 
 was a patch on the real Catholic churches, because it wasn't. 
 She — Louie — had been at the Midnight Mass in Toulouse Cathe- 
 dral on Christmas Eve. That was something like. And down in 
 the crypt they had a ' Bethlehem ' — the sweetest thing you ever 
 saw. " There were the shepherds, and the wise men, aud the 
 angels — dolls, of course, but their dresses were splendid, and the 
 little Jesus was dressed in white satin, embroidered with gold — 
 old embroidery, tell Dora. 
 
 To this David had replied at once, sending money he could ill 
 spare, and telling her to keep him informed of her whereabouts. 
 
 But the months passed on, and no more news arrived. He 
 wrote again via Bordeaux, but with no result, and could only 
 wait patiently till that eagle's grip, in which all French life was 
 stifled, should be loosened. 
 
 Meanwhile his relation to another human being, whose life had 
 been affected by the French episode, passed into a fresh phase. 
 Two days after the news of Elise's marriage had reached him, he 
 and John had just shut up the shop, and the young master was 
 hanging over the counter under the gas, heavily conning a not 
 very satisfactory business account. 
 
 John came in, took his hat and stick from a corner, and threw 
 David a gruff ' good night. ' 
 
 Something in the tone struck David's sore nerves like a blow. 
 He turned abruptly — 
 
 ' Look here, John ! I can't stand this kind of thing much 
 longer. Hadn't we better part ? You've learnt a lot here, and 
 I'll see you get a good place. You — you rub it in too long ! ' 
 
 John stood still, his big rough hands beginning to shake, his 
 pink cheeks turning a painful crimson. 
 
 ' You— you never said a word to me ! ' he flung out at last, 
 Incoherently, resentfully. 
 
 ' Said a' word to you ? What do you mean ? I told you the 
 truth, and I would have told you more, if you hadn't turned 
 against me as though I had been the devil himself. Do you 
 suppose you are the only person who came to grief because of 
 that French time ? Good God ! ' 
 
 The last words came out with a low exasperation. The young 
 
406 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 man leant against the counter, looking at his assistant with bitter, 
 indignant eyes. 
 
 John first shrank from them, then his own were drawn to 
 meet them. Even his slow perceptions, thus challenged, realised 
 something of the truth. He gave way — as David might have 
 made him give way long before, if his own misery had not made 
 him painfully avoid any fresh shock of speech. 
 
 ' Well ! ' said John, slowly, with a mighty effort ; ' I'll not lay 
 it agen you ony more. I'll say that. But if you want to get rid 
 of me, you can. Only you'll be put to 't wi' t' printing.' 
 
 The two young fellows surveyed each other. Then suddenly 
 David said, pushing him to the door : 
 
 ' You're a great ass, John — get out, and good night to you.' 
 
 But next day the atmosphere was cleared, and, with inexpres- 
 sible relief on both sides, the two fell back into the old brotherly 
 relation. Poor John ! He kept an old photograph of Louie in a 
 drawer at his lodging, and, when he came home to bed, would 
 alternately weep over and denounce it. But, all the same, his 
 interest in David's printing ventures was growing keener and 
 keener, and whenever business had been particularly exciting 
 during the day, the performance with the photograph was cur- 
 tailed or omitted at night. Let no scorn, however, be thought, 
 on that account, of the true passion ! — which had thriven on 
 unkindness, and did but yield to the slow mastery of time. 
 
 The war thundered on. To Manchester, and to the cotton and 
 silk industries of Lancashire generally, the tragedy of France 
 meant on the whole a vast boom in trade. So many French 
 rivals crippled — so much ground set free for English enterprise to 
 capture— and, meanwhile, high profits for a certain number at 
 least of Manchester and Macclesfield merchants, and brisk wages 
 for the Lancashire operatives, especially for the silk-weavers. 
 This, with of course certain drawbacks and exceptions, was the 
 aspect under which the war mainly presented itself to Lancashire. 
 Meanwhile, amid tlieso teeming Manchester streets with their 
 clattering lurries and overflowing warehouses, there was at least 
 one Englishman who took the war hardly, in whom the spectacle 
 of its wreck and struggle roused a feeling which was all moral, 
 human, disinterested. 
 
 What was Regnault doing ? David kept a watch on the news- 
 papers, of which the Free Library offered him an ample store ; 
 but there was no mention of him in the English press that he 
 could discover, and Barbier, of course, got nothing now from 
 Paris. 
 
 Christmas was over. The last month of the siege, that hideous 
 January of frost and fire, rushed past, with its alternations of 
 famine within and futile battle without — Europe looking on 
 appalled at this starved and shivering Paris, into which the shells 
 were raining. At last — the 27th ! — the capitulation ! Ail was 
 over ; the German was master in Europe, and France lay at the 
 feet of her conqueror. 
 
CHAP, xnr STORM AND STRESS 407 
 
 Out to all parts streamed the letters which had been so long 
 delayed. Barbier and David, walking together one bitter evening 
 towards Barbier's lodgings, silent, with hanging heads, met the 
 postman on Barbier's steps, who held out a packet. The French- 
 man took it with a cry ; the two rushed upstairs and fell upon 
 the letters and papers it contained. 
 
 There— while Barbier sat beside him, groaning over the con- 
 ditions of peace, over the enthronement of the Emperor-King at 
 Versailles, within sight of the statue of Louis Quatorze, now 
 cursing ' ces imbeciles da gouvernement ! ' and now wiping the 
 tears from his old cheeks with a trembling hand — David read the 
 news of the fight of Buzenval, and the death of Regnault. 
 
 It seemed to him that he had alwaj^s foreseen it — that from 
 the very beginning Regnault's image in his thought had been 
 haloed with a light of tragedy and storm — a light of death. His 
 eyes devoured the long memorial article in which a friend of 
 Regnault's had given the details of his last months of life. 
 Barbier, absorbed in his own grief, heard not a sound from the 
 corner where his companion sat crouched beneath the gas. 
 
 Everything — the death and the manner of it — was to him, as 
 it were, in the natural order — fitting, right, such as might have 
 been expected. His heart swelled to bursting as he read, but his 
 eyes were dry. • 
 
 This, briefly, was the story which he read. 
 
 Henri Regnault re-entered Paris at the beginning of Septem 
 ber. By the beginning of October he was on active service, 
 stationed now at Asnieres, now at Colombes. In October or 
 November he became engaged to a young girl, with whom he had 
 been for long devotedly in love — ah ! David thought of that 
 sudden smile — the ' open door ' ! Their passion, cherished under 
 the wings of war, did but give courage and heroism to both. Yet 
 he loved most humanly ! One night, in an interval of duty, on 
 leaving the house where his fiancee lived, he found the shells of 
 the bombardment falling fast in the street outside. He could 
 not make up his mind to go — might not ruin befall the dear house 
 with its inmates at any moment ? So he wandered up and down 
 outside for hours in the bitter night, watching, amid the rattle of 
 the shells and the terrified cries of women and children from the 
 houses on either side. At last, worn out and frozen with cold, 
 but still unable to leave the spot, he knocked softly at the door 
 he had left. The concierge came, ' Let me lie down awhile on 
 your floor. Tell no one.' Then, appeased by this regained near- 
 ness to her, and by the sense that no danger could strike the one 
 without warning the other, he wrapped himself in his soldier's 
 cloak and fell asleop. 
 
 In November he painted his last three water-colours— visions 
 of the East, painted for her, and as flower-bright as possible, 
 ' because flowers were scarce ' in the doomed city. 
 
 December came. Regnault spent Christmas night at the 
 advanced post of Colombes. His captain wished to make him an 
 
408 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book in 
 
 officer. 'Thanks, my captain,' said the young fellow of twenty- 
 three ; ' but if you have a good soldier in me, why exchange him 
 for an indifferent officer ? My example will be of more use to 
 you than my commission.' Meanwhile the days and nights were 
 passed in Arctic cold. Men were frozen to death round about 
 him ; his painter's hand was frostbitten. ' Oh ! I can speak with 
 authority on cold ! ' he wrote to his fiancee ; ' this morning at 
 least I know what it is to spend the night on the hard earth 
 exposed to a glacial wind. Enough ! Je 'ine recliaufferai a voire 
 foyer. I love you — I love my country — that sustains. Adieu ! ' 
 
 On the 17th, after a few days in Paris spent with her and 
 some old friends, he was again ordered to the front. On Thurs- 
 day the fight at Buzenval began with a brilliant success ; in the 
 middle of the day \i\9>ficuitee still had news of him, brought by a 
 servant. Night fell. The battle was hottest in a wood adjoining 
 the park of Buzenval. Regnault and his painter-comrade Clairin 
 were side by side. Suddenly the retreat was sounded, and the 
 same instant Clairin missed his friend. He sought him with 
 frenzy amid the trees in the darkening wood, called to him, 
 peered into the faces of the dying — no answer ! Ah ! he must 
 have been swept backwards by the rush of the retreat — Clairin 
 wi'l find him again. 
 
 Three days later the lost was found — one among two hundred 
 corpses of National Guards carted into Pere Laehaise. Clairin, 
 mad with grief, held his friend in his arms — held, kissed the 
 beautiful head, now bruised and stained past even her knowing, 
 with its bullet-wound in the temple. 
 
 On his breast was found a medal with a silver tear hanging 
 from it. She who had long worn it as a symbol of bereavement, 
 in memory of dear ones lost to her, had given it to him in her 
 first joy. 'I will reclaim it,' she had said, smiling, 'the first 
 time you make me weep ! ' It was all that was brought back to 
 her — all except a scrawled paper found in his pocket, containing 
 some hurried and almost illegible words, written perhaps beside 
 his outpost fire. 
 
 ' We have lost many men — we must remake them — hetter — 
 stronger. The lesson should profit us. No more lingering amid 
 facile pleasures ! Who dare now live for himself alone ? It has 
 been for too long the custom with us to believe in nothing but 
 enjoyment and all bad passions. We have prided ourselves on de- 
 spising everything good and worthy. No more of such contempt ! ' 
 
 Then— so the story ended— four days later, on the very day of 
 the capitulation of Paris, Regnault was carried to his last rest. 
 A figure in widow's dress walked l)ehind. And to many standing 
 by, amid the muffled roll of the drums and the wailing of the 
 music, it was as though France herself went down to burial with 
 her son, 
 
 David got up gently and went across to Barbier, who was sit- 
 ting with his letters and papers before him, staring and stupefied, 
 the lower jaw falling, in a trance of grief. 
 
CHAP. XIV STORM A^D STRESS 409 
 
 The young mtin put down the newspaper he had been reading 
 in front of the old man. 
 
 ' Read that some time ; it will give you something to be proud 
 of. I told you I knew him — he was kind to me. ' 
 
 Barbier nodded, not understanding, and sought for his spec- 
 tacles with shaking fingers. David quietly went out. 
 
 He walked home in a state of exaltation like a man still 
 environed with the emotion of great poetry or great music. He 
 said very little about Regnault in the days that followed to 
 Ancrum or Barbier, even to Dora, with whom every week his 
 friendship was deepening. But the memory of the dead man, as 
 it slowly shaped itself in his brooding mind, became with him a 
 permanent and fruitful element of thought. Very likely the 
 Regnault whom he revered, whose name was henceforth a sacred 
 thing to him, was only part as it were of the real Regnault. He 
 saw the French artist with an Englishman's eyes— interpreted 
 him in English ways — the ways, moreover, of a consciousness 
 self-taught and provincial, however gifted and flexible. Only 
 one or two aspects, no doubt, of that rich, self -tormented nature, 
 reared amid the most complex movements of European intelli- 
 gence, were really plain to him. And those aspects were specially 
 brought home to him by his own mental condition. No matter. 
 Broadly, essentially, he understood. 
 
 But thenceforward, just as Ehse Delaunay had stood to him 
 in the beginning for French art and life, and that ferment in 
 himself which answered to them, so now in her place stood 
 Regnault with those stern words upon his young and dying lips — 
 'We have lost many men — we must remake them — letter! 
 Henceforward let no one dare live unto himself.' The English- 
 man took them into his heart, that ethical fibre in him, which 
 was at last roused and dominant, vibrating, responding. And as 
 the poignant images of death and battle faded he saw his hero 
 always as he had seen him last — young, radiant, vigorous, point- 
 ing to the dawn behind Notre-Dame. 
 
 All life looked differently to David this winter. He saw the 
 Manchester streets and those who lived in them with other per- 
 ceptions. His old political debating interests, indeed, v^ere com- 
 paratively slack ; but persons— men and women, and their stories 
 —for these he was instinctively on the watch. His eye noticed 
 the faces he passed as it had never yet done— divined in them 
 suffering, or vice, or sickness. All that he saw at this moment 
 he saw tragically. The doors set open about him were still, as 
 Keats, himself hurried to his end by an experience of passion, 
 once expressed it, ' all dark,' and leading to darkness. There were 
 times when Dora's faith and Ancrum's mysticism drew him irre- 
 sistibly ; other times when they were almost as repulsive to him 
 as they had ever been, because they sounded to him like the 
 formula of people setting out to explain the world ' with a light 
 heart,' as Ollivier had gone to war. 
 
410 THE HISTORY OP DAVID GRIEVE book in 
 
 But whether or no it could be explained, this world, he could 
 not now help putting out his hand to meddle with and mend it ; 
 his mind fed on its incidents and conditions. The mill-girls 
 standing on the Ancoats pavements ; the drunken lurryman 
 tottering out from the public-house to his lurry under the biting 
 sleet of February ; the ragged barefoot boys and girls swarming 
 and festering in the slums ; the young men struggling all about 
 him for subsistence and success — these for the first time became 
 realities to him, entered into that pondering of ' whence and 
 whither ' to which he had been always destined, and whereon he 
 was now consciously started. 
 
 And as the months went on, his attention was once more 
 painfully caught and held by Dora's troubles and Daddy's 
 infirmities. For Daddy's improvement was short-lived. A bad 
 relapse came in November ; things again went downhill fast ; the 
 loan contracted in the summer had to be met, and under the 
 pressure of it Daddy only became more helpless and disreputable 
 week by week. And now, when Doctor Mildmay went to see him, 
 Daddy, crouching over the fire, pretended to be deaf, and ' soft ' 
 besides. Nothing could be got out of him except certain grim 
 hints that his house was his own till he was turned out of it. 
 ' Looks pretty bad this time,' said the doctor to David once as he 
 came out discomfited. ' After all, there's not much hope when 
 the craving returns on a man of his age, especially after some 
 years' interval.' 
 
 Daddy would sometimes talk frankly enough to David. At 
 such times his language took an exasperating Shakespearean 
 turn. He was abominably fond of posing as Lear or Jaques — as 
 a man much buffeted, and acquainted with all the ugly secrets 
 of life. Purcell stood generally for ' the enemy ; ' and to Purcell 
 his half-mad fancy attributed most of his misfortunes. It w^as 
 Purcell who had undermined his business, taken away his cha- 
 racter, and driven him back to drink. David did not believe 
 much of it, and told him so. Then, roused to wrath, the young 
 man would speak his mind plainly as to Dora's sufferings and 
 Dora's future. But to very little purpose. 
 
 'Aye, you're right — you're right enough,' said the old man to 
 him on one of these occasions, with a wild, sinister look. ' Cor- 
 delia '11 hang for 't. If you want to do her any good, you must 
 turn old Lear out — send him packing, back to the desert where 
 he was before. There's elbow-room there ! ' 
 
 David looked up startled. The thin bronzed face had a 
 restless flutter in it. Before he could reply Daddy had laid a 
 hand on his shoulder. 
 
 ' Davy, why don't you drink ? ' 
 
 ' What do you mean ? ' said the young man, flushing. 
 
 * Davy, you've been as close as wax ; but Daddy can see a 
 thing or two when he chooses. Ah, you should drink, my lad. 
 Let people prate — why shouldn't a man please himself ? It's not 
 the beastly liquor — that's the worst part of it — it's the dreamSf 
 
CHAP. XIV STORM AND STRESS 411 
 
 my lad, "the dreams that come." They say ether does the 
 business cheapest. A teaspoonful — and you can be alternately in 
 Paradise and the gutter four times a day. But the fools here 
 don't know how to mix it.' 
 
 As he spoke the door opened, and there stood Dora on the 
 threshold. She had just come back from a Lenten service ; her 
 little worn prayer-book was in her hand. She stood trembling, 
 looking at them both — at David's tight, indignant lips — at her 
 father's excitement. 
 
 Daddy's eye fell on her prayer-book, and David, looking up, 
 saw a quick cloud of distaste, aversion, pass over his weird face. 
 
 She put out some supper, and pressed David to stay. He did 
 so in the vain hope of keeping Daddy at home. But the old 
 vagrant was too clever for both of them. When David at last 
 got up to go. Daddy accompanied him downstairs, and stood in 
 the doorway looking up Market Place till David had disappeared 
 in the darkness. Then with a soft and cunning hand he drew 
 the door to behind him, and stood a moment lifting his face to 
 the rack of moonlit cloud scudding across the top of the houses 
 opposite. As he did so, he drew a long breath, with the gesture 
 of one to whom the wild airs of that upper sky, the rush of its 
 driving wind, were stimulus and delight. Then he put down his 
 head and stole off to the right, towards the old White Inn in 
 Hanging Ditch, while Dora was still listening in misery for his 
 return step upon the stairs. 
 
 A week later Dora, not knowing how the restaurant could be 
 kept going any longer, and foreseeing utter bankruptcy and ruin 
 as soon as the shutters should be up, took her courage in both 
 hands, swallowed all pride, and walked up to Half Street to beg 
 help of Purcell. After all he was her mother's brother. In spite 
 of that long^eud between him and Daddy, he would surely, for 
 his own credit's sake, help them to escape a public scandal. For 
 all his rodomontade, Daddy had never done him any real harm 
 that she could remember. 
 
 So she opened the shop door in Half Street, quaking at the 
 sound of the bell she set in motion, and went in. 
 
 Twenty minutes afterwards she came out again, looking from 
 side to side like a hunted creature, her veil drawn close over her 
 face. She fled on through Market Place, across Market Street 
 and St. Ann's Square, and through the tall dark warehouse 
 streets beyond — drawn blindly towards Potter Street and her only 
 friend. 
 
 David was putting out some books on the stall when he looked 
 up and saw her. Perceiving that she was weeping and breathless, 
 he asked her into the back room, while John kept guard in the 
 shop. 
 
 There she leant against the mantelpiece, shaking from head 
 to foot, and wiping away her tears. He soon gathered that she 
 had been to Purcell, and that Purcell had dismissed her appeal 
 
412 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 with every circumstance of cold and brutal insult. The sooner 
 her father was in the workhouse or the lunatic asylum, and she 
 income nunnery or other, the sooner each would be in their right 
 place. He was a vagabond, and she a Papist — let them go where 
 they belonged. He was not going to spend a farthing of his hard- 
 earned money to help either of them to impose any further on the 
 world. And then he let fall a word or two which showed her that 
 he had probably been at the bottom of some merciless pressure 
 lately applied to them by one or two of their chief creditors. The 
 bookseller's hour was come, and he was looking on at the hewing 
 of his Agag with the joy of the righteous. So might the Lord 
 avenge him of all his enemies. 
 
 Dora could hardly give an account of it. The naked revelation 
 of Purceirs hate, of so hard and vindictive a soul, had worked 
 upon her like some physical horror. She had often suspected the 
 truth, but now that it was past doubting, the moral shock was 
 terrible to this tender mystical creature, whose heart by day and 
 night lived a hidden life with the Crucified and with His saints. 
 Oh, how could he, how could anyone, be so cruel ? — her father 
 getting an old man ! and she, who had never quarrelled with him 
 — who had nursed Lucy ! So she wailed, gradually recovering 
 her poor shaken soul — calming it, indeed, all the while out of 
 sight, with quick piteous words of prayer and submission. 
 
 David stood by, pale with rage and sympathy. But what 
 could he do ? He was himself in the midst of a hard struggle, 
 and had neither money nor credit available. They parted at last, 
 with the understanding that he was to go and consult Aucrum, 
 and that she was to go to her friends at St. Damian's. 
 
 Till now poor Dora had carefully refrained from bringing her 
 private woes into relation with her life in and through St. 
 Damian's. Within that enchanted circle, she was another being 
 with another existence. There she had never asked^anything for 
 herself, except the pardon and help of God, before His altar, and 
 through His priests. Rather she had given — given all that she 
 had— her time, such as she could spare from Daddy and her work, 
 to the Sunday-school and the sick ; her hard-won savings on her 
 clothes, and on the extra work, for wdiich she would often sit up 
 night after night when Daddy believed her asleep, to the poor 
 and to the services of the Church. There she had a position, 
 almost an authority of her own — the authority which comes of 
 self-spending. But now this innocent pride must be humbled. 
 For the sake of her father, and of those to whom they owed 
 money they could not pay, she must go and ask — beg instead of 
 giving. All she wanted was time. Her embroidery work was 
 now better paid than ever. If the restaurant were closed she 
 could do more of it. In the end she believed she could pay every- 
 body. But she must have time. Yes, she would go to Father 
 Vernon that night ! He would understand, even if he could not 
 help her. 
 
 Alas I Next morning David was just going out to dinner, 
 
CHAP. xiY STORM AND STRESS 413 
 
 when a message was brougnt him from Market Place. He started 
 off thither at a run, and found a white and gasping Dora wander- 
 ing restlessly up and down the upper room ; while Sarah, the old 
 Lancashire cook, very red and very tearful, followed her about 
 trying to administer consolation. Daddy had disappeared. After 
 coming in about eleven the night before and going noisily to 
 his room — no doubt for the purpose of deluding Dora— he must 
 have stolen down again and made off without being either seen or 
 heard by anybody. Even the policeman on duty in Market Place 
 had noticed nothing. He had taken what was practically the only 
 money left them in the world — about twenty pounds — from Dora's 
 cashbox, and some clothes, packing these last in a knapsack 
 which still remained to him from the foreign tramps of years 
 before. 
 
 The efforts made by Dora, David, and Ancrum, whom David 
 called in to help, to track the fugitive, were quite useless. Daddy 
 had probably disguised himself, for he had all the tricks of the 
 adventurer, and could ' make up ' in former days so as to deceive 
 even his own wife. 
 
 Strange outbreak of a secret ineradicable mstinct ! He had 
 been Dora's for twenty years. But life with her at Leicester, and 
 during their first years at Manchester, had thriven too evenly, 
 and in the end the old wanderer had felt his blood prick within 
 him, and the mania of his youth revive. His business had grown 
 hateful to him ; it was probably the comparative monotony of 
 success which had first reawakened the travel-hunger— then rest- 
 lessness, conflict, leading to drink, and. finally, escape. 
 
 ' He will come back, you know,' said Dora one night, sharply, 
 to David. ' He served my mother so many times. But he always 
 came back.' 
 
 They were sitting together in the shuttered and dismantled 
 restaurant. There was to be a sale on the premises on the 
 morrow, and the lower room had that day been filled with all the 
 ' plant ' of the restaurant, and all or almost all the poor house- 
 hold stuff from upstairs. It was an odd, ramshackle collection ; 
 and poor Dora, who had been walking round looking at the 
 auction tickets, wns realising with a sinking heart how much debt 
 the sale would still leave unprovided for. But she had found 
 friends. Father Vernon had met the creditors for her. There 
 had been a composition, and she had insisted upon working off to 
 the best of her power whatever sum might remain after the 
 possession and goodwill had been sold. She could live on a crust, 
 and she was sure of continuous work both for the great church- 
 furniture shop in Manchester which had hitherto employed her 
 and also for the newly established School of Art Keedlework at 
 Kensington. As an embroideress there were few more delicately 
 trained eyes and defter hands than hers in England. 
 
 When she spoke of her father's coming back, David was seized 
 with pity. She could not sit down in these days when her work 
 was out of her hands. Perpetual movement seemed her onljf 
 
414 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 relief. The face, that seemed so featureless but was so expressive, 
 had lost its sweet, shining look ; the mouth had the pucker of 
 pain ; and she had piteous startled ways quite unlike her usual 
 soft serenity. 
 
 ' Oh, yes, he will come back— some time,' he said, to comfort 
 her. 
 
 ' I don't doubt that — never. But I wonder how he could go 
 like that — how he had the heart ! I did think he cared for me. 
 I wasn't ever nasty to him — at least, I don't remember. Perhaps 
 he thought I was. But only we two — and always together — since 
 mother died ! ' 
 
 She began to tidy some of the lots, to tie some of the bundles 
 of odds and ends together more securely — talking all the while in 
 a broken way. She was evidently bewildered and at sea. If she 
 could have remembered any misconduct of her own, it seemed to 
 David, it would have been a relief to her. Her faith taught her 
 that love was all-powerful — but it had availed her nothing ! 
 
 The sale came ; and the goodwill of the Parlour was sold to a 
 man who was to make a solid success of what with Daddy had 
 been a half- crazy experiment. 
 
 Dora went to live in Ancoats, that teeming, squalid quarter 
 which lies but a stone's-throw from the principal thoroughfares 
 and buildings of Manchester, and in its varieties of manufacturing 
 life and population presents types which are all its own. Here 
 are the cotton operatives who work the small proportion of mills 
 still remaining within the bounds of Manchester — the spinners, 
 minders, reelers, reed-makers, and the rest ; here are the calico- 
 printers and dyers, the warehousemen and lurrymen ; and here 
 too are the sellers of ' fents,' and all the other thousand and one 
 small trades and occupations which live on and by the poor. The 
 quarter has one broad thoroughfare or lung, which on a sunny 
 day is gay, sightly, and alive ; then to north and south diverge 
 the innumerable low red-brick streets where the poor live and 
 work ; which have none, however, of the trim uniformity which 
 belongs to the workers' quarters of the factory towns pure and 
 simple. Manchester in its worst streets is more squalid, more 
 haphazard, more nakedly poor even than London. Yet, for all 
 that, Manchester is a city with a common life, which London is 
 not. The native Lancashire element, lost as it is beneath many 
 supervening strata, is still there and powerful ; and there are 
 strong well-defined characteristic interests and occupations which 
 bind the whole together. 
 
 Here Dora settled with a St. Damian's girl friend, a shirt- 
 maker. They lived over a sweetshop, in two tiny rooms, in a 
 street even more miscellaneous and half-baked than its neigh- 
 bours. Outside was ugliness ; inside, unremitting labour. But 
 Dora soon made herself almost happy. By various tender shifts 
 she had saved out of the wreck in Market Place Daddy's bits of 
 engravings and foreign curiosities, his Swiss carvings and shells, 
 his skins and stuffed birds ; very moth-eaten and melancholy 
 
CHAP. XIV STORM AND STRESS 415 
 
 these last, but still safe. There, too, was his chair ; it stood 
 beside the fire ; he had but to come back to it. Many a time in 
 the week did she suddenly rise that she might go to the door and 
 listen ; or crane her head out of window, agitated by a figure, a 
 sound, as her mother had done before her. 
 
 Then her religious life was free to expand as it had never been 
 yet. Very soon, in Passion Week, she and her friend had gathered 
 a prayer-meeting of girls, hands from the mill at the end of the 
 street. They came for twenty minutes in the dinner-hour, delicate- 
 faced comely creatures many of them, with their shawls over their 
 heads : Dora prayed and sang with them, a soft tremulous passion 
 in every word and gesture. They thought her a saint — began to 
 tell her their woes and their sins. In the evenings and on Sunday 
 she lived in the coloured and scented church, with its plaintive 
 music, its luminous altar, its suggestions both of a great encom- 
 passing church order of undefined antiquity and infinite future, 
 and of a practical system full of support for individual weakness 
 and guidance for the individual will. The beauty of the cere- 
 monial appealed to those instincts in her which found other 
 expression in her glowing embroideries ; and towards the church 
 order, with its symbols, observances, mysteries, the now solitary 
 girl felt a more passionate adoration, a more profound humility, 
 than ever before. Nothing too much could be asked of her. 
 During Lent, but for the counsels of Father Russell himself, a 
 shrewd man, well aware that St. Damian's represented the one 
 Anglican oasis in an incorrigibly moderate Manchester, even her 
 serviceable and elastic strength would have given way, so hard 
 she was to that poor 'sister the body,' which so many patient 
 ages have gone to perfect and adjust. 
 
 Half of the romance, the poetry of her life, lay here ; the other 
 half in her constant expectation of her father, and in the visits of 
 David Grieve. Once a week at least David mounted to the little 
 room where the two girls sat working ; sometimes now, oh joy ! 
 he went to church with her ; sometimes he made her come out 
 to Eccles, or Cheadle, or the Irwell valley for a walk. She used 
 various maidenly arts and self-restraints to prevent scandal. At 
 home she never saw him alone, and she now never went to Potter 
 Street. Still, out of doors they were often alone. There was no 
 concealment, and the persons who took notice assumed that they 
 were keeping company and going to be married. When such 
 things were said to Dora she met them with a sweet and quiet 
 denial, at first blushing, then with no change at all of look or 
 manner. 
 
 Yet the girl who lived with her knew that the first sound of 
 David's rap on the door below sent a tremor through the figure 
 beside her, that the slight hand would go up instinctively to the 
 coiled hair, straightening and pinning, and that the smiling, 
 listening, sometimes disputing Dora who talked with David 
 Grieve was quite different from the dreamy and ascetic Dora 
 who sat beside her all day. 
 
416 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 Why did David go ? As a matter of fact, with every month 
 of this winter and spring, Dora's friendship became more neces- 
 sary to him. All the brotherly feeling he would once so willingly 
 have spent on Louie, he now spent on Dora. She became in 
 truth a sister to him. He talked to her as he would have done 
 to Louie had she been like Dora. No other relationship ever 
 entered his mind ; and he believed that he was perfectly under- 
 stood and met in the same way. 
 
 Both often spoke of Lucy, towards whom David in this new 
 and graver temper felt both kindly and gratefully. She, poor 
 child, wrote to Dora from time to time letters full of complaints 
 of her father and of his tyranny in keeping her away from 
 Manchester. He indeed seemed to have taken a morbid dislike 
 to his daughter, and what company he wanted he got from the 
 widow, whom yet he had never made up his mind to marry. 
 Lucy chafed and rebelled against the perpetual obstacles he 
 placed in the way of her returning home, but he threatened to 
 make her earn her own living if she disobeyed him, and in the 
 end she alwaj^s submitted. She poured herself out bitterly, how- 
 ever, to Dora, and Dora was helplessly sorry for her, feeling that 
 her idle wandering life with the various aunts and cousins she 
 boarded with was excessively bad for her — seeing that Lucy was 
 not of the stuff to fashion new duties or charities for herself out 
 of new relations— and that the small, vain, and yet affectionate 
 nature ran an evil chance of ultimate barrenness and sourness. 
 
 But what could she do ? In every letter there was some men- 
 tion of David Grieve or request for news about him. About the 
 visit to Paris Dora had written 'discreetly, telling only what she 
 knew, and nothing of what she guessed. In reality, as the 
 winter passed on, Dora watched him more and more closely, 
 waiting for the time when that Frenci mystery, whatever it was, 
 should have ceased to overshadow him, and she might once more 
 scheme for Lucy. He must marry— that she knew !— whatever 
 he might think. Anyone could see that, with the returning 
 spring, in spite of her friendship and Ancrum's, he felt his loneli- 
 ness almost intolerable. It was clear, too, as his manhood 
 advanced, that he was naturally drawn to women, naturally 
 dependent on them. In spite of" his great intelligence, to her so 
 formidable and mysterious, Dora had soon recognised, as Elise 
 had done, the eager, clinging, confiding temper of *his youth. 
 And beneath the transformation of passion and grief it was still 
 there — to be felt moving often like a wounded thing. 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 It was a showery April evening. But as it was also a Saturday, 
 Manchester took no heed at all of the weather. The streets were 
 thronged. All the markets were ablaze with light, and full of 
 buyers. In Market Place, Dora's old home, the covered glass 
 booths beside the pavement brought the magic of the spring into 
 
CHAP. XV STORM AND STRESS 411 
 
 the very heart of the black and swarming town, for they were a 
 fragrant show of daffodils, hyacinths, primroses, and palms. 
 Their lights shone out into the rainy mist of the air, on the 
 glistening pavements, and on the faces of the cheerful chattering 
 crowd, to which the shawled heads so common among the women 
 gave the characteristic Lancashire touch. Above rose the dark 
 tower of the Exchange ; on one side was the Parlour, still dedi- 
 cated to the kindly diet of corn- and fruit-eating men, but 
 repainted, and launched on a fresh career of success by Daddy's 
 successor ; on the other, the gabled and bulging m^ass of the old 
 Fishing-tackle House, with a lively fish and oyster traffic surging 
 in the little alleys on either side of it. 
 
 Market Street, too, was thronged. In the great cheap shop at 
 the head of it, aflame with lights from top to base, you could see 
 the buyers story after story, swarming like bees in a glass hive. 
 Farther on in the wide space of the Infirmary square, the omni- 
 buses gathered, and a detachment of redcoats just returned from 
 rifle-practice on the moors crowded the pavement outside the 
 hospital, amid an admiring escort of the youth of Manchester, 
 while their band played lustily. 
 
 But especially in Peter Street, the street of the great public 
 halls and principal theatres, was Manchester alive and busy. 
 Nilsson was singing at the ' Royal,' and the rich folk were setting 
 down there in their broughams and landaus. But in the great 
 Free Trade Hall there was a performance of ' Judas Maccabeus' 
 given by the Manchester Philharmonic Society, and the vast 
 place, filled from end to end with shilling and two-shilling seats, 
 was crowded with the 'people.' It was a purely local scene, 
 unlike anything of the same kind in London, or any other capital. 
 The performers on the platform were well known to Manchester, 
 unknown elsewhere ; Manchester took them at once critically and 
 affectionately, remembering their past, looking forward to their 
 future ; the Society was one of which the town was proud ; the 
 conductor was a character, and popular ; and half the audience 
 at least was composed of the relations and friends of the chorus. 
 Most people had a 'Susan,' an 'Alice,' or a 'William' making 
 signs to them at intervals from the orchestra ; and when any- 
 thing went particularly well, and the applause was loud, the 
 friends of Susan or Alice beamed with a proprietary pride. 
 
 Looking down upon this friendly cheerful throng sat David 
 Grieve, high up in the balcony. It had been his wont of late to 
 frequent these cheap concerts, where as a rule, owing to the 
 greater musical sensitiveness of the English North as compared 
 with the South, the music is singularly good. During the past 
 winter, indeed, music might almost be said to have become part 
 of his life. He had no true musical gift, .ut in the paralysis of 
 many of his natural modes of expression which had overtaken 
 him music supplied a need. In it he at least, and at this moment, 
 found a voice and an emotion not too personal or poignant. He 
 lost himself in it, and was soothed. 
 
418 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 Towards the beginning of the last part he suddenly with a 
 start recognised Lucy Purcell in the body of the hall. She was 
 sitting with friends whom he did not know, staring straight 
 before her. He bent forward and looked at her carefully. In a 
 minute or two he decided that she was looking tired, cross, and 
 unhappy, and that she was not attending to the music at all. 
 
 So at last her father had let her come home. As to her looks, 
 to be daughter to Purcell was to be sure of disagreeable living ; 
 and perhaps her future stepmother had been helping Purcell to 
 annoy her. 
 
 Poor little thing ! David felt a strong wish to speak to her 
 after the performance. Meanwhile he tried to attract her atten- 
 tion, but in vain. It seemed to him that she looked right along 
 the bench on which he sat ; but there was no flash in her face ; it 
 remained as tired and frowning as before. 
 
 He ran downstairs before the end of the last chorus, and 
 placed himself near the door by which he felt sure she would 
 come out. He was just in time. She and her party also came 
 out early before the rush. There was a sudden crowd of people 
 in the doorway, and then he heard a little cry. Lucy stood 
 before him, flushed, pulling at her glove, and saying something 
 incoherent. But before he could understand she had turned back 
 to the two women who accompanied her and spoken to them 
 quickly ; the elder replied, with a sour look at David ; the 
 younger laughed behind her muff. Lucy turned away wilfully, 
 and at that instant the crowd from within, surging outwards, 
 swept them away from her, and she and David found themselves 
 together. 
 
 ' Come down those steps there to the right,' she said peremp- 
 torily. ' They are going the other way.' 
 
 By this time David himself was red. She hurried him into 
 the street, however, and then he saw that she was breathing hard, 
 and that her hands were clasped together as though she were 
 trying to restrain herself. 
 
 ' Oh, I am so unhappy ! ' she burst out, ' so unhappy ! And it 
 was all, you know, to begin with, because of you, Mr. Grieve 1 
 But oh ! I forgot you'd been ill — you look so different ! ' 
 
 She paused suddenly, while over her face there passed an 
 expression half startled, half shrinking, as of one who speaks 
 familiarly, as he supposes, to an old friend and finds a stranger. 
 She could not take her eyes off him. What was this new dignity, 
 this indefinable change of manner ? 
 
 'I am not different,' he said hastily, 'not in the least. So 
 your father has never forgiven you the kindness you did me ? I 
 don't know what to say, Miss Lucy. I'm both sorry and ashamed.' 
 
 ' Forgiven it ! — no, nor ever will,' she said shortly, walking on. 
 and forgetting everything but her woes. ' Oh, do listen ! Come 
 up Oxford Street. I must tell some one, or I shall die ! I must 
 see Dora. Father's forbidden me to go, and I haven't had a 
 moment to myself yet. She hasn't written to me since she left 
 
CHAP. XV STORM AND STRESS 419 
 
 the Parlour, and no one '11 tell me where she is. And that odious 
 woman ! Oh, she is an abominable wretch ! She wants to claim 
 all my things— all the bits of things that were mother's, and I 
 have always counted mine. She won't let me take any of them 
 away. And she's stolen a necklace of mine — yes, Mr. Grieve, 
 stolen it. I don't care tliat about it — not in itself ; but to have 
 your things taken out of your drawers without " With your 
 leave" or ""By your leave" ! — She's made father worse than 
 ever. I thought he had found her out, but he is actually going 
 to marry her in July, and they won't let me live at home unless 
 I make a solemn promise to " perform my religious duties " and 
 behave properly to the chapel people. And I never will, not if 
 I starve for it — nasty, canting, crawling, backbiting things ! Then 
 father says I can live away, and he'll make me an allowance. 
 And what do you think he'll allow me ? ' 
 
 She faced round upon him with curving lip and eyes aflame. 
 David averred truly that he could not guess. 
 
 ' Thirty — pounds — a — year ! ' she said with vicious emphasis. 
 ' There — would you believe it ? If you put a dirty little chit of a 
 nurse-girl on board wages, it would come to more than that. 
 And he just bought three houses in Millgate, and as rich as any- 
 thing ! Oh, it's shameful, I call it, shameful ! ' 
 
 She put her handkerchief to her eyes. Then she quickly 
 withdrew it again and turned to him, remembering how his first 
 aspect had surprised her. In the glare of some shops they were 
 passing David could see her perfectly, and she him. Certainly, 
 in the year which had elapsed since they had met she had ripened, 
 or rather softened, into a prettier girl. Whether it was the 
 milder Southern climate in which she had been living, or the 
 result of physical weakness left by her attack of illness in the 
 preceding spring, at any rate her bloom was more delicate, the 
 lines of her small, pronounced face more finished and melting. 
 As for her, now that she had paused a moment in her flow of 
 complaint, she was busy puzzling out the change in him. David 
 became vaguely conscious of it, and tried to set her off again. 
 
 ' But you'd rather live away,' he said, 'when they treat you 
 like that ? You'd rather be independent, I should think ? I 
 would ! ' 
 
 ' Oh, catch me living with that woman ! ' she cried passion- 
 ately. ' She's no better than a thief, a common thief. I don't 
 care who hears me. And 7nade up I Oh, its shocking ! It 
 seems to me there's nothing I can talk about at home now — 
 whether it's getting old— or teeth — or hair — I'm always supposed 
 to be "passing remarks." And I wouldn't mind if it was my 
 Hastings cousins I had to live with. But they can't have me any 
 more, and now I'm at Wakely with the Astons.' 
 
 ' The Aston's ? ' David echoed. like most people of small 
 training and intelligence, Lucy instinctively supposed that what- 
 ever was familiar to her was familiar to other people. 
 
 * Oh, don't you know ? It's father's sister who married a mill- 
 
430 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book in 
 
 overseer at Wakely. And they're very kind to me. Only they're 
 dreadfully pious too— not like father— I don't mean that. And, 
 you see — it's Robert ! ' 
 
 ' Who's Robert ? ' asked David amused by her blush, and 
 admiring the trim lightness of her figure and walk. 
 
 ' Robert's the eldest son. He's a reedmaker. He's got enough 
 to marry on — at least he thinks so.' 
 
 ' And he wants to marry you ? ' 
 
 She nodded. Then she looked at him, laughing, her natu- 
 rally bright eyes sparkling through the tears still wet in them. 
 
 ' Father's a Baptist, you know — that's bad enough — but 
 Robert's a Particidar Baptist. I asked him what it meant once 
 when he was pestering me to marry him. " Well, you see," he 
 said, " a man must show that his heart's changed — we don't take 
 in everybody like — we want to be sure they're real converted." I 
 don't believe it does mean that — father says it doesn't. Anyway 
 I asked him whether if I married him he'd want me to be a Parti- 
 cular Baptist too. And he said, very slow and solemn, that of 
 course he should look for religious fellowship in his wife, but that 
 he didn't want to hurry me. I laughed till I cried at the thought 
 of me going to that hideous chapel of his, dressed like his married 
 sister. But sometimes, I declare, I think he'll make me do what 
 he wants — he's got a way with him. He sticks to a thing as 
 tight as wax, and I don't care what becomes of me sometimes.' 
 
 She pouted despondently, but her quick eye stole to her com- 
 panion's face. 
 
 'Oh, no, you won't marry Robert, Miss Lucy,' said David 
 cheerfully. ' You've had a will of your own ever since I've 
 known you. But what are you at home for now ? ' 
 
 ' Why, I told you — to pack up my tilings. But I can't find 
 half of them ; she — she's walked off with them. Oh, I'm going off 
 again as soon as possible — I can't stand it. But I must see Dora. 
 Father says I shan't visit Papists. But I'll watch my chance. I'll 
 get there to-morrow— see if I don't ! Tell me whal she's doing, 
 Mr. Grieve.' 
 
 David told her all he knew. Lucy's comments were very cha- 
 racteristic. She was equally hard on Daddy's ill-behaviour and 
 Dora's religion, with a little self-satisfied liardness that would have 
 provoked David but for its childish ncuvete. Many of the things 
 that she said of Dora, however, showed real feeling, real affection. 
 
 ' She is good,' she wound up at last with a long sigh. 
 ' Yes, she's the best woman I ever saw,' said David slowly ; 
 ^ she's beautiful, she's a saint.' 
 
 Lucy looked up quickly — her dismayed eyes fastened on him 
 — then they fell again, and her expression became suddenly 
 piteous and humble. 
 
 ' You're still getting on well, aren't you ? ' she said timidly. 
 ' You were glad not to be turned out, weren't you ? ' 
 
 Somehow, for the life of her, she could not at that moment 
 help reminding him of her claim upon him. He admitted it very 
 
CHAr. XV - STORM AND STRESS 421 
 
 readily, told her broadly how he was doing and what new connec- 
 tions lie was making. It was pleasant to tell her, pleasant to 
 speak to this changing rose-leaf face with its eager curiosity and 
 attention. 
 
 ' And you were ill when you were abroad ?— so Dora said. 
 Father, of course, made unkind remarks— you may be sure of 
 that I— hell set stories about when he doesn't like anybody. I 
 didn't believe a word.' 
 
 'It don't matter,' said David hotly, but he flushed. His 
 desire to wring Purcell's neck was getting inconveniently strong. 
 
 ' No, not a bit,' she declared. Then she suddenly broke into 
 laughter. ' Oh, Mr. Grieve, how many assistants do you think 
 father's had since you left ? ' 
 
 And she chatted on about these individuals, describing a 
 series of dolts, their achievements and personalities, with a great 
 deal of girlish fun. Her companion enjoyed her little humours 
 and egotisms, enjoyed the v^alk and her companionship. After 
 the strain of the day, a day spent either in the toil of a develop- 
 ing business or under a difficult pressure of thought, this light 
 girl's voice brought a gay, relaxed note into life. The spring 
 was in the air, and his youth stirred again in that cavern where 
 grief had buried it. 
 
 'Oh, dear, I must go home,' she said at last regretfully, 
 startled by a striking clock. ' Father'll be just mad. Of course, 
 he'll hear all about my meeting you — I don't care. I'm not going 
 to be parted from all my friends to please him, particularly now 
 he's turned me out for good — from Dora and — ' 
 
 'From you,' she would have said, but she became suddenly 
 conscious and her voice failed. 
 
 ' No, indeed ! And your friends won't forget you, Miss Lucy. 
 You'll go and see Dora to-morrow ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, if I can give them the slip at home.' 
 
 There was a pause, and then he said — 
 
 ' And will you allow me to visit you at Wakely some Sunday ? 
 I know those moors well. ' 
 
 She reddened all over with delight. There was something in 
 the little stiffness of the request which gave it importance. 
 
 'I wish you would; it's not far,' she stammered. 'Aunt 
 Miriam would be glad to see you.' 
 
 They walked back rapidly along Mosley Street and into Market 
 Place. There she stopped and shyly asked him to leave her. 
 Almost all the Saturday-night crowd had disappeared from the 
 streets. It was really late, and she became suddenly conscious 
 that this walk of hers might reasonably be regarded at home as a 
 somewhat bold proceeding. 
 
 'I wish you'd let me see you right home,' he said, detaining 
 her hand in his. 
 
 ' Oh, no, no— I shall catch it enough as it is. Oh, they'll let 
 me in ! Will it be next Sunday, Mr. Grieve ? ' 
 
 ' No, the Sunday after. Can I do anything for you ? ' 
 
483 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 He came closer to her, seeming to envelope her in his tall, 
 protecting presence. It was impossible for him to ignore her 
 girlish flutter, her evident joy in having seen and talked to him 
 again, in spite of her dread of her father. Nor did he wish to 
 ignore them. They were unexpectedly sweet to him, and he 
 surprised himself. 
 
 'Oh no, nothing, — but it's very good of you to say so,' she 
 said impulsively ; ' very. Good night again.' 
 
 And instinctively she put out another small hand, which also 
 he took, so holding her prisoner a moment. 
 
 'Look here,' he said. Til just slip down that side of the 
 Close and wait till I see you get safe in. Good night ; I am glad 
 I saw you ! ' 
 
 She ran away in a blind whirl of happiness up the steps into 
 the passage of Half Street. He slipped down to the left and 
 waited, looking through the railings across the corner of the 
 Close, his eyes fixed on that upper window, where he had so often 
 sat, parleying alternately with the cathedral and Voltaire. 
 
 Lucy rang, the door opened, there were loud sounds within, 
 but she was admitted ; it closed behind her. 
 
 David was soon in his back room, kindling a lamp and a bit of 
 fire to read by. But when it was done he sat bent forward over 
 the blaze, till the cathedral clock chimed the small hours, thinking. 
 
 She was so unformed and childish, that poor little thing ! — 
 surely a man could make what he would of her. She would give 
 him affection and duty ; the core of the nature was sound, and 
 her little humours would bring life into a house. 
 
 He had but to put out his hand — that was plain enough. And 
 why not? Was any humbler draught to be for ever put aside, 
 because the best wine had been poured to waste ? 
 
 Then the rebellions of an unquenched romance, an untamed 
 heart, beset him. Surging waves of bitterness and pain, the 
 after-swell of that tempest in which his youth had so nearly 
 foundered, seemed to bear him away to seas of desolation. 
 
 After all that had happened, the greed for personal joy he 
 every now and then detected in himself surprised and angered 
 him by its strength. The truth was that in whole tracts of his 
 nature he was still a boy, still young beyond his years, and it was 
 the conflict in him between youth's hot immaturity and a man's 
 baffling experience which made the pain of his life. 
 
 He meant to go to Wakely on the next Sunday but one — that 
 he was certain of — but as to what he was to do and say when he 
 got there he was perhaps culpably uncertain. But in his weakness 
 and sehnsucht he dwelt upon the thought of Lucy more and more. 
 
 Then Dora — foolish saint ! — came upon the scene. 
 
 Lucy found her way to the street in Ancoats where Dora lived, 
 the morning after her talk with David, and the two cousins spent 
 an agitated hour together. Lucy could hardly find time to ask 
 Dora about her sorrows, so occupied was she in recounting all her 
 
CHAP. XV STORM AND STRESS 425 
 
 own adventures. She was to go back to Wakely that very 
 afternoon. Purcell had been absolutely unapproachable since the 
 cousin who had escorted Lucy to the Free Trade Hall the night 
 before had in her own defence revealed the secret of that young 
 lady's behaviour. Pack and go she should ! He wouldn't have 
 such a hussy another night under his roof. Let them do with 
 her as could. 
 
 'I thought he would have beaten me this morning,' Lucy 
 candidly confessed. There was a red spot on each cheek, and 
 she was evidently glorying in martyrdom. 'He looked like a 
 devil— a real devil. Why can't he be fond of me, and let me 
 alone, like other girls'" fathers ? I believe he is fond of me 
 somehow, but he wants to break my spirit — ' 
 
 She tossed her head significantly. 
 
 'Lucy, you know you ought to give in when you can,' said the 
 perplexed Dora, with rebuke in her voice. 
 
 ' Oh, nonsense ! ' said Lucy. ' You can't— it's ridiculous. 
 Well, he'll quarrel with that woman some day— I'm sure she's 
 his match— and then maybe he'll want me back. But perhaps he 
 won't get me. ' 
 
 Dora looked up with a curious expression, half smiling, half 
 wistful. She had already heard all the story of the walk. 
 
 ' O Dora ! ' cried the child, laying down her head on the table 
 beneath her cousin's eyes, ' Dora, I do believe he's beginning to 
 care. You see he asked to come to Wakely. I didn't ask him. 
 Oh, if it all comes to nothing again, I shall break my heart ! ' 
 
 Dora smoothed the fine brown hair, and said affectionate 
 things, but vaguely, as if she was not quite certain what to say. 
 
 'He does look quite different, somehow,' continued Lucy. 
 ' W^hy do you think he was so long away over there, Dora ? 
 Father says nasty things about it— says he fell into bad company 
 and lost his money. ' 
 
 ' I don't know how uncle Purcell can know,' said Dora indig- 
 nantly. ' He's always thinking the worst of people. He was ill, 
 for Mr. Ancrum told me, and he's the only person that does 
 know. And anvone can see he isn't strong yet.' 
 
 ' Oh, and he' is so handsome ! ' sighed Lucy, ' handsomer than 
 ever. There isn't a man in Manchester to touch him.' 
 
 Dora laughed out and called her a ' little silly. ' But, as 
 privately in her heart of hearts she was of the same opinion, her 
 reproof had not much force. 
 
 When Lucy left, Dora put away her work, and, lifting a 
 flushed face, walked to the window and stood there looking out. 
 A pale April sun was shining on the brewery opposite, and 
 touched the dark waters of the canal under the bridge to the left. 
 The roofs of the squalid houses abutting on the brewery were wet 
 with rain. Through a gap she could see a laundress's back-yard 
 mainly filled with drying clothes, but boasting besides a couple of 
 pink flowering currants just out. and holding their own for a few 
 
424 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 brief days against the smuts of Manchester. Here and there a man 
 out of work lounged, pipe in mouth, at his open door, silently 
 absorbing the sunshine and the cheerfulness of the moist blue 
 over the house-tops. There was a new sweetness and tenderness 
 in the spring air — or were they in Dora's soul ? 
 
 She leant her head against the window, and remained there 
 with her hands clasped before her for some little time — for her, a 
 most unusual idleness. 
 
 Yes, Lucy was very obstinate. Dora had never thought she 
 would have the courage to fight her father in this way. And 
 selfish, too. She had spoken only once of Daddy, and that in a 
 way to make the daughter wdnce. But she was so young — such 
 a child ! — and would be ruined if she were left to this casual 
 life, and people who didn't understand her. A husband to take 
 care of her, and children — they would be the making of her. 
 
 And he ! Dora's eyes filled with tears. All this winter the 
 change in him, the silent evidences of a shock all the more tragic 
 to her because of its mystery, had given him a kind of sacredness 
 in her eyes. She fell thinking, besides, of the times lately he had 
 been to church with her. Ah, she was glad he had heard that 
 sermon, that beautiful sermon of Canon Welby's in Passion Week! 
 He had said nothing about it, but she knew it had been meant for 
 clever, educated men — men like him. The church, indeed, had 
 been full of men — her neighbours had told her that several of the 
 gentlemen from Owens College had been there. 
 
 That evening David knocked at the door below about half -past 
 eight. Dora got up quickly and went across to her room-fellow, 
 a dark-faced stooping girl, who took her shirt-maker's slavery 
 without a murmur, and loved Dora. 
 
 ' Would you mind, Mary ? ' she said timidly. ' I want to 
 speak to Mr. Grieve.' 
 
 The girl looked up, understood, stopped her machine, and, 
 hastily gathering some pieces together that w^anted buttonholes, 
 went off into the little inner room and shut the door. 
 
 Dora knelt and with restless hands put the bit of fire together. 
 She had just thrown a handkerchief over her canaries. On the 
 frame a piece of her work, a fine altar-cloth gleaming with golds, 
 purples, and pale pinks, stood uncovered. The deal table, the 
 white walls on which hung Daddy's old prints, the bare floor with 
 its strip of carpet, were all spotlessly clean. The tea had been 
 put away. Daddy's vacant chair stood in its place. 
 
 When David came in he found her sitting pensively on a little 
 wooden stool by the fire. Generally he gossipped while the two 
 girls worked busily away — sometimes he read to them. To-night 
 as he sat down he felt something impending. 
 
 Dora talked of Lucy's visit. They agreed as to the folly and 
 brutality of Purcell's treatment of her, and laughed together over 
 the marauding stepmother. 
 
 Then there was a pause. Dora broke it. She was sitting 
 upright on the stool, looking straight into his face. 
 
CHAr. XV STORM AND STRESS 425 
 
 ' Will you not be cross if I say something ? ' she asked, catch- 
 ing her breath. ' It's not my business.' 
 
 ' Say it, please.' But he reddened instantly. 
 
 ' Lucy's — Lucy's — got a fancy for you,' she said tremulously, 
 shrinking from her own words. ' Perhaps it's a shame to say it 
 — oh, it may be ! You haven't told me anything, and she's given 
 me no leave. But she's had it a long time. ' 
 
 ' I don't know why you say so,' he replied half sombrely. 
 
 His flush had died away, but his hand shook on his knee. 
 
 'Oh, yes, you do,' she cried ; ' you must know. Lucy can't 
 keep even her own secrets. But she's got such a warm heart ! 
 I'm sure she has. If a man w^ould take her and be kind to her, 
 she'd make him happy. ' 
 
 She stopped, looking at him intently. 
 
 Then suddenly she burst out, laying her hand on the arm of 
 his chair — Daddy's chair : 
 
 ' Don't be angry ; you've been like a brother to me. ' 
 
 He took her hand and pressed it, reassuring her. 
 
 ' But how can I make her happy ? ' he said, with his head on 
 his hand. ' I don't want to be a fool and deny what you say, for 
 the sake of denying it. But — ' 
 
 His voice sank into silence. Then, as she did not speak, he 
 looked up at her. She was sitting, since he had released her, ' 
 with her arms locked behind her, frowning in her intensity of 
 thought, her last energy of sacrifice. 
 
 ' You would make her happy,' she said slowly, ' and she'd be 
 a loving wife. She's flighty is Lucy, but there's nothing bad in 
 her.' 
 
 Both were silent for another minute, then, by a natural 
 reaction, both looked at each other and laughed. 
 
 ' I'm making rather free with you, I'm bound to admit that,' 
 she said, with a merry shamefaced expression, which brought out 
 the youth in her face. 
 
 ' Well, give me time. Miss Dora. If — if anything did come of 
 it, I should have to let Purcell know, and there'd be fiat war. 
 You've thought of that ? ' 
 
 Certainly, Dora had thought of it. They might have to wait, 
 and Purcell would probably refuse to give or leave Lucy any 
 money. All the better, according to David. Nothing would ever 
 induce him to take a farthing of his ex-master's hoards. 
 
 But here, by a common instinct, they stopped planning, and 
 David resolutely turned the conversation. When they parted, 
 however, Dora was secretly eager and hopeful. It was curious 
 how little the father's rights w^eighed with so scrupulous a soul. 
 Whether it was his behaviour to her father which had roused an 
 unconscious hardness even in her gentle nature, or whether it 
 was the subtle influence of his Dissent, as compared with the 
 nascent dispositions she seemed to see in David— anyway, Dora's 
 conscience w\is silent ; she was entirely absorbed in her own act, 
 and in the prospects of the other two. 
 
THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 When David reached home that night he found a French letter 
 awaiting him. It was from Louie, still dated from the country- 
 town near Toulouse, and announced the birth of her child — a 
 daughter. The letter was scrawled apparently from her bed, and 
 contained some passionate, abusive remarks about her husband, 
 half finished, and hardly intelligible. She peremptorily called on 
 David to send her some money at once. Her husband was a sot, 
 and unfaithful to her. Even now with his first child, he had 
 taken advantage of her being laid up to make love to other 
 women. All the town cried shame on him. The priest visited 
 her frequently, and was all on her side. 
 
 Then at the end she wrote a hasty description of the child. 
 Its eyes were like his, David's, but it would have much hand- 
 somer eyelashes. It was by far the best-looking child in the 
 .place, and because everybody remarked on its likeness to her, she 
 believed Montjoie had taken a dislike to it. She didn't care, but 
 it made him look ridiculous. Why didn't he do some work, 
 instead of letting her and her child live like pigs ? He could get 
 some, if his dirty pride would let him. It wasn't to be supposed, 
 with this disgusting Commune going on in Paris, and everybody 
 nearly ruined, that anyone would want statues — they had never 
 even sold the Maenad — but somebody had wanted him to do a 
 monument, cheap, the other day for a brother wiio had been 
 killed in the war ; and he wouldn't. He was too fine. That was 
 like him all over. 
 
 It was as though he could hear her flinging out the reckless 
 sentences. But he thought there were signs that she was pleased 
 with the baby — and he suddenly remembered her tyrannous pas- 
 sion for the Mason child. 
 
 As to the money, he looked carefully into his accounts. For 
 the last six months he had been gathering every possible saving 
 together with a view to the History of Manchester, which he and 
 John had planned to begin printing in the coming autumn. It 
 went against him sorely to take from such a hoard for the purpose 
 of helping Jules Montjoie to an idler and easier existence. The 
 fate of his six hundred pounds burnt deep into a mind which at 
 bottom was well furnished with all the old Yorkshire and Scotch 
 frugality. 
 
 However, he sent his sister money, and he gave up in thought 
 that fortnight's walking tour in the Lakes he had planned for his 
 holiday. He must just stay at home and see to business. 
 
 Then next morning, as it happened, he woke up with a sudden 
 hunger for the country — a vision before his eyes of the wide bosom 
 of the Scout, of fresh airs and hurrying waters, of the sheep 
 among the heather. His night had been restless ; the whole of 
 life seemed to be again in debate— Lucy's figure, Dora's talk, 
 
CHAP. XVI • STORM AND STRESS 427 
 
 chased and tormented him. Away to the April moorland ! He 
 sprang out of bed determined to take the first train to Clough 
 End. He had not been out of Manchester for months, and it was 
 luckily a Saturday. Here was this letter of Louie's too — he owed 
 the news to Uncle Reuben. Since Reuben's visit to Manchester, a 
 year before, there had been no communication between him and 
 them. Six years ! How would the farm — how would Aunt 
 Hannah look ? There was a drawing in him this morning towards 
 the past, towards even the harsh forms and memories of it, such 
 as often marks a time of emotion and crisis, the moment before 
 a man takes a half-reluctant step towards a doubtful future. 
 
 But as he journeyed towards the Derbyshire border, he was 
 not in truth thinking of Dora's counsels or of Lucy Purcell at all. 
 Every now and then he lost himself in the mere intoxication of 
 the spring, in the charm of the factory valleys, just flushing into 
 green, through which the train was speeding. But in general 
 his attention was held by the book in his hand. His time for 
 reading had been much curtailed of late by the toils of his busi- 
 ness. He caught covetously at every spare hour. 
 
 The book was Bishop Berkeley's ' Dialogues.' 
 
 With what a medley of thoughts and interests had he been 
 concerned during the last four or five months ! His old tastes and 
 passions had revived as we have seen, but unequally, with morbid 
 gaps and exceptions. In these days he had hardly opened a poet 
 or a novelist. His whole being shrank from them, as though it 
 had been one wound, and the books which had been to him the 
 passionate friends of his most golden hours, which had moulded 
 in him, as it were, the soul wherewith he had loved Elise, looked 
 to him now like enemies as he passed them quickly by upon the 
 shelves. 
 
 But some of his old studies— German, Greek, science espe- 
 cially — were the saving of him. Among some foreign books, for 
 instance, which he had ordered for a customer he came upon a 
 copy of some scientific essays by Littre. Among them was a 
 survey of the state of astronomical knowledge written somewhere 
 about 1835, with all the luminous charm which the great Posi- 
 tivist had at command. David was captured by it, by the flight 
 of the scientific imagination through time and space, amid suns, 
 planets and nebulae, the beginnings and the wrecks of worlds. 
 When he laid it down with a sigh of pleasure, Ancrum, who was 
 sitting opposite, looked up. 
 
 ' You like your book, Davy ? ' 
 
 'Yes,' said the other slowly, staring out of the twilight 
 window at the gloom which passes for sky in Manchester. Then 
 with another long breath, — ' It makes you a new heaven and a 
 new earth ! ' 
 
 A similar impression, only even richer and more detailed, had 
 been left upon him by a volume of Huxley's ' Lay Sermons.' The 
 world of natural fact'in its overpowering wealth and mystery was 
 thus given back to him, as it were, under another aspect than 
 
428 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 that torturing intoxicating aspect of art — one that fortified and 
 calmed. All his scientific curiosities which had been so long laid 
 to sleep revived. His first returning joy came from a sense of 
 the inexhaustibleness and infinity of nature. 
 
 But very soon this renewed interest in science began to have 
 the bearing and to issue in the mental activities which, all 
 unknown to himself, had been from the beginning in his destiny. 
 He could not now read it for itself alone. That new ethical and 
 spiritual susceptibility, into which agony and loss had become 
 slowly transformed, dominated and absorbed all else. For some 
 time, beside his scientific books, there lay others from a class not 
 hitherto very congenial to him, that which contains the great 
 examples in our day, outside the poets, of the poetical or imagi- 
 native treatment of ethics— Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin. At an 
 age when most young minds of intelligence amongst us are first 
 seized by these English masters, he had been wandering in 
 French paths. 'Sartor Resartus,' Emerson's 'Essays,' 'The 
 Seven Lamps,' came to him now with an indescribable "freshness 
 and force. Nay, a too great force ! We enjoy the great prophets 
 of literature most when we have not yet lived enough to realise 
 all they tell us. When David, wandering at night with Teufels- 
 drockh through heaven and hell, felt at last the hard sobs rising 
 in his throat, he suddenly put the book and others akin to it away 
 from him. As with the poets so here. He must turn to some- 
 thing less eloquent — to paths of thought where truth shone with 
 a drier and a calmer light. 
 
 But still the same problems ! Since his Eden gates had closed 
 upon him, he had been in the outer desert where man has wan- 
 dered from the beginning, threatened with all the familiar 
 phantoms, illusions, mist-voices of human thought. What was 
 consciousness — knowledge — law ? Was there any law — any 
 knowledge — any I? 
 
 Naturally he had long ceased to find any final sustenance or 
 pleasure in the Secularist literature, which had once convinced 
 him so easily. Secularism up to a certain point, it began to seem 
 to him, was a commonplace ; beyond that point, a contradiction. 
 If the race should ever take the counsel of the Secularists, or of 
 that larger Positivist thought, of which English secularism is the 
 popular reflection, the human intellect would be a poorer instru- 
 ment with a narrower swing. So much was plain to him. For 
 nothing can be more certain than that some of the finest powers 
 and noblest work of the human mind have been developed by the 
 struggle to know what the Secularist declares is neither knowable 
 nor worth knowing. 
 
 Yet the histories of philosophy which he began to turn over 
 were in truth no more fruitful to him than the talk of the 
 Reasoner. They stimulated his powers of apprehension and 
 analysis ; and the great march of human debate from century to 
 century touched his imagination. But in these summaries of the 
 philosophical field his iiiniost life appropriated nothing. Once by 
 
CHAP. XVI STORM AND STRESS 4^9 
 
 a sort of reaction he fell upon Eume again, pining for the old 
 intellectual clearness of impression, though it were a clearness of 
 limit and negation. But he had hardly begun the ' Treatise ' or 
 the 'Essays' before his soul rose against them, crying for he 
 knew not what, only that it was for nothing they could give. 
 
 Then by chance a little Life of Berkeley, and upon it an old 
 edition of the works, fell into his hands. As he was turning over 
 the leaves, the ' Alciphron ' so struck him that he turned to the 
 first page of the first volume, and evening after evening read 
 the whole through with a devouring energy that never flagged. 
 When it was over he was a different being. The mind had crys- 
 tallised afresh. 
 
 It was his first serious grapple with the fundamental problems 
 of knowledge. And, to a nature which had been so tossed and 
 bruised in the great unregarding tide of things, which had felt 
 itself the mere chattel of a callous universe, of no account or dig- 
 nity either to gods or men, what strange exaltation there was in 
 the general suggestion of Berkeley's thought ! The mind, the 
 source of all that is ; the impressions on the senses, merely the 
 speech of the Eternal Mind to ours, a Visual Language, whereof 
 man's understanding is perpetually advancing, which has been 
 indeed contrived for his education ; man, naturally immortal, 
 king of himself and of the senses, inalienably one — if he would 
 but open his eyes and see — with all that is Divine, true, eternal : 
 the soul that had been crushed by grief and self -contempt revived 
 at the mere touch of these vast possibilities like a trampled plant. 
 Not that it absorbed them yet, made them its own ; but they 
 made a healing stimulating atmosphere in which it seemed once 
 more possible for it to grow into a true manhood. The spiritual 
 hypothesis of things was for the first time presented in such a 
 way as to take imaginative hold without exciting or harrowing 
 the feelings ; he saw the world reversed, in a pure light of 
 thought, as Berkeley saw it, and all the horizon of things fell 
 back. 
 
 Now — on this April afternoon — as the neighbourhood of 
 Manchester was left behind, as the long woodclad valleys and 
 unpolluted streams began to prophesy of Derbyshire and the 
 Peak, David, his face pressed against the window, fell into a 
 dream with Berkeley and with nature. Oh for knowledge ! for 
 verification ! He began dimly and passionately to see before him 
 a life devoted to thought — a life in which science after science 
 should become the docile instrument of a mind still pressing on 
 and on into the shadowy realm, till, in Berkeley's language, the 
 darkness part, and it ' recover the lost region of light ' ! 
 
 But in the very midst of this overwhelming vision he said 
 suddenly to himself : 
 
 ' There is another way — another answer — Dora's way and 
 Ancrum's.' 
 
 Aye, the way of faith, which asks for no length of years in 
 which to win the goal, which is there at once — in the beat of a 
 
430 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book in 
 
 wing— safe on the breast of God ! He thought of it as he had 
 seen it illustrated in his friend and in Dora, with the mixture of 
 attraction and repulsion which, in this connection, was now more 
 or less habitual to him. The more he saw of Dora, the more 
 he wondered — at her goodness and her ignorance. Her positive 
 dislike to, and alienation from knowledge was amazing. At the 
 first indication of certain currents of thought he could see her 
 soul shrivelling and shrinking like a green leaf near flame. As 
 he had gradually realised, she had with some difficulty forgiven 
 him the attempt to cure Daddy's drinking through a doctor ; that 
 anyone should think sin could be reached by medicine — it was in 
 effect to throw doubt on the necessity of God's grace ! And she 
 could not bear that he should give her information from the 
 books he read about the Bible or early Christianity. His 
 detached, though never hostile, tone was clearly intolerable to 
 her. She could not and would not suffer it, would take any 
 means of escaping it. 
 
 Then that Passion-week sermon she had taken him to hear ; 
 which had so moved her, with which she had so sweetly and 
 persistently assumed his sympathy ! The preacher had been a 
 High Church Canon with a considerable reputation for eloquence. 
 The one o'clock service had been crowded with business and 
 professional men. David had never witnessed a more tempting 
 opportunity. But how hollow and empty the whole result ! What 
 foolish sentimental emphasis, what unreality, what contempt for 
 knowledge, yet what a show of it ! — an elegant worthless jumble 
 of Gibbon, Horace, St. Augustine, Wesley, Newman and Mill, 
 mixed with the cheap picturesque — with moonlight on the Cam- 
 pagna, and sunset on Niagara — and leading, by the loosest 
 rhetoric, to the most confident conclusions. He had the taste of 
 it in his mouth still. Fresh from the wrestle of mind into which 
 Berkeley had led him, he fell into a new and young indignation 
 with sermon and preacher. 
 
 Yet, all the same, if you asked how man could best live, apart 
 from thinking, how the soul could put its foot on the brute — 
 where would Dora stand then ? What if the true key to life lay 
 not in knowledge, but in will ? What if knowledge in the true 
 sense was ultimately impossible to man, and if Christianity not 
 only offered, but could give him the one thing truly needful — his 
 own will, regenerate ? 
 
 But with the first sight of the Clough End streets these high 
 debates were shaken from the mind. 
 
 He ran up the Kinder road, with its villanous paving of cobbles 
 and coal dust, its mills to the right, down below in the hollow, 
 skirting the course of the river, and its rows of workmen's homes 
 to the left climbing the hill— in a tremor of excitement. Six 
 years ! Would anyone recognize him ? Ah ! there was Jerry's 
 ' public,' an evil-looking weather-stained hole ; but another name 
 swung on the sign ; poor Jerry ! — was he, too, gone the way of 
 
CHAP. XVI STORM AND STRESS 431 
 
 orthodox and sceptic alike? And here was the Foundry— David 
 could hardly prevent himself from marching into the yard littered 
 with mysterious odds and ends of old iron which had been the 
 treasure house of his childhood. But no Tom — and no familiar 
 face anywhere. 
 
 Yes ! — there was the shoemaker's cottage, where the prayer- 
 meeting had been, and there, on the threshold, looking at the 
 approaching figure, stood the shoemaker's wife, the strange 
 woman with the mystical eyes. David greeted her as he came 
 near. She stared at him from under a bony hand put up against 
 the sun, but did not apparently recognise him ; he, seized with 
 sudden shyness, quickened his pace, and was soon out of her 
 sight. 
 
 In a minute or two he was at the Dye-works, which mark the 
 limit of the town, and the opening of the valley road. Every 
 breath now was delight. The steep wooded hills to the left, the 
 red-brown shoulder of the Scout in front, were still wrapt in torn 
 and floating shreds of mist. But the sun was everywhere — above 
 in the slowly triumphing blue, in the mist itself, and below, on 
 the river and the fields. The great wood climbing to his left was 
 all embroidered on the brown with palms and catkins, or broken 
 with patches of greening larch, which had a faintly luminous 
 relief amid the rest. And the dash of the river— and the scents 
 of the fields ! He leapt the wall of the lane, and ran down to the 
 water's edge, watching a dipper among the stones in a passion of 
 pleasure which had no words. 
 
 Then up and on again, through the rough uneven lane, higher 
 and higher into the breast of the Scout. What if he met Jim 
 Wigson on the way? What if Aunt Hannah, still unreconciled, 
 turned him from the door ? No matter ! Rancour and grief have 
 no hold on mortals walking in such an April world — in such an 
 exquisite and sunlit beauty. On ! let thought and nature be 
 enough ! Why complicate and cumber life with relations that 
 do but give a foothold to pain, and offer less than they threaten ? 
 
 There is smoke rising from Wigson's, and figures moving in 
 the yard. Caution ! — keep close under the wall. And here at 
 last is Needham farm, at the' top of its own steep pitch, with the 
 sycamore trees in the lane beside it, the Red Brook sweeping 
 round it to the right, the rough gate below, the purple Scout 
 mist-wreathed behind. There are cows lowing in the yard, a 
 horse grazes in the front field ; through the little garden gate a 
 gleam of sun strikes on the struggling crocuses and daffodils 
 which come up year after year, no man heeding them ; there is a 
 clucking of hens, a hurry of water, a flood of song from a lark 
 poised above the field. The blue smoke rises into the misty air ; 
 the sun and the spring caress the rugged lonely place. 
 
 With a beating heart David opened the gate into the field, 
 walked round the little garden, let himself into the yard, and 
 with a hasty glance at the windows mounted the steps and 
 knocked. 
 
432 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 No answer. He knocked again. Surely Aunt Hannah must 
 be about somewhere. Eleven o'clock ; how quiet the house was ! 
 
 This time there was a clatter of a chair on a flagged floor 
 inside, and a person with a slow laboured step came and opened. 
 
 It was Reuben. He adjusted his spectacles with diSiculty, 
 and stared at the intruder, 
 
 ' Uncle Reuben ! — I thought it was such a fine day, I'd just 
 run over and see the old place, and bring you some news,' said 
 David, smiling and holding out his hand. 
 
 Reuben took it, stupefied. ' Davy, ' he said, trembling. Then 
 with a sudden movement he whipped the door to behind him, and 
 shut it close. 
 
 ' Whist ! ' he said, putting his old finger to his lip. ' T' ser- 
 vant's just settlin her i' t' kitchen. She's noa ready yet — she's 
 been terr'ble bad th' neet. Coom yo here.' And he descended 
 the steps with infinite care, and led David to the wood-shed. 
 
 ' Is Aunt Hannah ill ? ' asked David, astonished. 
 
 Reuben leant against the wall of the shed, and took off his 
 spectacles, as though to wipe them with his old and shaking 
 hands. Then David saw a sort of convulsion pass across his 
 ungainly face. 
 
 ' Aye,' he said, looking down, ' aye, she's broken is Hannah. 
 Yo didna knaw ? ' 
 
 ' I've heard nothing.' 
 
 Reuben recounted the facts. Since her stroke of last spring, 
 and the partial recovery which had followed upon it, there had been 
 little apparent change, except perhaps in the direction of slowly 
 increasing weakness. She was a wreck, and likely to remain so. 
 Hardly anybody but Reuben could understand her now, and she 
 rarely let him out of her sight. He could not get time to attend 
 to the farm, was obliged to leave things to the hired man, and 
 was in trouble often about his affairs. 
 
 'Bit yo see, she hasna t' reet use of her speach,' he said, 
 excusing himself humbly to this handsome city nephew. ' An' 
 she conno gie ower snipin aw at onst. 'Twudna be human 
 natur'. An' t' gell's worritin' an' I mun tell her what t' missis 
 says.' ' 
 
 David asked if he might see her, or should he just turn back 
 to the town? Reuben protested, his hospitality and family 
 feeling aroused, his poor mind torn with conflicting motives. 
 
 ' I believe she'd f ratch if she didna see tha, ' he said at last. 
 ' A'll just goo ben, and ask.' 
 
 He went in, and David remained in the wood-shed, staring out 
 at the familiar scene, at Louie's window, at the steps w^here he 
 and she had fed the fowls together. 
 
 _ The door opened again, and Reuben reappeared on the steps, 
 agitated and beckoning. 
 
 David went in, stepping softly, holding his blue cloth cap in 
 his hand. In another instant he stood beside the old cushioned 
 seat in the kitchen, looking down at Hannah. 
 
CHAP. XVI STORM AND STRESS 433 
 
 This Hannah ! this his childhood's enemy ! this shawled and 
 shrunken figure with the w^hite parchment face and lantern 
 cheeks ! 
 
 He stooped to her and said something about why he had 
 come. Reuben listened wondering. 
 
 ' Louie's married and got a babby — dosto hear, Hannah ? And 
 he — t' lad— did yo iver see sich a yan for growin ? ' 
 
 He wished to be mildly jocular. Hannah's face did not move. 
 She had just touched her nephew with her cold wasted hand. 
 Now she beckoned to him to sit down at her right. He did so, 
 and then for the first time he could believe that Hannah, the old 
 Hannah, was there beside them. For as she slowly studied his 
 dress, the Inverness cape then as now a favourite garb in Man- 
 chester, the hand holding the cap, refined since she saw it last by 
 commerce with books and pens rather than hurdles and sheep, 
 the broad shoulders, the dark head, her eye for the first time met 
 his, full, and a w^eird thrill went through him. For that eye- 
 dulled, and w^avering — was still Hannah. The old hate was in it, 
 the old grudge, all that had been at least for him and Louie the 
 inmost and characteristic soul of their tyrant. He knew in an 
 instant that she had in her mind the money of which he and his 
 sister had robbed her, and beyond that the offences of their child- 
 hood, the infamy of their mother. If she could, she would have 
 hurled them all upon him. As it was, she was silent, but that 
 brooding eye, like a smouldering spark in her blanched face, 
 spoke for her. 
 
 Reuben tried to talk. But a weight lay on him and David. 
 The gaunt head in the coarse white nightcap turned now to one, 
 now to the other, pursued them phantom -like. Presently he 
 insisted that his nephew must dine, avoiding Hannah's look. 
 David would much rather have gone without ; but Reuben, 
 affecting joviality, called the servant, and some food w^as brought. 
 No attempt was made to include Hannah in the meal. David 
 supposed that it was now necessary to feed her. 
 
 Reuben talked disjointedly of the neighbours and his stock, 
 and asked a few questions, without listening to the answers, about 
 David's affairs, and Louie's marriage. In Hannah's presence his 
 poor dull wits were not his own ; he could in truth think of 
 nothing but her. 
 
 After the meal, however, when a draught of ale had put some 
 heart in him, he got up with an air of resolution. 
 
 ' I mun goo and see what that felly's been doin' wi' th' Hud- 
 dersfield beeasts,' he said ; ' wilta coom wV me, Davy ? Mary ! ' 
 
 He called the little maid. Hannah suddenly said something 
 incoherent which David could not understand. Reuben affected 
 not to hear. 
 
 ' Mary, gie your mistress her dinner, like a good gell. An' 
 keep t' house-door open, soa 'at she can knock wi' t' stick if she 
 wants owt.' 
 
 He stood before her restless and ashamed, afraid to look at 
 
434 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 her. Then he suddenly stooped and kissed her on the forehead. 
 David felt a lump in his throat. As he took leave of her the 
 spell, as it were, of Reuben's piteous affection came upon him. 
 He saw nothing but a dying and emaciated woman, and taking 
 her hand in his, he said some kind natural words. 
 
 The hand dropped from his like a stone. As he stood at the 
 door behind Reuben, the servant came forw^ard with a plate of 
 something which she put down inside the fender. As she did so, 
 she awkwardly upset the fire-irons, which fell with a crash. 
 Hannah started upright in her chair, with a rush of half -articu- 
 late words, grasping fiercely for her stick with glaring eyes. The 
 servant, a wild moorland lass, fled terrified, and at the ' house ' 
 door turned and made a face at David. 
 
 Outside Reuben slowly mastered himself, and woke up to some 
 real interest in Louie's doings. David told him her story frankly, 
 so far as it could be separated from his own, and, pressed by 
 Reuben's questions, even revealed at last the matter of the six 
 hundred pounds. Reuben could not get over it. Sandy's ' six 
 hunderd pund ' which he had earned with the sweat of his brow, all 
 handed over to that minx Louie, and wasted by her and a rascally 
 French husband in a few months— it was more than he could bear. 
 
 'Aye, aye, marryin's varra weel,' he said impatiently. 'A 
 grant tha it's a great sin coomin thegither without marryin. 
 But Sandy's six hunderd pund ! Noa, I conno abide sich wark.' 
 
 And he fell into sombre silence, out of which David could 
 hardly rouse him. Except that he said once, ' And we that had 
 kep' it so long. I'd better never ha gien it tha.' And clearly 
 that was the bitter thought in his mind. The sacrifice that had 
 taxed all his moral power, and, as he believed, brought physical 
 ruin on Hannah, had been for nothing, or worse than nothing. 
 Neither he nor David nor anyone w^as the better for it. 
 
 ' I must go over the shoulder to Frimley,' said David at last. 
 They had made a half-hearted inspection of the stock in the home 
 fields, and were now passing through the gate on to the moor. 
 ' I must see Margaret Dawson again before I take the train back. ' 
 
 Reuben looked astonished and shook his head as though he did 
 not remember anything about Margaret Dawson. He walked on 
 beside his nephew for a while in silence. The Red Brook was 
 leaping and dancing beside them, the mountain ashes were just 
 bursting into leaf, the old smithy was ahead of them on the 
 heathery slope, and to their left the Downfall, full and white, 
 thundered over its yellow rocks. 
 
 But they had hardly crossed the Red Brook to mount the peak 
 beyond when Reuben drew up. 
 
 ' Noa '—he said restlessly—' noa. I mun goo back. T' gell's 
 flighty and theer's aw maks o' mischief i' yoong things.' He 
 stood and held his nephew by the hand, looking at him long and 
 wistfully. As he did so a calmer expression stole for an instant 
 into the poor troubled eyes. 
 
 ' Very like a'st not see tha again, Davie. We niver know. 
 
CHAP. XVI STORM AND STRESS 435 
 
 Livin's hard soomtimes — soa's deein, folks say. I'm often freet'nt 
 of deein' — but I should na be. Theer's noan so mich peace here, 
 and we knaw that wi' the Lord theer's peace.' 
 
 He gave a long sigh — all his character was in it— so tortured 
 was it and hesitating. 
 
 They parted, and the young man climbed the hill, looking 
 back often to watch the bent figure on the lower path. The spell 
 had somehow vanished from the sunshine, the thrill from the 
 moorland air. Life was once more cruel, implacable. 
 
 He walked fast to Frimley, and made for the cottage of Mar- 
 garet's brother. He remembered its position of old. 
 
 A woman was washing in the ' house ' or outer kitchen. She 
 received him graciously. The weekly money which in one way 
 or another he had never failed to pay since he first undertook it, 
 had made him well known to her and her husband. With a 
 temper quite unlike that of the characteristic northerner, she 
 showed no squeamishness at all about the matter. If it hadn't been 
 for his help, they would just have sent Margaret to the workhouse, 
 she said bluntly ; for they had many mouths to feed, and couldn't 
 have burdened themselves with an extra one. She was quite 
 ' silly ' and often troublesome. 
 
 ' Is she here ? ' David asked. 
 
 ' Aye, if yo goo ben, yo'll find her,' said the woman, carelessly 
 pointing to an inner door. ' I conno ha her in here washin days, 
 nor the children noather. ' 
 
 David opened the door pointed out to him. He found him- 
 self in a rough w^eaving shed almost filled by a large hand-loom, 
 with its forest of woodwork rising to the ceiling, its rolls of 
 perforated pattern-paper, its great cylinders below, and many- 
 coloured shuttles to either hand. But to-day it stood idle, the 
 weaver was not at work. The room was stuffy but cold, and 
 inexpressibly gloomy in this silence of the loom. 
 
 Where was Margaret ? After a minute's search, there, beyond 
 the loom, sitting by a fireless grate, w^as a little figure in a bedgown 
 and nightcap, poking with a stick amid the embers, and as it 
 seemed crooning to itself. 
 
 David made his way up to her, inexpressibly moved. 
 
 ' Margaret ! ' 
 
 She did not know him in the least. She had a starved-looking 
 cat on her lap, which she was huddling against her breast. The 
 face had fallen away almost to nothing, so small and thin it was. 
 She was dirty and unkempt. Her still brown hair, once so daintily 
 neat, straggled out beneath her torn cap ; her print bed-gown was 
 pinned across her, her linsey skirt was in holes ; everywhere the 
 same tale of age neglected and unloved. 
 
 When David first stood before her she drew back with a 
 terrified look, still clutching the cat tightly. But, as he smiled at 
 her, with the tears in his eyes, speaking her name tenderly, her 
 frightened look relaxed, and she remained staring at him with 
 the shrinking furtive expression of a quite young child. 
 
436 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book in 
 
 He knelt down beside her. 
 
 ' Margaret — dear Margaret — don't you know me ? ' 
 
 She did not answer, but her wrinkled eyes, still blue and 
 vaguely sweet, wavered under his, and it seemed to him that 
 every now and then a shiver of cold ran through her old and frail 
 body. He went on gently, trying to recall her wandering senses. 
 In vain. In the middle she interrupted him with a piteous lip. 
 
 ' They promised me a ribbon for't,' she said, complainingly, 
 in a hoarse, bronchitic voice, pointing to the animal she held, 
 and to its lean neck adorned with a collar of plaited string, on 
 which apparently she had just been busy, to judge from the odds 
 and ends of string lying about. 
 
 At the same moment David became aware of a couple of 
 children craning their heads round the corner of the loom to 
 look, a loutish boy about eleven, and a girl rather younger. At 
 sight of them, Margaret raised a cry of distress and alarm, with 
 that helpless indefinable note in the voice which shows that 
 personality, in the true sense, is no longer there. 
 
 ' Go away ! ' David commanded. 
 
 The children did not stir, but grinned. He made a threatening 
 movement. Then the boy, as quick as lightning, put his tongue 
 out at Margaret, and caught hold of his sister, and they clattered 
 off, their mother in the next room scolding them out into the 
 street again. 
 
 And this the end of a creature all sacrifice, a life all 
 affection ! 
 
 He took her shivering hand in his. 
 
 ' Margaret, listen to me. You shall be better looked after. I 
 will see to that. No one shall be unkind to you any more. If 
 they won't do it here, my— my— wife shall take care of you ! ' 
 
 He lifted her hand and kissed it, putting all the pity and 
 bitter mdignation of his heart into the action. Margaret, seeing 
 his emotion, whimpered too ; otherwise she was impassive. 
 
 He left her, went into the next room, and had a long energetic 
 talk with Margaret's sister-in-law. The woman, half ashamed, 
 half recalcitrant, in the end promised amendment. What business 
 it was of his she could not imagine ; but the small weekly addition 
 which he offered to make to Margaret's payments, while it showed 
 him a greater fool than before, made it impossible to put his 
 meddling aside. She promised that Margaret should be brought 
 into the warm, that she should have better clothes, and that the 
 children should be kept from plaguing her. 
 
 Then he departed, and mounting the moor again, spent an 
 hour or two wandering among the boggy fissures of the top, or 
 sitting on the high edges of the heather, looking down over the 
 dark and craggy splendour of the hill immediately around and 
 beneath him, on and away through innumerable paling shades of 
 distance to the blue Welsh border. His speculative fervour was 
 all gone. Reuben, Hannah, Margaret, these figures of suffering 
 and pain had brought him close to earth again. The longing for 
 
CHAP. XVI STORM AND STRESS 437 
 
 a human hand in his, for a home, wife, children to spend himself 
 upon, to put at least for a while between him and this uncon- 
 querable ' something v/hich infects the world,' became in this long 
 afternoon a physical pain not to be resisted. He thought more 
 and more steadily of Lucy, schooling himself, idealising her. 
 
 It was the Sunday before Whitsunday. David was standing 
 outside a trim six-roomed house in the upper part of the little 
 Lancashire town of Wakely, waiting for Lucy Purcell. 
 
 She came at last, flushed and discomposed, pulling the door 
 hastily to behind her. 
 
 They walked on a short distance, talking disconnectedly of 
 the weather, the mud, and the way on to the moor, till she said 
 suddenly : 
 
 ' I wish people wouldn't be so good and so troublesome ! ' 
 
 ' Did Robert wish to keep you at home ? ' inquired David, 
 laughing. 
 
 ' Well, he didn't want me to come out with — anybody but 
 him,' she said, flushing. ' And it's so bad, because one can't be 
 cross. I don't know how it is, but they're just the best people here 
 that ever walked ! ' 
 
 She looked up at him seriously, an unusual energy in her 
 slight face. 
 
 'What ! — a town of saints?' asked David, mocking. It was 
 so difficult to take Lucy seriously. 
 
 She tossed her head and insisted. 
 
 Talking very fast, and not very consecutively, she gave him 
 an account, so far as she was able, of the life lived in this little 
 town, a typical Lancashire town of the smaller and more homo- 
 geneous kind. All the people worked in two large spinning mills, 
 or in a few smaller factories representing dependent industries, 
 such as reed-making. Their work was pleasant to them. Lacy 
 complained, with the natural re'^entment of the idle who see their 
 place in the world jeopardised by the superfluous energy of the 
 workers, that she could never get the mill girls to say that the 
 mill hours v>ere too long. The heat tried them, made appetites 
 delicate, and lung mischief common. But the only thing which 
 really troubled them was 'half-time.' Socially everybody knew 
 everybody. They were passionately interested in each other's 
 lives and in the town's affairs. And their religion, of a strong 
 Protestant type expressed in various forms of Dissent, formed an 
 ideal bond which kept the little society together, and made an 
 authority which all acknowledged, an atmosphere in which all 
 moved. 
 
 The picture she drew was, in truth, the picture of one of those 
 social facts on which perhaps the future of England depends. 
 She drew it girlishly, quite unconscious of its large bearings, 
 gossiping about this person and that, with a free expenditure of 
 very dogmatic opinion on the habits and ways which were not 
 hers. But, on the whole, the picture emerged, and David had 
 
438 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book hi 
 
 never liked her talk so well. The little self-centred thing had 
 somehow been made to wonder and admire ; which is much for 
 all of us. 
 
 And she, meanwhile, was instantly sensible that slie was in a 
 happy vein, that she pleased. Her eyes danced under her pretty 
 spring hat. How proud she was to walk with him — that he had 
 come all this way to see her ! As she shyly glanced him up and 
 down, she would have liked the village street to be full of gazers, 
 and was almost loth to leave the public way for the loneliness of 
 the moor. What other girl in Wakely had the prospect of such a 
 young man to take her out ? Oh ! would he ever, ever ' ask her ' 
 — would he even come again ? 
 
 At last, after a steep and muddy climb, through uninviting 
 back ways, they were out upon the moor. An apology for a moor 
 in David's eyes ! For the hills which surround the valley of the 
 Irwell, in which Wakely lies, are, for the m.ost part, green and 
 rolling ground, heatherless and cragless. Still, from the top they 
 looked over a wide and wind-blown scene, the bolder moors of 
 Rochdale behind them, and in front the long green basin in which 
 the Irwell rises. Along the valley bottoms lay the mills, with 
 their surrounding rows of small stone houses. Up on the backs 
 of the moors crouched the old farms, which have watched the 
 mills come, and will perhaps see them go ; and here and there a 
 grim-looking colliery marked a fold of the hill. The landscape 
 on a spring day has a bracing bareness, which is not without 
 exhilaration. The wind blows freshly, the sun lies broadly on 
 the hills. England, on the whole at her busiest and best, spreads 
 before you. 
 
 They were still on the top when it occurred to them that they 
 had a long walk in prospect — for they talked of getting to the 
 source of the Irwell — and that it was dinner-time. So they sat 
 down under one of the mortarless stone walls which streak the 
 moors, and David brought out the meal that was in his pockets. 
 They ate with laughter and chat. Pigeons passed overhead, 
 going and coming from an old farm about a hundred yards away ; 
 the sky above them had a lark for voice singing his loudest ; and 
 in the next field a peewit was wheeling and crying. The few 
 trees in sight were struggling fast into leaf. Nature even in this 
 cold north was gay to-day and young. 
 
 Suddenly, in the midst of their meal, by a natural caprice and 
 reaction of the mind, as David sat looking down on slate roofs 
 and bare winding valley, across the pale, rain-beaten grass of the 
 moor, all the northern English detail vanished from his eyes. 
 For one suffocating instant he saw nothing but a great picture 
 gallery, its dimly storied walls and polished floor receding into 
 the distance. In front Velazquez' 'Infanta,' and before it a 
 figure bent over a canvas. Every line and tint stood out. He 
 heard the light varying voice, caught the complex grace of the 
 woman, the strenuous effort of the artist. 
 
CHAP. XVI STORM AND STRESS 439 
 
 Enough ! He closed his eyes for one bitter instant ; then 
 raised them again to England and to Lucy. 
 
 There under the wall, while they were still lingering in the 
 sun, he asked Lucy Purcell to be his wife. And Lucy, hardly 
 believing her own foolish ears, and in a whirl of bliss and exulta- 
 tion past expression, nevertheless put on a few maidenly airs and 
 graces, coquetted a little, would not be kissed all at once, talked 
 of her father and the war that must be faced, and finally surren- 
 dered, held up her scarlet cheek for her lord's caress, and then 
 sat speechless, hand in hand with him. 
 
 But Nature had its way. They rambled on, crossing the stone 
 stiles which link the bare green fields on the side of the moor. 
 When a stile appeared, Lucy would send him on in front, so that 
 she might mount decorously, and then descend trembling upon 
 his hand. 
 
 Presently they came to a spot where the path crossed a little 
 streamlet, and then climbed a few rough steps in a steep bank, 
 and so across a stile at the top. 
 
 David ran up, leapt the stile, and waited. But he had time 
 to study the distant course of their walk, as well as the burnt and 
 lime-strewn grass about him, for no Lucy appeared. He leant 
 over the wall, and to his amazement saw her sitting on one of 
 the stone steps below, crying. 
 
 He was beside her in an instant. But he could not loosen the 
 hands clasped over her eyes. 
 
 ' Oh, why did you do it ?— why did you do it ? I'm not good 
 enough — I never shall be good enough ! ' 
 
 For the first time since their formal kiss he put his arms 
 round her. And as she, at last forced to look up, found herself 
 close to the face which, in its dark refinement and power, seemed 
 to her to-day so far, so wildly above her deserts, she saw it all 
 quivering and changed. Never had little Lucy risen to such a 
 moment ; never again, perhaps, could she so rise. But in that 
 instant of passionate humility she had dropped healing and life 
 into a human heart. 
 
 Yet, was it Lucy he kissed?— Lucy he gathered in his arms? 
 Or was it not rather Love itself ?— the love he had sought, had 
 missed, but must still seek — and seek ? 
 
BOOK IV 
 MATURITY 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 <• Daddy ! ' said a little voice. 
 
 The owner of it, a child of four, had pushed open a glass door, 
 and was craning his curly head through it towards a garden that 
 lay beyond. 
 
 ' Yes, you rascal, what do you want now i 
 
 ' E^addy, come here !' ^ ^ , ^^ i, i.- -u 
 
 The voice had a certain quick stealthmess, through which, 
 however, a little tremor of apprehension might be detected. 
 
 David Grieve, who was smoking and reading m the garden, 
 came up to where his small son stood, and surveyed him. 
 
 ' Sandy, you've been getting into mischief.' _ . ^ ^^ ,.^,, 
 
 The child laid hold of his father, dragged him into the little 
 hall, and towards the dining-room door. Arrived there, he 
 stopped, put a finger to his lip, and laid his head plaintively on 
 
 one side. -r^ -, i , 
 
 ' Zere's an at^ful sight in zere, Daddy. 
 
 ' You monkey, what have you been up to ? ' 
 
 David opened the door. Sandy first hung back, then, m a 
 sudden enthusiasm, ran in, and pointed a thumb pmk with much 
 sucking at the still uncleared dinner-table, which David and the 
 child's mother had left half an hour before. 
 
 ' Zere's a pie ! ' he said, exultantly. , „ ^ ^ ^ , 
 
 And a pie there was. First, all the salt-cellars had been upset 
 into the middle of the table, then the bits of bread left beside 
 the plates had been crumbled in, then— the Joys of wickedness 
 crrovving-the mustard-pot had been emptied over the heap, some 
 bananas had been stuck unsteadily here and there to give it 
 feature, and finally, in a last orgie of crime, a cruet of vinegar 
 had been discharged on the whole, and the brown streams were 
 now meandering across the clean tablecloth. , ^ ,^ , 
 
 ' Sandy you little wretch ! ' cried his father, ' don't you know 
 that you have been told again and again not to touch the things 
 on the table ? Hold out your hand 1 ' 
 
 Sandy held out a small paw, whimpered beforehand, but 
 never ceased all the time to watch his father with eyes which 
 seemed to be quietly on the watch for experiences. 
 
 David administered two smart pats, then rang the bell for the 
 housemaid. Sandy stationed himself on the rug opposite his 
 father, and looked at his reddened hand, considering. 
 
 ' I don't seem to mind much. Daddy ! ' he said at last, looking 
 
 "^' ' No, sir. Daddy '11 have to try and find something that you 
 will mind.' 
 
444 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 The tone was severe, and David did his best to frown. In 
 reality his eyes, under the frown, devoured his small son, and lie 
 had some difficulty in restraining himself from kissing the hand 
 he had just slapped. 
 
 When the housemaid entered, however, she showed a temper 
 which would clearly have slapped Master Sandy without the 
 smallest compunction. 
 
 The little fellow stood and listened to her laments and denun- 
 ciations with the same grave considering eyes, slipped his hand 
 inside his father's for protection, watched, like one enchained, 
 the gradual demolition of the pie, and when it was all gone, and 
 the tablecloth removed, he gave a long sigh of relief. 
 
 ' Say you're sorry, sir, to Jane, for giving her so mucb extra 
 trouble,' commanded his father. 
 
 'I'm soddy, Jane,' said the child, nodding to her; 'but it 
 was a p — wecioiis pie, wasn't it ? ' 
 
 The mixture of humour and candour in his baby eye was 
 irresistible. Even Jane laughed, and David took him up and 
 swung him on to his shoulder. 
 
 'Come out, young man, into the garden, w'here I can keep an 
 eye on you. Oh ! by the way, are you all right agjiin ?' 
 
 This inquiry was uttered as they reached the garden seat, and 
 David perched the child on his knee. 
 
 'Yes, I'm 6f^— ter,' said the child slowly, evidently unwilling 
 to relinquish the dignity of illness all in a moment. 
 
 'Well, what was the matter with you that you gave poor 
 mammy such a bad night ?' 
 
 The child was silent a moment, pondering how to express him- 
 self. 
 
 ' I was — I was a little sick outside, and a \\\.t\Q feeltsli inside' 
 — he wavered on the difficult word. ' Mammy said I had the 
 wrong dinner yesterday at Aunt Dora's. Zere was plums — lots 
 o' plums ! ' said the child, clasping his hands on his knee, and 
 hunching himself up in a sudden ecstasy. 
 
 ' Well, don't go and have the wrong dinner again at Aunt 
 Dora's. I must tell her to give you nothing but rice pudding.' 
 
 ' Zen I shan't go zere any more,' said the child with determi- 
 nation. 
 
 ' What, you love plums more than Aunt Dora ?' 
 
 ' No — o,' said Sandy dubiously, ' but plums is good ! ' 
 
 And, with a sigh of reminiscence, he threw himself back in 
 his father's arm, being, in fact, tired after his bad night and the 
 further excitement of the 'pie.' The thumb slipped into the 
 pink mouth, and with the other hand the child began dreamily 
 to pull at one of his fair curls, The attitude meant going to 
 sleep, and David had, in fact, hardly settled him, and drawn a 
 light overcoat which lay near over his small legs, before the 
 fringed eyelids sank. 
 
 David held him tenderly, delighting in the weight, the warmth, 
 the soft even breath of his sleeping son. He managed somehow 
 
CHAP. I MATURITY 445 
 
 to relight his pipe, and then sat on, dreamily content, enjoying 
 the warm September sunshine, and letting the book he had brought 
 out lie unopened. 
 
 The garden in which he sat was an oblong piece of ground, 
 with a central gi'ass plat and some starved and meagre borders on 
 either hand. The gravel in the paths had blackened, so had the 
 leaves of the privets and the lilacs, so also had the red-brick walls 
 of the low homely house closing up the other end of the garden. 
 Seventy years ago this house had stood pleasantly amid fields on 
 the northern side of Manchester ; its shrubs had been luxuriant, 
 its roses unstained. Now on every side new houses in oblong 
 gardens had sprung up, and the hideous smoke plague of Man- 
 chester had descended on the whole district, withering and 
 destroying. 
 
 Yet David had a great affection for his house, and it deserved 
 it. It had been built in the days when there was more elbow- 
 room in the world than now. The three sitting-rooms on the 
 ground floor opened sociably into each other, and were pleasantly 
 spacious, and the one story of bedrooms above contained, at any 
 rate in the eyes of the tenants of the house, a surprising amount 
 of accommodation. When all was said, however, it remained, no 
 doubt, a very modest dwelling, at a rent of somewhere about 
 ninety pounds a year ; but as David sat contemplating it this 
 afternoon, there rose in him again the astonishment with which 
 he had first entered upon it, astonishment that he, David Grieve, 
 should ever have been able to attain to it. 
 
 ' Sandy ! come here directly ! Where are you, sir?' 
 
 David heard the voice calling in the hall, and raised his own. 
 
 ' Lucy ! all right ! — he's here.' 
 
 The glass door opened, and Lucy came out. She was very 
 smartly arrayed in a new blue dress which she had donned since 
 dinner ; yet her looks were cross and tired. 
 
 ' Oh, David, how stupid ! Why isn't the child dressed ? 
 Just look what an object ! I sent Lizzie for him ten minutes 
 ago, and she couldn't find him.' 
 
 ' Then Lizzie has even less brains than I supposed,' said David 
 composedly, 'seeing that she had only to look out of a back 
 window. What are you going lo do with him ? ' 
 
 ' Take him out with me, of course. There are the Watsons 
 of Fallowfield, they pestered me to bring him, and they're at 
 home Saturdays. And aren't you coming too ? ' 
 
 ' Madam, you are unreasonable ! ' said David, smiling, and 
 putting down his pipe he laid an affectionate hand on his wife's 
 arm. ' I went careering about the world with you last Saturday 
 and the Saturday before, and this week end I must take for 
 reading. There is an Oxford man who has been writing me in- 
 furiated letters this week because 1 won't let him know whether 
 we will take up his pamphlet or no. I must get that read, and a 
 good many other things, before to-morrow night.' 
 
 ' Oh, I know ! ' said Lucy, pettishly. ' There's always some- 
 
446 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 thing in the way of what I want. Soon I shan't see anything of 
 you at all ; it will be all business, and yet not a penny more to 
 spend ! Well, then, give me Sandy.' 
 
 David hesitated. 
 
 ' Do you think you'll take him ? ' he said, bending over the 
 little fellow. ' He doesn't look a bit himself to-day. It's those 
 abominable plums of Dora's ! ' 
 
 He spoke with fierceness, as though Dora had been the 
 veriest criminal. 
 
 ' Well, but what nonsense ! ' cried Lucy ; ' they don't upset 
 other children. I can't think what's wrong with him.' 
 
 'He isn't like other children; he's of a finer make,' said 
 David, laughing at his own folly, but more than half sincere in 
 it all the same. 
 
 Lucy laughed too, and was appeased. She bent down to look 
 at him, confessed that he was pale, and that she had better not 
 take him lest there should be catastrophes. 
 
 ' Well, then, I must go alone,' she said, turning away discon- 
 tentedly. ' I don't know what's the good of it. Nobody cares to 
 see me without him or you.' 
 
 The last sentence came out with a sudden energy, and as she 
 looked back towards him he saw that her cheek was flushed. 
 
 ' What, in that new gown ? ' he said, smiling, and looked her 
 up and down approvingly. 
 
 Her expression brightened. 
 
 ' Do you like it ?' she said, more graciously. 
 
 ' Very much. You look as young as when I first teased you ! 
 Come here and let me give you a " nip for new." ' 
 
 She came docilely. He pretended to pinch the thin wrist she 
 held out to him, and then, stooping, lightly kissed it. 
 
 ' Now go and enjoy yourself,' he said, ' and I'll take care of 
 Sandy. Don't tire yourself. Take a cab when you want one.' 
 
 She was moving away when a thought struck her. 
 
 ' What are you going to say to Lord Driffield ?' 
 
 A cloud crossed David's look. ' Well, what am I to say to 
 him ? You don't really want to go, Lucy ? ' 
 
 In an instant the angry look came back. 
 
 ' Oh, very well ! ' she cried. ' If you're ashamed of me, and 
 don't care to take me about with you, just say it, that's all ! ' 
 
 ' As if I wanted to go myself ! ' he remonstrated. ' Why, I 
 should be bored to death ; so would you. I don't believe there 
 would be a person in the house whom either of us would ever 
 have seen before, except Lord Driffield. And I can see Lord 
 Driffield, nnd his books too, in much more comfortable ways 
 than by going to stay with him.' 
 
 Lucy stood silent a moment, trying to contain herself, then 
 she broke out : 
 
 ' Tliat is just like you ! ' she said in a low bitter voice ; ' you 
 won't take any chance of getting on. It's always the way. 
 People say to me that you're so clever — that you're thought so 
 
CHAP. I MATURITY 447 
 
 much of in Manchester, you might be anything you like. And 
 what's the good ? — that's what I think ! If you do earn more 
 money you won't let us live any differently. It's always, can't 
 we do without this ? and can't we do without that ? And as to 
 knowing people, you won't take any trouble at all ! Why can't 
 we get on, and make new friends, and be — be — as good as any- 
 body ? other people do. I believe you think I should disgrace 
 myself — I should put my knife in my mouth, or something, if 
 you took me to Lord Drifiaeld's. I can behave myself i}er/ec%, 
 thank you.' 
 
 And Lucy looked at her husband in a perfect storm of temper 
 and resentment. Her prettiness had lost much of its first bloom ; 
 the cheek-bones, always too high, were now more prominent than 
 in first youth, and the whole face had a restless thinness which 
 robbed it of charm, save at certain rare moments of unusual 
 moral or physical well-being. David, meeting his wife's sparkling 
 eyes, felt a pang compounded of many mixed compunctions and 
 misgivings. 
 
 'Look here, Lucy!' he said, laying down his pipe, and 
 stretching out his free hand to her, ' don't say those things. 
 They hurt me, and you don't mean them. Come and sit down a 
 moment, and let's make up our minds about Lord Driffield.' 
 
 Unwillingly she let herself be drawn down beside him on the 
 garden bench. These quarrels and reproaches were becoming a 
 necessity and a pleasure to her. David felt, with a secret dread, 
 that the habit of them had been growing upon her. 
 
 ' I haven't done so very badly for you, have I ? ' he said affec- 
 tionately, as she sat down, taking her two gloved hands in his one. 
 
 Lucy vehemently drew them away. 
 
 ' Oh, if you mean to say,' she cried, her eyes flaming, ' that I 
 had no money, and ought just to be thankful for what I can get, 
 just say it, that's all' 
 
 This time David flushed. 
 
 ' I think, perhaps, you'd better go and pay your calls,' he said, 
 after a minute ; ' we can talk about this letter some other time.' 
 
 Lucy sat silent, her chest heaving. As soon as ever in these 
 little scenes between them he began to show resentment, she 
 began to give way. 
 
 'I didn't mean that,' she said, uncertainly, in a low voice, 
 looking ready to cry. 
 
 'Well, then, suppose you don't say it,' replied David, after a 
 pause. ' If you'll try and believe it, Lucy, I don't want to go to 
 Lord Driffield's simply and solely because I am sure we should 
 neither of us enjoy it. Lady Driffi.eld is a stuck-up sort of person, 
 who only cares about her own set and relations. We should be 
 patronised, we should find it difficult to be ourselves — there 
 would be no profit for anybody. Lord Driffield would be too 
 busy to look after us ; besides, he has more power anywhere than 
 in his own house.' 
 
 ' No one could patronise you,' said Lucy, firing up again. 
 
448 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 * I don't know,' said David, with a smile and a stretch ; ' I'm 
 shy— on other people's domains. If they'd come here I should 
 know how to deal with them.' 
 
 Lucy was silent for a while, twisting her mouth discontentedly. 
 David observed her. Suddenly he held out his hand to her again, 
 relenting. 
 
 ' Do you really want to go so much, Lucy ? ' 
 
 'Of course I do,' she said, pouting, in a quick injured tone. 
 » It's — it's a chance, and I want to see what it's like ; and I should 
 hardly have to buy anything new, unless it's a new bonnet, and I 
 can make that myself. ' 
 
 David sat considering. 
 
 ' Well ! ' he said at last, trying to stifle his sigh, * I don't mind. 
 I'll write and accept.' 
 
 Lucy's eye gleamed. She edged closer to her husband. 
 
 ' You won't mind very much ? It's only two nights. Isn't 
 Sandy cramping your arm ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, we shall get through, I dare say. No— the boy's all 
 right. I say^ — with a groan- ' shall I have to get a new dress 
 suit?' 
 
 'Yes, ot course,'' said Lucy, with indignant eagerness. 
 
 ' Well, then, if you don't go off, and let me earn some money, 
 we shall be in the 'Bankruptcy Court. Good-bye! I shall take 
 the boy into the study, and cover him up while I work.' 
 
 Lucy stood before him an instant, then stooped and kissed him 
 on the forehead. She would have liked to say a penitent word or 
 two, but there was still something hard and hot in her heart 
 which prevented her. Yet her husband, as he sat there, seemed 
 to her the handsomest and most desirable of men. 
 
 David nodded to her kindly, and sat watching her slim 
 straight figure as she tripped away from him across the garden 
 and disappeared into the house. Then he bent over Sandy and 
 raised him in his arms. 
 
 ' Don't wake, Sandy ! ' he said softly, as the little man half 
 opened his eyes—' Daddy's going to put you to bye in the study.' 
 
 And he carried him in, the child breathing heavily against 
 his shoulder, and deposited his bundle on an old horsehair sofa 
 in the corner of his own room, turning the little face away from 
 the light, and wrapping up the bare legs. 
 
 Then he sat down to his work. The room in which he sat was 
 made for work. It was walled with plain deal bookcases, which 
 were filled from floor to ceiling, largely with foreign books, as the 
 paper covers testified. 
 
 For the rest, anyone looking roynd would have noticed a spa- 
 cious writing-table in the window, a large and battered armchair 
 beside the fire, a photograph of Lucy over the mantelpiece, oddly 
 flanked by an engraving of Goethe and the head of the German 
 historian Ranke, a folding cane chair which was generally used 
 by Lucy whenever she visited the room, and the horsehair sofa,_ 
 whereon Sandy was now sleeping amid a surrounding litter of 
 
CHAP. I MATURITY 449 
 
 books and papers which only just left room for his small person. 
 If there were other chairs and tables, they were covered deep in 
 literature of one kind or another, and did not count. The large 
 window looked on the garden, and the room opened at the back 
 into the drawing-room, and at one side into the dining-room. 
 On the rug slept the short-haired black collie, whom David had 
 once protected from Louie's dislike— old, blind, and decrepit, but 
 still beloved, especially by Sandy, and still capable of barking a 
 toothless defiance at the outer world. 
 
 It was a room to charm a student's eyes, especially on this 
 September afternoon with its veiled and sleepy sun stealing in 
 from the garden, and David fell into his chair, refilled his pipe, 
 and stretched out his hand for a batch of manuscript which lay 
 on his table, with an unconscious sigh of satisfaction. 
 
 The manuscript represented a pamphlet on certain trade 
 questions by a young Oxford economist. For the firm of Grieve 
 & Co., of Manchester, had made itself widely known for some 
 five years past to the intelligence of northern England by its 
 large and increasing trade in pamphlets of a political, social, or 
 economical kind. They supplied mechanics' institutes, political 
 associations, and workmen's clubs ; nay, more, they had a system 
 of hawkers of their own, which bade fair to extend largely. To 
 be taken up by Grieve & Co. was already an object to young 
 politicians, inventors, or social reformers, who might wish for 
 one reason or another to bring thc4r names or their ideas before 
 the working-class of the North. And Grieve & Co. meant David, 
 sitting smoking and reading in his armchair. 
 
 He gave the production now in his hands some careful reading 
 for half an hour or more, then he suddenly threw it down. 
 
 ' Stuff and nonsense ! ' he said to himself. ' The man has got 
 the facts about those Oldham mills wrong somehow, I'm certain 
 of it. Where's that letter I had last week?' and, jumping up, 
 he took a bunch of keys out of his pocket and opened a drawer in 
 his writing-table. The drawer contained mostly bundles of 
 letters, and to the right hand a number of loose ones recently 
 received, and net yet sorted or tied. He looked through these, 
 found what he wanted, and was about to close the drawer when 
 his attention was caught by a thick black note-book lying towards 
 the back of it. He took it out, reminded by it of something he 
 had meant to do, and carried it off with the Oldham letter to his 
 chair. Once settled there again, he turned himself to the confu- 
 tation of his pamphleteer. But not for long. The black book on 
 his knee exercised a disturbing influence ; his under-mind began 
 to occupy itself with it, and at last the Oldham letter was hastily 
 put down, and, taking out a pocket pen, David, with a smile at 
 his own delinquency, opened the black book, turned over many 
 closely written pages, and settled down to write another. 
 
 The black book was his journal. He had kept it intermit- 
 tently since his marriage, rather as a journal of thought than as 
 a journal of events, and he had to add to it to-day some criti- 
 
450 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 cisms of a recent book by Renau which had been simmering in 
 his mind for a week or two. Still it contained a certain number 
 of records of events, and, taken generally, its entries formed an 
 epitome of everything of most import — practical, moral, or 
 intellectual — which had entered into David Grieve's life during 
 the eight years since his marriage. 
 For instance : — 
 
 ^ April 10, 1876. — Our son was born this morning between 
 three and four o'clock, after more than three years of marriage, 
 when both of us had begun to despair a little. Now that he is 
 come, I am decidedly interested in him, but the paternal relation 
 hardly begins at birth, as the mother's does. The father, who 
 has suffered nothing, cannot shut his eyes to the physical ugliness 
 and weakness, the clash of pain and effort, in which the future 
 man begins ; the mother, who has suffered everything, seems by 
 a special spell of nature to feel nothing after the birth but the 
 mystery and wonder of the new creature, the life born from her 
 life — flesh of her flesh — breath of her breath. Else why is Lucy 
 — who bears pain hardly, and had looked forward much less 
 eagerly to the child, I think, than I had — so proud and content 
 just to lie with the hungry creature beside her ? while I am half 
 inclined to say, What ! so little for so much? — and to spend so 
 full an energy in resenting the pains of maternity as an unmean- 
 ing blot on the scheme of things, that I have none left for a more 
 genial emotion. Altogether, I am disappointed in myself as a 
 father. I seem to have no imagination, and at present I would 
 rather touch a loaded torpedo than my son.' 
 
 ^ April 30. — Lucy wishes to have the child christened at St. 
 Damian's, and, though it goes against me, I have made no objec- 
 tion. And if she wishes it I shall go. It is not a question of 
 one's own personal consistency or sincerity. The new individual- 
 ity seems to me to have a claim in the matter, which I have no 
 business to override because I happen to think in this way or 
 that. My son when he grows up may be an ardent Christian. 
 Then, if I had failed to comply with the national religious re- 
 quirement, and had let him go unbaptized, because of my own 
 beliefs or non-beliefs, he might, I think, rightly reproach me : 
 "I was helpless, and you took advantage." 
 
 ' Education is different. The duty of the parent to hand on 
 what is best and truest in his own mind to the child is clear. 
 Besides, the child goes on to carry what has been taught him 
 into the open agora of the world's thought, and may there test 
 its value as he pleases. But the omission, in a sense irreparable, 
 of a definite and customary act like baptism from a child's exis- 
 tence, when hereafter the omission may cause him a pang quite 
 disproportionate to any likes or dislikes of mine in the matter, 
 appears to me unjust. 
 
 ' I talk as if Lucy were not concerned ! — or Dora ! In reality 
 I shall do as Lucy wills. Only they must not misunderstand me 
 
CHAP. I MATURITY 451 
 
 for the future. If my son lives, his father will not hide his 
 heart from him. 
 
 ' I notice for the first time that Lucy is anxious and troubled 
 about her father. She would like now to be friends, and she 
 took care that the news of the chiUrs birth should be conveyed 
 to him at once through a common acquaintance. But he has 
 taken no notice. In some natures the seeds of affection seem to 
 fall only on the sand and rock of the heart, where because they 
 have "no depth of earth they wither away;" while the seeds 
 of hatred find the rich and good ground, where they spring and 
 grow a hundred-fold.' 
 
 ' December 8, 1877.— I have just been watching Sandy on the 
 rug between the two dogs— Tim, and the most adorable black 
 and tan dachshund that Lord Driffield has just given me. Sandy 
 had a bit of biscuit, and was teasing his friends— first thrusting 
 it under their noses, and then, just as they were preparing to 
 gulp, drawing it back with a squeal of joy. The child's evident 
 mastery and sense of humour, the grave puzzled faces of the 
 dogs, delighted me. Then a whim seized me. I knelt down on 
 the rug, and asked him to give me some. He held out the biscuit 
 and laid it against my lips ; I saw his eye waver ; there was a 
 gleam of mischief— the biscuit was half snatched away, and I 
 felt absurdly chagrined. But in an instant the little face melted 
 into the sweetest, keenest smile, and he almost choked me in his 
 eagerness to thrust the biscuit down my throat. " Poor Daddy ! 
 Daddy so hungry. " 
 
 ' I recall with difficulty that I once thought him ugly and 
 unattractive, poor little worm ! On the contrary, it is quite clear 
 that, whatever he may be when he grows up— T don't altogether 
 trust his nose and mouth— for a child he is a beauty ! His great 
 browm eyes— so dark and noticeable beneath the fair hair in the 
 little apple-blossom face— let you into the very heart of him. 
 It is by no means a heart of unmixed goodness. There is a 
 curious aloofness in his look sometimes, as of some pure intelli- 
 gence beholding good and evil with the same even speculative 
 mind. But this strange mood breaks up so humanly ! he has 
 such wiles— such soft wet kisses ! such a little flute of a voice 
 when he wants to coax or propitiate you ! ' 
 
 ' March 1878.— My printing business has been growing very 
 largely lately. I have now worked out my profit-sharing scheme 
 with some minuteness, and yesterday the men, John, and I had 
 a conference. In part, ray plan is copied from that of the 
 " Maison Leclaire," but I have worked a good deal of my own 
 into it. Our English experience of this form of industrial 
 partnership has been on the whole unfavourable ; but, after a 
 period of lassitude, experiments are beginning to revive. The 
 great rock ahead lies in one's relation to the trade unions— one 
 must remember that. 
 
 'To the practised eye the men to-day show^ed signs of 
 
453 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 accepting it with cordiality, but the north-country man is before 
 all things cautious, and I dare say a stranger would have thought 
 them cool and suspicious. We meet again next week. 
 
 ' I must explain the thing to Lucy — it is her right. She may 
 resent it vehemently, as she did my refusal, in the autumn, to 
 take advantage of that London opening. It will, of course, 
 restrict our income just as it was beginning to expand quickly. 
 I have left myself adequate superintendence w^ages, a bonus on 
 these wages calculated in the same w^ay as that of the men, a 
 fixed percentage on the capital already employed in the business, 
 and a nominal thirty per cent, of the profits. But I can see 
 plainly that however the business extends, we— she and I — shall 
 never "make our fortune" out of it. For beyond the fifty per 
 cent, of the profits to be employed in bonuses on wages, and the 
 twenty per cent, set aside for the benefit and pension society, 
 my thirty per cent, must provide me with what I want for 
 various purposes connected with the well-being of the w^orkers, 
 and for the widening of our operations on the publishing side, 
 in a more or less propagandist spirit. 
 
 ' My bookselling business proper is, of course, at present 
 outside the scheme, and I do not see very well how anything 
 of the kind can be applied to it. This will be a comfort to 
 Lucy ; and just now the trade both in old and foreign books is 
 prosperous and brings me in large returns. But I cannot 
 disguise from myself that the other experiment is likely to absorb 
 more and more of my energies in the future. I have from sixty 
 to eighty men now in the printing-office — a good set, take them 
 altogether. They have been gradually learning to understand 
 me and my projects. The story of what Leclaire was able to do 
 for the lives and characters of his men is wonderful ! 
 
 ' My poor little wife ! I try to explain these things to her, 
 but she thinks that I am merely making mad experiments with 
 money, teaching w^orkmen to be "uppish" and setting employers 
 against me. When in my turn I do my best to get at what she 
 means by "getting on," I find it comes to a bigger house, more 
 servants, a carriage, dinner parties, and, generally, a move to 
 London, bringing with it a totally new circle of acquaintance 
 who need never know exactly what she or I rose from. She 
 does not, put all this into words, but I think I have given it 
 accurately. 
 
 ' And I should yield a great deal more than I do if I had 
 any conviction that these things, when got, would make her 
 happy. But every increase in our scale of living since w^e began 
 has seemed rather to make her restless, and fill her with cravings 
 which yet she can never satisfy. In reality she lives by her 
 affections, as most women do. One day she wants to lose sight 
 of everyone who knew her as Purcelrs daughter, or me as 
 PurcelPs assistant ; the next she is fretting to be reconciled to 
 her father. In the same way, she thinks I am hard about 
 money ; she sees no attraction in the things which fill me with 
 
CHAP. I MATURITY 453 
 
 enthusiasm ; but at the same time, if I were dragged into a 
 life where I was morally starved and discontented, she would 
 suffer too. No, I must steer through— judge for her and myself 
 —and make life as pleasant to her in little ways as it can be made. 
 
 'Ah ! the gospel of " getting on"— it fills me with a kind of 
 rage. There is an essential truth in it, no doubt, and if I had 
 not been carried away by it at one time, I should have far less 
 power over circumstances than I now have. But to square the 
 whole of this mysterious complex life to it— to drop into the 
 grave at last, having missed, because of it, all that sheds dignity 
 and poetry on the human lot, all that njakes it worth while or 
 sane to hope in a destiny for man diviner and more lasting than 
 appears — horrible ! 
 
 *■ Yet Lucy may rightly complain of me. I get dreamy— I 
 procrastinate. And it is unjust to expect that her ideal of social 
 pleasure should be the same as mine. I ought to— and I will- 
 make more effort to please her.' 
 
 ^Juli/ 1878.— I am in Paris again. Yesterday afternoon I 
 wandered about looking at those wrecks of the Commune which 
 yet remain. The new Hotel de Ville is rising, but the Tuileries 
 still stands charred and ruined against the sky, an object lesson 
 for Belleville. I walked up to the Arc de TEtoile, and coming 
 back I strolled into a little leafy open-air restaurant for a cup of 
 coffee. Suddenly I recognised the place— the fountain— a large 
 quicksilver ball— a little wooden pavilion festooned with coloured 
 lamps. It was as though eight years were wiped away. 
 
 'I could not stay there. But the shock soon subsided. 
 There is something bewildering, de-personalising, in the differ- 
 ence between one stage of life and another. In certain moods I 
 feel scarcely a thread of identity between my present self and 
 myself of eight j'ears ago. 
 
 ' This morning I have seen Louie, after an interval of three 
 years. Montjoie keeps out of my way, and, as a matter of fact, 
 I have never set eyes on him since I passed him close to the 
 Auteuil station in July 1870. From Louie's account, he is now a 
 confirmed drunkard, and can hardly ever be got to do any serious 
 work. Yet she brought me a clay study of their little girl which 
 he.threw off in a lucid interval two or three months ago, surely 
 as good as anybody or anything, astonishingly delicate and true. 
 Just now, apparently, he has a bad fit on, and but for my allow- 
 ance to her she tells me they would be all but destitute. It is 
 remarkable to see how she has taken possession of this money 
 and with what shrewdness she manages it. I suspect her of 
 certain small Bourse speculations— she has all the financial slang 
 on the tip of her tongue— but if so, they succeed. For she keeps 
 herself and the child, scornfully allows him so much for his 
 pocket in the week, and even, as I judge from the consideration 
 she enjoys in the church she frequents, finds money for her own 
 Catholic purposes. 
 
454 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 ' Louie a fervent Catholic and an affectionate mother ! The 
 mixture of old and new in her— the fresh habits of growth im- 
 posed on the original plant — startle me at every turn. Her 
 Catholicism, which resolves itself, perhaps, into the cult of a par- 
 ticular church and of two or three admirable and sagacious 
 priests, seems to me one long intrigue of a comparatively harm- 
 less kind. It provides her witli enemies, allies, plots, battles, 
 and surprises. It ministers, too, to her love of colour and mag- 
 nificence—a love which implies an artistic sense, and would have 
 been utilised young if she had belonged to an artistic family, 
 
 ' But just as I am adapting myself to the new Louie the old 
 reappears ! She was talking to me yesterday of her exertions at 
 Easter for the Easter decorations, and describing to me in super- 
 latives the final splendour of the results, and the compliments 
 which had been paid her by one or two of the clergy, when the 
 name of a lady who seems to have been connected with the church 
 longer than Louie has, and is evidently her rival in various 
 matters of pious service and charitable organisation, came to her 
 lips. Instantly her face flamed, and the denunciation she 
 launched was quite in the old Clough End and Manchester vein. 
 I was to understand that this person was a mean, designing, 
 worthless creature, a hideous object besides, and " made up ; " 
 and as to her endeavours to ingratiate herself with Father this 
 and Father that, the worst motives were hinted at. 
 
 ' Another little incident struck me more painfully still. Her 
 devotion to the little Cecile is astonishing. She is miserable when 
 the child has a finger-ache, and seems to spend most of her time 
 in dressing and showing her off. Yet I suspect she is often irri- 
 table and passionate even with Cecile ; the child has a shrinking 
 quiet way with her which is not natural. And to-day, when she 
 was in the middle of cataloguing Montjoie's enormities, and I was 
 trying to restrain her, remembering that Cecile was looking at a 
 book on the other side of the room, she suddenly called to the 
 child imperiously : 
 
 '"Cecile! come here and tell your uncle what your father 
 is !" 
 
 ' And, to my horror, the little creature walked across to us, 
 and, as though she w^ere saying a lesson, began to debiter a set 
 speech about her father's crimes and her mother's wrongs, con- 
 taining the wildest abuse of her father, and prompted throughout 
 by the excited and scarlet Louie. I tried to stop it ; but Louie 
 only pushed me away. The child rose to her part, became per- 
 fectly white, declaimed with a shrill fury, indescribably repulsive, 
 and at the end sank into a chair, hardly able to stand. Then 
 Louie covered her with kisses, made me get wine for her, and 
 held her cradled in her arms till it was time for them to go. 
 
 'On the way downstairs, when Cecile was in front of us, I 
 spoke my mind about this performance in the strongest way. 
 But Louie only laughed at me. "It shall be quite plain that 
 she is mine and not his ! I don't run away from him ; I keep 
 
CHAP. I MATURITY 455 
 
 him from dying on the streets like a dog ; but his child and 
 everyone else shall know what he is." 
 
 ' It is a tigress passion. Poor little child !— a thin, brown, 
 large-eyed creature, with rather old, affected manners, and a 
 small clinging hand.' 
 
 'July Uh. — Father Lenoir, Louie's director, has just been to 
 call upon me ; Louie insisted on my going to a festival service at 
 St. Eulalie this morning, and introduced me to him— an elderly, 
 courteous, noble-faced priest of a fine type. He was discreet, of 
 course, and made me feel the enormous difference that exists 
 between an outsider and a member of the one flock. But I 
 gathered that the people among whom she is now thrown 
 perfectly understand Louie. By means of the subtle and 
 powerful discipline of the Church, a discipline which has 
 absorbed the practical wisdom of generations, they have estab- 
 lished a hold upon her. And they work on her also through the 
 child. But he gave me to understand that there had been crises ; 
 that the opportunities for and temptations to dissolute living 
 which beset Montjoie's wife were endless ; and it was a marvel 
 that under such circumstances a being so wdld had yet kept 
 straight. 
 
 ' I shook him warmly by the hand at parting, and thanked 
 him from my heart. He somewhat resented my thanks, I 
 thought. They imported, perhaps, a personal element into what 
 he regards as a matter of pure ecclesiastical practice and duty. ' 
 
 ' December 2Uh, 1878.— Lucy is still asleep ; the rest of the 
 house is just stirring. I am in my study looking out on the 
 snowy garden and the frosted trees, which are as yet fair and 
 white, though in a few hours the breath of Manchester will have 
 polluted them. 
 
 'Last night I went with Lucy and Dora to the midnight 
 service at St. Damian's. It pleased them that I went ; and I 
 thought the service, with its bells, its resonant Adeste fideles, 
 and its white flowers, singularly beautiful and touching. And 
 yet, in truth, I was only happy in it because I was so far removed 
 from it ; because the legend of Bethlehem and the mythology of 
 the Trinity are no longer matters of particular interest or debate 
 with me ; because after a period of three- fourths assent, followed 
 by one lasting over years of critical analysis and controversial 
 reading, I have passed of late into a conception of Christianity 
 far more positive, fruitful, and human than I have yet held. I 
 would fain believe it the Christianity of the future. But the 
 individual must beware lest he wrap his personal thinking in 
 phrases too large for it. 
 
 ' Yet, at least, one may say that it is a conception which has 
 been gaining more and more hold on the minds of those who 
 during the present century have thought most deeply, and 
 laboured most disinterestedly in the field of Christian antiquity 
 —who have sought with most learning and with fewest hindrances 
 
456 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 from circumstance to understand Christianity, whether as a his- 
 tory or as a philosophy. 
 
 ' I have read much German during the past year, and of late 
 a book reviewing the whole course of religious thought in Ger- 
 many since Schleiermacher, with a mixture of exhaustive 
 information and brilliant style most unusual in a German, has 
 absorbed all my spare hours. Such a movement ! — such a wealth 
 of collective labour and individual genius thrown into it — 
 producing offshoots and echoes throughout the world, trans- 
 forming opinion with the slow inevitable ness which belongs to 
 all science, possessing already a great past and sure of a greaf 
 future. 
 
 ' In the face of it, our orthodox public, the contented igno- 
 rance of our clergy, the solemn assurance of our religious press 
 — what curious and amazing phenomena ! Yet probably the 
 two worlds have their analogues in every religion ; and what 
 the individual has to learn in these days at once of outward 
 debate and of unifying social aspiration, is "to dissent no 
 longer with the heat of a narrow antipathy, but with the quiet 
 of a large sympathy." ' 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 A FEW days after Lord Driffield's warm invitation to Mr. and 
 Mrs. David Grieve to spend an October Saturday-to-Monday at 
 Ben-et's Park had been accepted, Lucy was sitting in the Sep- 
 tember dusk putting some frills into Sandy's Sunday coat, when 
 the door opened and Dora walked in. 
 
 'You do look done ! ' said Lucy, as she held up her cheek to 
 her cousin's salutation. ' What have you been about ? ' 
 
 'They kept me late at the shop, for a Saturday,' said Dora, 
 with a sigh of fatigue, 'and since then I've been decorating. 
 It's the Dedication Festival to-morrow.' 
 
 ' Well, the festivals don't do you any good,' said Lucy, 
 emphatically ; ' they always tire you to death. When you do get 
 to church, I don't believe you can enjoy anything. Why don't 
 you let other people have a turn now, after all these years? 
 There's Miss Barham, and Charlotte Corfield, and Mrs. Willan— 
 they'd all do a great deal more if you didn't do so much. I 
 know that.' 
 
 Lucy's cool bright eye meant, indeed, that she had heard 
 some remarks made of late with regard to Dora's position at St. 
 Damian's somewhat unfavourable to her cousin. It was said 
 that she was jealous of co-operation or interference on the part 
 of new members of the congregation in the various tasks she had 
 been accustomed for years past to lay upon herself in connection 
 with the church. Slie was universally held to be extraordinarily 
 good ; but both in the large shop, where she was now forewoman, 
 and at St. Damian's, people were rather afraid of her, and 
 
CHAP. II MATURITY 45T 
 
 inclined to head oppositions to her. A certain severity had 
 grown upon her ; slie was more self-confident, though it was a 
 self-confidence grounded always on the authority of the Church ; 
 and some parts of the nature which at twenty had been still soft 
 and plastic were now tending to rigidity. 
 
 At Lucy's words she flushed a little. 
 
 ' How can they know as well as I what has to be done?' she 
 said with energy. 'The chancel screen is heaatifid^ Lucy — all 
 yellow fern and heather. You must go to-morrow, and take 
 Sandy.' 
 
 As she spoke she threw off her waterproof and unloosed the 
 strings of her black bonnet. Her dark serge dress with its white 
 turn-down collar and armlets— worn these last -for the sake of 
 her embroidery work — gave her a dedicated conventual look. 
 She was paler than of old ; the eyes, though beautiful and lumi- 
 nous, were no longer young, and lines were fast deepening in the 
 cheeks and chin, with'their round childish moulding. What had 
 been naivete and tremulous sweetness at twenty, was now 
 conscious strength and patience. The countenance had been 
 fashioned — and fashioned nobly— by life ; but the tool had cut 
 deep, and had not spared the first grace of the woman in develop- 
 ing the saint. The hands especially, the long thin hands defaced 
 by the labour of years, which met yours in a grasp so full of pur- 
 pose and feeling, told a story and symbolised a character. 
 
 'David won't come,' said Lucy, in answer to Dora's last 
 remark ; ' he hardly ever goes anywhere now unless he hears of 
 some one going to preach that he thinks he'll like.' 
 
 ' No — I know,' said Dora. A shade came over her face. The 
 attitude of David Grieve towards religion during the last four or 
 five years represented to her the deep disappointment of certain 
 eager hopes, perhaps one might almost call them ambitions, of 
 her missionary youth. The disappointment had brought a cer- 
 tain bitterness with it, though for long years she had been sister 
 and closest friend to both David and his wife. And it had made 
 her doubly sensitive with regard to Lucy, whom she had herself 
 brought over from the Baptist communion to the Church, and 
 Sandy, who was her godchild. 
 
 After a pause, she hesitatingly brought a small paper book 
 out of the handbag she carried. 
 
 ' I brought you this, Lucy. Father Eussell sent it you. He 
 thinks it the best beginning book you can have. He always gives 
 it in the parish ; and if the mothers will only use it, it makes it 
 so much easier to teach the children when they come to Sunday 
 school.' 
 
 Lucy took it doubtfully. It was called ' The Mother's Cate- 
 chism ; ' and, opening it, she saw that it contained a series of 
 questions and answers, as between a mother and a child. 
 
 'I don't think Sandy would understand it,' she said, slowly, 
 as she turned it over. 
 
 ' Oh yes, he would ! ' said Dora, eagerly. ' Why, he's nearly 
 
458 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 five, Lucy. It's really time you began to teach him something— 
 unless you want him to grow up a little heathen ! ' 
 
 The last words had a note of indignation. Lucy took no 
 notice. She was still turning over the book. 
 
 ' And I don't think David will like it,' she said, still more 
 slowly than before. 
 
 Dora flushed. 
 
 ' He can't want to keep Sandy from being taught any religion 
 at all ! It wouldn't be fair to you— or to the child. And if he 
 won't do it, if he isn't certain enough about what he thinks, how 
 can he mind your doing it ? ' 
 
 ' I don't know,' said Lucy, and paused. ' I sometimes think,' 
 she went on, with more energy, ' that David will be quite different 
 some day from what he has been. I'm sure he'll want to teach 
 Sandy.' 
 
 ' He's got nothing to teach him ! ' cried Dora. Then she added 
 in another voice — a voice of wounded feeling—' If he was to be 
 brought up an atheist, I don't think David ought to have asked 
 me to be godmother.' 
 
 ' He shan't be brought up an atheist,' exclaimed Lucy startled. 
 Then, feeling the subject too much for her— for it provoked in 
 her a mingled train of memories which she had not words enough 
 to express — she turned back to her work, leaving the book on the 
 table and the discussion pending. 
 
 'David's dreadfully late,' she said, discontentedly, looking at 
 the clock. 
 
 ' Where is he ? ' 
 
 ' Down in Ancoats, I expect. He told me he had a committee 
 there to-day after work, about those houses he's going to pull 
 down. He's got Mr. Buller and Mr. Haycraf t— and '—Lucy named 
 some half-dozen more rich and well-known men— 'to help him, 
 and they're going to pull down one of the worst bits of James 
 Street, David says, and build up new houses for working people. 
 He's wild about.it. Oh, I know we'll have no money at all left 
 soon ! ' cried Lucy indignantly, with a shrug of her small shoul- 
 ders. 
 
 Dora smiled at what seemed to her a childish petulance. 
 
 ' Why, I'm sure you've got everything very nice, Lucy, and all 
 you want.' 
 
 ' No, indeed, I haven't got all I want,' said Lucy, looking up 
 and frowning ; ' I never shall, neither. I want David to be— to 
 be — like everybody else. He might be a rich man to-morrow if 
 he wouldn't have such ideas. He doesn't think a bit about me 
 and Sandy. I told you what would happen when he made that 
 division between the bookselling and the printing, and took up 
 with those ideas about the men. I knew he'd come not to care 
 about the bookselling. And I was perfectly right ! There's that 
 printing-office getting bigger and bigger, and crowds of men wait- 
 ing to be taken on, and such a lot of business doing as never was. 
 And are we a bit the richer ? Not a penny — or hardly. It's sicken- 
 
CHAP, n MATURITY 459 
 
 ing to hear the way people talk about him ! Why, they say the 
 last election wouldn't have been nearly so good for the Liberals 
 all about the North if it hadn't been for the things he's always 
 publishing and the two papers he started last year. He might be 
 a member of Parliament any day, and he wouldn't be a member 
 of Parliament— not ho ! He told me he didn't care twopence 
 about it. No, he doesn't care for anything but just taking our 
 money and giving it to other people — there ! You may say what 
 you like, but it's true.' 
 
 The wilful energy with which Lucy spoke the last words 
 transformed the small face — brought out the harder lines on it. 
 
 'Well, I never know what it is that you want exactly,' said 
 Dora. ' I don't think you do yourself.' 
 
 Lucy stitched silently, her thin red lips pressed together. She 
 knew perfectly well what she wanted, only she was ashamed to 
 confess it to the religious and ascetic Dora. Her ideal of living 
 was filled in with images and desires abundantly derived from 
 Manchester life, where every day she saw people grow rich 
 rapidly, and rise as a matter of course into that upper region of 
 gentility, carriages, servants, wines, and grouse-moors, whither, 
 ever since it had become plain to her that David could, if he 
 chose, easily place her there, it had been her constant craving to 
 go. Other people came to be gentlefolks and lord it over the 
 land— why not they ? It made her mad, as she had said to Dora, 
 to see theii' money — their very own money — chucked away to 
 other people, and they getting no good of it, and remaining mere 
 working booksellers and printers as before. 
 
 'Why don't you go and help him?' said Dora suddenly. 
 ' Perhaps if you were to go right in and see what he's doing, you 
 wouldn't mind it so much. You might get to like it. He doesn't 
 want to keep everything to himself— he wants to share with those 
 that need. If there were a good many others like that, perhaps 
 there'd be fewer awful things happening down at Ancoats.' 
 
 A sigh rose to her lips. Her beautiful eyes grew sad. 
 
 ' Well, I did try once or twice,' said Lucy, pettishly, ' but I've 
 always told you that sort of thing isn't in my line. Of course I 
 understand about giving away, and all that. But he'll hardly 
 let you give away at all ! He says it's pauperising the people. 
 And the things he wants me to do — I never seem to do 'em right, 
 and I can't get to care a bit about them.' 
 
 The tone in her voice betrayed a past experience which had 
 been in some way trying and discouraging to a fine natural vanity. 
 
 Dora did not answer. She played absently with the little 
 book on the table. 
 
 ' Oh 1 but he's going to let us accept the invitation to Benet's 
 Park— I didn't tell you that,' said Lucy suddenly, her face 
 clearing. 
 
 Dora was startled. 
 
 ' Why, I thought you told me he wouldn't go ?' 
 
 * So I did. But — well, I let out ! ' said Lucy, colouring, * and 
 
460 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE ijook iv 
 
 he's changed his mind. But I'm rather in a fright, Dora, though 
 I don't tell him. Think of that big house and all those servants 
 — I'm more friglitened of them than of anybody ! I say, do you 
 think my new dresses '11 do ? You'll come up and look at them, 
 won't you ? Not that you're much use about dresses.' 
 
 Dora was profoundly interested and somewhat bewildered. 
 That her little cousin Lucy, Purcell's daughter and Daddy's niece, 
 should be going to stay as an invited guest in a castle, w ith an 
 earl and countess, was very amazing. Was it because the Radi- 
 cals had got the upper hand so much at the election ? She could 
 not understand it, but some of her old girlishness, her old interest 
 in small womanish trifles, came back upon her, and she discussed 
 the details of what Lucy might expect so eagerly that Lucy was 
 quite delighted with her. 
 
 In the middle of their talk a step w^as heard in the hall. 
 
 ' Ah, there he is ! ' said Lucy ; ' now we'll ring for supper, and 
 I'll go and get ready.' 
 
 Dora sat alone for a few minutes, and then David came in. 
 
 'Ah ! Dora, this is nice. Lucy says you will stay to supper. 
 "We get so busy, you and I, we see each other much too seldom.' 
 
 He spoke in his most cordial, brotherly tone, and, standing on 
 the rug with his back to the fire, he looked down upon her with 
 evident pleasure. 
 
 As for her, though the throb of her young passion had been 
 so soon and so sternly silenced, it was still happiness to her to be 
 in the same room with David Grieve, and any unusual kindness 
 from him, or a long talk with him, would often send her back to 
 her little room in Ancoats stored with a cheerful warmth of soul 
 which helped her through many days. For of late years she had 
 been more liable than of old to fits of fretting— fretting about her 
 father, about her own sins and other people's, about the little 
 worries of her Sunday-school class, or the little rubs of church 
 work. The contact with a nature so large and stimulating, 
 though sometimes it angered and depressed her through the 
 influence of religious considerations, was yet on the whole of 
 infinite service to her, of more service than she knew. 
 
 ' Have you forgiven me for upsetting Sandy ? ' she asked him, 
 with a smile. 
 
 'I'm on the way to it. I left him just now prancing about 
 Lucy's bed, and making an abominable noise. She told him to 
 be quiet, whereupon he indignantly informed her that he was "a 
 dwagon hunting wats." So I imagine he hasn't had " the wrong 
 dinner" to-day.' 
 
 They both laughed. 
 
 • And you have been in Ancoats?' 
 
 * Yes,' said David, tossing back his black hair with an ani- 
 mated gesture, and thrusting his hands into his pockets. 'Yes 
 — we are getting on. We have got the whole of that worst 
 James Street court into our hands. We shall begin pulling down 
 directly, and the plans- for the new buildings are almost ready. 
 
CHAP. 11 MATUKITY 461 
 
 And we have told all the old tenants that they shall have a prior 
 claim on the new rooms if they choose to come back. Some will ; . 
 for a good many others of course we shall be too respectable, 
 though I am set on keeping the plans as simple and the rents as 
 low as possible.' 
 
 Dora sat looking at him with somewhat perplexed eyes. 
 
 Her Christianity had been originally of the older High Church 
 type, wherein the ideal of personal holiness had not yet been fused 
 with the ideal of social service. The care of the poor and needy 
 was, of course, indispensable to the Christian life ; but she 
 thought first and most of bringing them to church, and to the 
 blessing and efficacy of the sacraments ; then of giving them 
 money when they were sick, and assuring to them the Church's 
 benediction in dying. The modern fuss about overcrowded 
 houses and insanitary conditions — the attack on bricks and 
 mortar — the preaching of temperance, education, thrift — these 
 things often seemed to Christian people of Dora's type and day, 
 if they spoke their true minds, to be tinged with atheism and 
 secularism. They were jealous all the time for something better. 
 They instinctively felt that the preeminence of certain ideas, 
 most dear to them, was threatened by this absorption in the 
 detail of the mere human life. 
 
 Something of this it was that passed vaguely through Dora's 
 mind as she sat listening to David's further talk about his 
 Ancoats scheme ; and at last, influenced, perhaps, by a half- 
 conscious realisation of her demur — it was only that — he let it 
 drop. 
 
 ' What is that book ? ' he said, his quick eye detecting the 
 little paper-covered volume on Lucy's table. And, stepping 
 forward, he took it up. 
 
 Dora unexpectedly found her voice a little husky as she 
 replied, and had to clear her throat. 
 
 ' It is a book I brought for Lucy. Sandy is a baptized Chris- 
 tian, David. Lucy wants to teach him, so I brought her this 
 little Catechism, which Father Eussell recommends.' 
 
 David turned the book over in silence. He read a passage 
 concerning the Virgin Mary ; another, in which the child asked 
 about the number and names of the Archangels, gave a detailed 
 answer ; another in which Dissenters were handled with an 
 acrimony which contrasted with a general tone of sweetness and 
 unction. 
 
 David laid it down on the mantelpiece. 
 
 'No, Dora, I can't have Sandy taught out of this.' 
 
 He spoke with dignity, but with an endeavour to make his 
 tone as gentle as possible. 
 
 Dora was silent a moment ; then she broke out : 
 
 ' What will you teach him, then ? Is he to be a Christian at 
 aU?' 
 
 * In a sense, yes ; with all my heart, yes ! so far, at least, as 
 his father has any share in the matter. ' 
 
463 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 ' And is his mother to have no voice ? ' Dora went on with 
 growing bitterness and hurry. ' And as for me— why did you 
 let me be his godmother ? I take it seriously, and I may do 
 nothing.' ,.-,■, 
 
 ' You may do everything,' he said, sittmg down beside her, 
 * except teach him extreme matter of this kind, which, because I 
 am what I am, will make a critic of the child before his time. I 
 am not a bigot, Dora I I shall not interfere with Lucy ; she 
 would not teach him in this way. She talks to him ; and she 
 instinctively feels for me, and what she says comes softly and 
 vaguely to him. It is different with things like this, set down in 
 black and white, and to be learnt by heart. You must remember 
 that half of it seems to me false history, and some of it false 
 morals.' 
 
 He looked at her anxiously. The jarring note was hateful to ' 
 him. He had always taken for granted that Lucy was under 
 Dora's influence religiously — had perhaps made it an excuse for 
 a gradual withdrawal of his inmost mind from his wife, which 
 in reality rested on quite other reasons. But his heart was full 
 of dreams about his son. He could not let Dora have her way 
 
 ' Oh, how different it is,' cried Dora, in a low, intense voice, 
 twining her hands together, ' from what I once thought ! ' 
 
 ' No ! ' he said, vehemently, ' there is no real difference be- 
 tween you and me— there never can be ; teach Sandy to be good 
 and to love you ! That's what I should like ! ' 
 
 His eyes were full of emotion, but he smiled. Dora, however, 
 could not respond. The inner tension was too strong. She 
 turned away, and began fidgeting with Lucy's workbag. 
 
 Then a small voice and a preparatory turmoil were heard 
 outside. 
 
 ' Auntie Dora ! Auntie Dora ! ' cried Sandy, rushmg in with 
 a hop, skip, and a jump, and flourishing a picture-book, ' look 
 at zese pickers ! Dat's a buffalo— most es^rornary animal, the 
 buffalo ! ' 
 
 ' Come here, rascal ! ' called his father, and the child ran up 
 to him. David knelt to look at the picture, but the little fellow 
 suddenly dropped it and his interest in it, in a way habitual to 
 him, twined one arm round his father's neck, laid his cheek 
 against David's, crossed one foot over the other, and, thumb in 
 mouth, looked Dora up and down with his large, observant eyes. 
 
 Dora, melted, wooed him to come to her. Her adoration of 
 him was almost on a level with David's. Sandy took a minute 
 to think whether he should leave his father. Then he climbed 
 her knee, and patronised her on the subject of buffaloes and 
 giraffes—' I tan't 'splain everything to you, Auntie Dora ; you'll 
 know when you're older'— till Lucy and supper came together. 
 And supper was brightened both by Lucy's secret content in the 
 prospect of the Benet's Park visit and by the child's humours. 
 When Dora said good night to her host, their manner to each 
 
CHAP II MATURITY 4^3 
 
 other had its usual fraternal quality. Nevertheless, the woman 
 carried away with her both resentment and distress. 
 
 About a fortnight later David and Lucy started one fine 
 October afternoon for Benet's Park. The cab was crowded with 
 Lucy's luggage, and David, in new clothes to please his wife, felt 
 himself, as the cab door closed upon them, a trapped and mise- 
 rable man. 
 
 What had possessed Lord Driffield to send that unlucky note ? 
 For Lord Driffield himself David bad a grateful and real affection. 
 Ever since that whimsical scholar had first taken kindly notice 
 of the boy-tradesman, there had been a growing friendship 
 between the two ; and of late years Lord Driffield's interest in 
 David's development and career had become particularly warm 
 and cordial. He had himself largely contributed to the subtler 
 sides of that development, had helped to refine the ambitions 
 and raise the standards of the growing intellect ; his advice, 
 owing to his lifelong commerce with and large possession of 
 books, had often been of great practical use to the young man ; 
 his library had for years been at David's service, both for refe- 
 rence and borrowing ; and he had supplied his favourite with 
 customers and introductions in a large percentage of the Uni- 
 versity towns both at home and abroad, a social milieu where 
 Lord Driffield was more at home and better appreciated than in 
 any other. The small delicately featured man, whose distin- 
 guished face, with its abundant waves of silky hair — once ruddy, 
 now a goldenish white — presided so oddly over an incorrigible 
 shabbiness of dress, had become a familiar figure in David's life. 
 Their friendship, of course, was limited to a very definite region 
 of thought and relation ; but they corresponded freely, when 
 they were apart, on matters of literature, bibliography, some- 
 times of politics ; and no sooner was the Earl at Benet's Park 
 than David had constant calls from him in his office at the back 
 of the nfhv spacious and important establishment in Prince's 
 Street. 
 
 But Lord Driffield, as we know, had managed his mind better 
 than his marriage, and his savoir vivre was no match for his 
 learning. He bore his spouse and his country-gentleman life 
 patiently enough in general ; but every now and then he fell 
 into exasperation. His wife flooded him too persistently, per- 
 haps, with cousins and grandees of the duller sort, whose ideas 
 seemed to him as raw as their rent-rolls were large — till he 
 rebelled. Then he would have Ms friends ; selecting them more 
 or less at random from up and down the ranks of literature and 
 science, till Lady Driffield raised her eyebrows, invited a certain 
 number of her own set to keep her in countenance, and made up 
 her mind to endure. At the end of the ordeal Lord Driffield 
 generally made the rueful reflection that it had not gone off well. 
 But he felt the better and digested the better for the self-asser- 
 tion of it, and it was periodically renewed. 
 
464 THE HISTORY OP DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 David and Lucy Grieve had been asked in some such moment 
 of domestic annoyance. The Earl had seen ' Grieve's wife ' twice, 
 and hastily remembered that she seemed 'a presentable little 
 person.' He was constitutionally indifferent to and contemptuous 
 of women. But lie imagined that it would please David to bring 
 his wife ; and he was perhaps tolerably certain, since no one, be 
 he rake or savant, possesses an historical name and domain 
 without knowing it, that it would please the bookseller's wife to 
 be invited. 
 
 David suspected a good deal of this, for he knew his man 
 pretty well. As he sat opposite to Lucy in the railway carriage 
 — first-class, since she felt it incongruous to go in anything else 
 — he recalled certain luncheons at Benet's Park, when he had 
 been doing a bit of work in the library during the family sojourn. 
 Certainly Lucy did not realise at all how formidable these aristo- 
 cratic women could be ! 
 
 And his pride — at bottom the workman's pride — was made 
 uncomfortable by his wife's newness. New hat, new dress, new 
 gloves ! Himself too ! It annoyed him that Lady Driffield 
 should be so plainly informed that great pains had been taken 
 for her. He felt irritable and out of gear. Being neither self- 
 conscious nor awkward, he became both for the moment, out of 
 sympathy with Lucy. 
 
 Yet Lucy was supremely happy as they sped along to Staly- 
 bridge. Suppose her father heard of it ! She could no doubt 
 insure his knowing ; but it might set his back up still more, 
 make him more mad than before with her and David. Eight 
 years and more since he had spoken to her, and the other day, 
 when he had seen her coming in Deansgate, he had crossed to 
 the other side of the street ! — Were those sleeves of her evening 
 dress quite right? They were not caught down, she thought, 
 quite in the right place. No doubt there would be time before 
 dinner to put in a stitch. And she did hope that pleatfrom the 
 neck would look all right. It was peculiar, but Miss Helby had 
 assured her it was much worn. Would there be many titled 
 people, she wondered, and would all the ladies vrear diamonds ? 
 She thought disconsolately of the little black enamelled locket 
 and the Roman pearls, which were all the adornments she pos- 
 sessed. 
 
 After a short journey they alighted at their station as the 
 dusk was beginning. 
 
 ' Are you for Benet's Park, m'm ? ' said the porter to Lucy. 
 ' All right ! — the carriage is just outside.' 
 
 Lucy held herself an inch taller, and waited for David to 
 come back from the van with their two new portmanteaus. 
 
 Meanwhile she noticed two other groups of people, whose 
 bags and rugs were being appropriated by a couple of powdered 
 footmen — a husband and wife, and a tall military-looking man 
 accompanied by two ladies. The two ladies belonged to the 
 height of fashion — of that Lucy was certain, as she stole an in- 
 
CHAP. II MATURITY 465 
 
 timidated glance at tlie cut of their tailor-made gowns and the 
 costliness of the fur cloak which one of them carried. As for the 
 other lady, could she also be on her way to Benet's Park — with 
 this uncouth figure, this mannish height and breadth, this com- 
 plete lack of waist, these large arms and hands, and the over- 
 ample garments and hat, of green cashmere slashed with yellow, 
 in which she was marvellously arrayed ? Yet she seemed entirely 
 at her ease, which was more than Lucy was, and her little dark 
 husband was already talking with the tall ladies. 
 
 David, having captured the luggage, was accosted by one of 
 the footmen, who then came up to Lucy and took her bag. She 
 and David followed in his wake, and found themselves mingling 
 with the other five persons, who were clearly to be their fellow- 
 guests. 
 
 As they stood outside the station door, the elder of the two 
 ladies turned and ran a scrutinising eye over Lucy and the person 
 in sage green following her ; then she said rapidly to the gentle- 
 man with her : 
 
 ' Now, remember Mathilde can't go outside, and I prefer to 
 have her with me.' 
 
 ' Well I suppose there'll be room in the omnibus,' said he, 
 shortly. ' I shall go in the dog-cart and get a smoke. By George! 
 those are good horses of Driffield's ! And they are not the pair I 
 sent him over from Ireland in the autumn either.' 
 
 He went down the steps, patted and examined the horses, and 
 threw a word or two to the coachman. Lucy, palpitating with 
 excitement and alarm, felt a corresponding awe of the person 
 who could venture such familiarities even with the servants and 
 live-stock of Benet's Park. 
 
 The servant let down the steps of the smart omnibus with its 
 impatient steeds. The two tall ladies got in. 
 
 ' Mathilde ! ' called the elder. 
 
 A httle maid, dressed in black, and carrying a large dressing- 
 bag, hurried down the steps before the remaining guests, and 
 was helped in by the footman. The lady in sage green smiled at 
 her husband — a sleepy, humorous smile. Then she stepped in, 
 the footman touching his hat to her as though he knew her. 
 
 ' Any maid, m'm ? ' said the man to Lucy, as she was follow- 
 ing. 
 
 ' No — oh no ! ' said Lucy, stumbling in. * Give me my bag, 
 please.' 
 
 The man gave it to her, and timidly looking round her she 
 settled herself in the smallest space and the remotest corner she 
 could. 
 
 When the carriage rolled off, the lady in green looked out of 
 window for a while at the dark flying fields and woods, over 
 which the stars were beginning to come out. 
 
 ' Aj*e you a stranger in these parts, or do you know Benet's 
 Park already ? ' she said presently to Lucy, who was next her, Itj 
 a pleasant, nonchalant way. 
 
466 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book xv 
 
 * I have never been here before, ' said Lucy, dreading'somehow 
 the sound of her own voice ; ' but my husband is well acquainted 
 with the family.' 
 
 She was pleased with her own phrase, and began to recover 
 herself. The lady said no more, however, but leant back and 
 apparently went to sleep. The tall ladies presently did the same. 
 Lucy's depression returned as the silence lasted. She supposed 
 that it was aristocratic not to talk to people till you had been 
 introduced to them. She hoped she w^ould be introduced when 
 they reached Benet's Park. Otherwise it w^ould be awkward 
 staying in the same house. 
 
 Then she fell into a dream, imagining herself with a maid — 
 ordering her about deliciously — saying to the handsome footman, 
 ' My maid has my wraps ' — and then with the next jolt of the 
 carriage waking up to the humdrum and unwelcome reality. 
 And David might be as rich as anybody ! Familiar resentments 
 and cravings stirred in her, and her drive became even less of a 
 pleasure than before. As for David, he spent the whole of it in 
 lively conversation with the small dark man, beside the window. 
 
 The carriage paused a moment. Then great gates were swung 
 back and in they sped, the horses stepping out smartly now that 
 they were within scent of home. There was a darkness as of 
 thick and lofty trees, then dim opening stretches of park ; lastly 
 a* huge house, mirage-like in the distance, wdth rows of lighted 
 windows, a crackling of crisp gravel, the sound of the drag, and 
 a pomp of opening doors. 
 
 ' Shall I take your bag, Madam ? ' said a magnificent person, 
 bending towards Lucy, as, clinging to her possession, she followed 
 the lady in green into the outer hall. 
 
 'Oh no, thank you ! at least, shall I find it again ?' said the 
 frightened Lucy, looking in front of her at the vast hall, with its 
 tall lamps and statues and innumerable doors. 
 
 ' It shall be sent upstairs for you. Madam,' said the magnifi- 
 cent person gravely, and, as Lucy thought, severely. 
 
 She submitted, and looked round for David. Oh, where 
 was he ? 
 
 ' This is a fine hall, isn't it ? ' said the lady in green beside 
 her. 'Bad period — but good of its kind. What on earth do 
 they spoil it for with those shocking modern portraits ? ' 
 
 Such assurance — combined with such garments — in such a 
 house — it was nothing short of a miracle I 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 'Now, Lavinia, do be kind to young Mrs. Grieve. She is evi- 
 dently as shy as she can be. ' 
 
 So spoke Lord Driffield, with some annoyance in his voice, as 
 he looked into his wife's room after dressing for dinner. 
 
 ' I suppose she can amuse herself like other people,' said Lady 
 
CHAP. Ill MATURITY 467 
 
 Driffield. She was standing by the fire warming a satin-shoed 
 foot. ' I have told Williams to leave all the houses open to- 
 morrow. And there's church, and the pictures. The Danbys 
 and the rest of us are going over to Lady Herbart's for tea.' 
 
 A cloud came over Lord Driffield's face. He made some 
 impatient exclamation, which was muffied by his white beard and 
 moustache, and walked back to his own room. 
 
 Meanwhile Lucy, in another corridor of the great house, was 
 standing before a long glass, looking herself up and down in a 
 tumult of excitement and anxiety. 
 
 She had just passed through a formidable hour ! In a great 
 gallery, with polished floor, and hung with portraits of ancestral 
 Driffields, the party from the station had found Lady Driffield, 
 with five or six other people, who seemed to be already staying in 
 the house. Though the butler had preceded them, no names but 
 those of Lady Venetia Danby and Miss Danby had been an- 
 nounced ; and when Lady Drilfield, a tall effective-looking woman 
 with a cold eye and an expressionless voice, said a short ' How do 
 you do ? ' and extended a few fingers to David and his wife, no 
 names were mentioned, and Lucy felt a sudden depressing con- 
 viction that no names were needed. To the mistress of the house 
 they were just two nonentities, to whom she was to give bed and 
 board for two nights to gratify her husband's whims ; whether 
 their insignificant name happened to be Grieve, or Tompkins, or 
 Johnson, mattered nothing. 
 
 So Lucy had sat down in a subdued state of mind, and was 
 handed tea by a servant, while the Danbys — Colonel Danby, after 
 his smoke in the dog-cart, following close on the heels of his wife 
 and daughter — mixed with the group round the tea-table, and 
 much chatter, combined with a free use of Christian names, 
 liberal petting of Lady Driffield's Pomeranian, and an account by 
 Miss Danby of an accident to herself in the hunting-field, filled 
 up a half -hour which to one person, at least, had the qualities of 
 a nightmare. David was talking to the lady in green — to whom, 
 by the way, Lady Driffield had been distinctly civil. Once he 
 came over to relieve Lucy from a waterproof which was on her 
 knee, and to get her some bread and butter. But otherwise no 
 one took any notice of her, and she fell into a nervous terror lest 
 she should upset her cup, or drop her teaspoon, or scatter her 
 crumbs on the floor. 
 
 Then at last Lord Driffield, who had been absent on some 
 country business, which his soul loathed, had come in, and with 
 the cordiality, nay, affection of his greeting to David, and the 
 kindness of his notice of herself, little Lucy's spirits had risen at 
 a bound. She felt instinctively that a protector had arrived, and 
 even the formidable procession upstairs in the wake of Lady 
 Driffield, when the moment at last arrived for showing the guests 
 to their rooms, had passed off safely, Lucy throwing out an 
 agitated ' Thank you ! ' when Lady Driffield had even gone so far 
 as to open a door with her own bediamonded hand, which had 
 
468 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 Mrs. Grieve's plebeian appellations written in full upon the card 
 attached to it. 
 
 And now ? Was the dress nice ? Would it do ? Unluckily, 
 since Lucy's rise in the social scale which had marked the last 
 few years, the sureness of her original taste in dress had some- 
 what deserted her. Her natural instinct was for trimness and 
 closeness ; but of late her ideals had been somewhat confused by 
 a new and more important diessmaker with 'aesthetic' notions, 
 who had been recommended to her by the good-natured and 
 artistic wife of one of the College professors. Under the guidance 
 of this expert, she had chosen a ' Watteau sacque ' from a fashion- 
 plate, not quite daring, little tradesman's daughter as she felt 
 herself at bottom, to venture on the undisguised low neck and 
 short sleeves of ordinary fashionable dress. 
 
 She said fretfully to herself that she could see nothing in this 
 vast room. More and more candles did she light with a trembling 
 hand, trusting devoutly that no one would come in and discover 
 her with such an extravagant illumination. Then she tried each 
 of the two long glasses of the room in turn. Her courage 
 mounted. It was pretty. The terra-cotta shade was exquisite, 
 and no one could tell that the satin was cotton-backed. The 
 flowing sleeves and the pleat from the shoulder gave her dignity, 
 she was certain ; and she had done her hair beautifully. She 
 wished David would come in and see ! But his room was across 
 a little landing, which, indeed, seemed to be all their own, for it 
 was shut off from the passage they had entered from by an outer 
 door. There was, however, more than one door opening on to 
 the landing, and Lucy was so much afraid of her surroundings that 
 she preferred to wait till he came. 
 
 Meanwhile — what a bedroom ! Why, it was more gorgeous 
 than any drawing-room she had ever entered. Every article of 
 furniture was of old marqueterie, adapted to modern uses, the 
 appointments of the writing-table were of solid silver — Lucy had 
 eagerly ascertained the fact by looking at the ' marks ' — and as 
 for the towels, she simply could not have imagined that such 
 things were made ! Her little soul was in a whirl of envy, admi- 
 ration, pride. What tales she would have to tell Dora when they 
 got home ! 
 
 ' Are you ready ? ' said David, opening the door. ' I believe I 
 hear people going downstairs. ' 
 
 He came in arrayed in the new dress suit which became him 
 as well as anything else ; for he had a natural dignity which 
 absorbed and surmounted any novelty of circumstance or setting, 
 and was purely a matter of character, depending upon a mind 
 familiar with large interests and launched towards ideal aims. 
 He might be silent, melancholy, impracticable, but never meanly 
 self-conscious. It had rarely occurred to anyone to pity or con- 
 descend to David Grieve. 
 
 Lucy looked at him with uneasy pride. Then she glanced back 
 at her own reflection in the glass. 
 
GHAP. Ill MATURITY 469 
 
 * What do you think of it ? ' she asked him, eagerly. 
 
 * Magnificent ! ' said David, with all the sincerity of ignorance 
 — wishing, moreover, to make his wife pleased with herself. ' But 
 oughtn't you to have gloves instead of those things ? ' 
 
 He pointed doubtfully to the mittens on her arms. 
 
 ' Oh, David, don't say that ! ' cried Lucy, in despair. ' Miss 
 Helby said these were the right things. It's to be like an old 
 picture, don't you understand ? And I haven't got any gloves but 
 those I came in. Oh, don't be so disagreeable ! ' 
 
 She looked ready to cry. Poor David hastened to declare that 
 Miss Helby must be right, and that it was all very nice. Then 
 they blew out the candles and ventured forth. 
 
 ' Lord Driffield says that Canon Aylwin is coming,' said David, 
 examining some Hollar engravings on the wall of the staircase as 
 they descended, ' and the Dean of Bradford, who is staying with 
 him. I shall be glad to see Canon Aylwin.' 
 
 His face took a pleased meditative look. He was thinking of 
 Canon Aylwin's last volume of essays — of their fine scholarship, 
 their delicate, unique qualities of stj^le. As for Lucy, it seemed 
 to her that all the principalities and powers of this world were 
 somehow arraying themselves against her in that terrible drawing- 
 room they were so soon to enter. She set her teeth, held up her 
 head, and on they went. 
 
 Presently they found themselves approaching a glass door, 
 which opened into the central hall. Beyond it was a crowd of 
 figures and a buzz of talk, and at the door stood a tall person in 
 black with white gloves, holding a silver tray, from w^hich he 
 presented David with a button-hole. Then, with a manner at 
 once suave and impersonal, he held open the door, and the 
 husband and wife passed through. 
 
 ' Ah, my dear Grieve,' said Lord Driffield, laying his hand on 
 David's shoulder, ' come here and be introduced to Canon Aylwin. 
 I am delighted to have caught him for you.* 
 
 So David was swept away to the other side of the room, and 
 Lucy was left forlorn and stranded. It seemed to her an immense 
 party ; there were at least eight or ten fresh faces beyond those 
 she had seen already. . And just as she was looking for a seat 
 into which she might slip and hide herself. Lady Venetia Danby, 
 who was standing near, playing with a huge feather fan and 
 talking to a handsome young man, turned round by chance and, 
 seeing the figure in the bright-coloured ' Watteau^acgwe,' involun- 
 tarily put up her eyeglass to look at it. Instantly Lucy, conscious 
 of the eyeglass, and looking hurriedly round on the people near, 
 was certain that the pleat from the shoulder and the mittens were 
 irretrievably wrong and conspicuous, and that she had betrayed 
 herself at once by her dress as an ignoramus and an outsider. 
 Worst of all, the lady in green was in a sacque too ! — a shape- 
 less yellow thing of the most untutored and detestable make. 
 Mittens also ! drawn laboriously over the hands and arms of an 
 Amazon. Lucy glanced at Miss Danby beside her, then at a 
 
470 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iV 
 
 beautiful woman in pale pink across the room — at their slim 
 waists, the careless aplomb and grace with which the costly stuffs 
 and gleaming jewels were worn, and the white necks displayed — 
 and sank into a chair trembling and miserable. That the only 
 person to keep her in countenance sliould be that particular 
 person — that they two should thus fall into a class together, by 
 themselves, cut off from all the rest— it was too much ! Then, by 
 a quick reaction, some of her natural obstinacy returned upon 
 her. She held herself erect, and looked steadily round the room. 
 
 ' Mr. Edwardes — Mrs. Grieve,' said Lady Driffield's impassive 
 voice, speaking, as it seemed to Lucy, from a great height, as the 
 tall figure swept past her to introductions more important. 
 
 A young man bowed to Lucy, looked at her for a moment, 
 then, pulling his fair moustache, turned away to speak to Miss 
 Danby, who, in the absence of more stimulating suitors for her 
 smiles, was graciously pleased to bestow a few of them on Lord 
 Driffield's new agent. 
 
 ' Whom are we waiting for ? ' said Miss Danby, looking round 
 her, and slightly glancing at Lucy. 
 
 'Only the Dean, I believe,' said Mr. Edwardes, with a smile. 
 ' I never knew Dean Manley less than half an hour late in this 
 house. ' 
 
 A cold shiver ran through Lucy. Then they — she and David 
 —had been all but the last, had all but kept the whole of this 
 portentous gathering waiting for them. 
 
 In the midst of her new tremor the glass doors were again 
 thrown open, and in walked the Dean — a short, plain man, with 
 a mirthful eye, a substantial person, and legs which became his 
 knee-breeches. 
 
 ' Thirty-five minutes. Dean ! ' said the handsome youth, who 
 had been talking to Lady Venetia, as he held up his watch, 
 
 ' It is a remarkable fact, Reggie,' said the Dean, laying his 
 hand on the lad's shoulder, ' that your watch has gained per- 
 sistently ever since I was first acquainted with you. Ah, well, 
 keep it ahead, my boy. A diplomatist must be egged on some- 
 how.' 
 
 ' I thought the one condition of success in that trade was the 
 patience to do nothing,' said a charming voice. ' Don't interfere 
 with Reggie's prospects. Dean.' 
 
 ' Has he got any ? ' said the Dean, maliciously. ' My dear 
 Mrs. Wellesdon, you are a " sight for sair een." ' 
 
 And he pressed the new-comer's hand between both his own, 
 surveying her the while with a fatherly affection and admiration. 
 
 Lucy looked up, a curious envy at her heart. She saw the 
 beautiful lady in pink, who had come across the room to greet 
 the Dean. Was she beautiful ? Lucy hurriedly asked herself. 
 Perhaps not, in point of feature, but she held her head so nobly, 
 her colour was so subtle and lovely, her eye so speaking, and her 
 mouth so sweet, she carried about with her a preeminence so 
 natural and human, that beauty was in truth the only word that 
 
CHAP. Ill MATURITY 471 
 
 fitted her. Now, as the Dean passed on from her to some one 
 else, she glanced down at the little figure in terra-cotta satin, 
 and, with a kindly difiident expression, she sat down and began 
 to talk to Lucy. Marcia Wellesdon was a sorceress, and could 
 win whatever hearts she pleased. In a few moments she so 
 soothed Lucy's nervousness that she even beguiled from her some 
 bright and natural talk about the journey and the house, and 
 Lucy was rapidly beginning to be happy, when the signal for 
 dinner was given, and a general move began. 
 
 At dinner Mr. Edwardes bestowed his conversation for a 
 decent space of time — say, during the soup and fish — upon Mrs. 
 Grieve. Lucy, once more ill at ease, tried eagerly to propitiate 
 him by asking innumerable questions about the family, and the 
 pictures, and the estate, it being at once evident that he had an 
 intimate knowledge of all three. But as the family, the pictures, 
 and the estate were always with him, so to speak, made, indeed, 
 a burden which his shoulders had some difficulty in carrying, the 
 attractions of this vein of talk palled on the young agent— who 
 was himself a scion of good family, with his own social ambitions 
 — before long. He decided that Mrs. Grieve was pure middle- 
 class, not at all accustomed to dine in halls of pride, and much 
 agitated by her surroundings. The type did not interest him. 
 She seemed to be asking him to help her out of the mire, and as 
 one does not go into society to be benevolent but to be amused, 
 by the time the first entree was well in he had edged his chair 
 round, and was in animated talk with pretty little Lady Alice 
 Findlay, the daughter of the hook-nosed Lord-Lieutenant of the 
 county, who was seated at Lady Driffield's right hand. Lucy 
 noticed the immediate difference in tone, the easy variety of 
 topic, compared with her own sense of difficulty, and her heart 
 swelled with bitterness. 
 
 Then, to her horror, she saw that, from inattention and ignor- 
 ance of what might be expected, she had allowed the servants to fill 
 every single wineglass of the four standing at her right — positively 
 every one. Sherry, claret, hock, champagne — she was provided 
 with them all. She cast a hurried and guilty eye round the table. 
 Save for champagne, each lady's glasses stood immaculately 
 empty, and when Lucy came back to her own collection she could 
 bear it no longer. 
 
 ' Mr. Edwardes ! ' she said hastily, leaning over towards him. 
 
 The you'ng man turned abruptly. 'Yes,' he said, looking at 
 her in some surprise. 
 
 ' Oh, Mr. Edwardes ! can you ask some one to take these wine- 
 glasses away ? I didn't want any, and it looks so— so — dreadful ! ' 
 
 The agent thought that Mrs. Grieve was going to cry. As for 
 himself, his eye twinkled, and he had great difficulty to restrain 
 a burst of laughter. He called a footman near, and Lucy was 
 soon relieved of her fourfold incubus. 
 
 ' Oh, but you must save the champagne ! ' he said, and, bend- 
 ing his chair backward, he was about to recall the man, when 
 Lucy stopped him- 
 
473 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 * Don't — don't, please, Mr. Edwardes ! ' she said, in an agony. 
 
 He lifted his eyebrows good-humouredly, and desisted. Then 
 he asked her if he should give her some water, and when that 
 was done the episode apparently seemed to him closed, for he 
 turned away again, and looked out for fresh opportunities with 
 Lady Alice. Lucy, meanwhile, was left feeling herself even more 
 unsuccessful and more out of place than before, and ready to 
 sink with vexation. And how well David was getting on ! There 
 he was, between Mrs. Shepton and the beautiful lady in pink, 
 and he and Mrs. Wellesdon were deep in conversation, his dark 
 head bent gravely towards her, his face melting every now and 
 then into laughter or crossed by some vivid light of assent and 
 pleasure. Lucy's look travelled over the table, the orchids with 
 which it was covered, the lights, the plate, then to the Vandykes 
 behind the guests, and the great mirrors in between — came back 
 to the table, and passed from face to face, till again it rested 
 upon David. The conviction of her husband's handsome looks 
 and natural adequacy to this or any world, with which her sur- 
 vey ended, brought with it a strange mixture of feelings — half 
 pleasure, half bitterness. 
 
 ' Are you from this part of the world, may I ask ? ' said a voice 
 at her elbow. 
 
 She turned, and saw Colonel Danby, who was tired of devot- 
 ing himself to the wife of a neighbouring Master of Hounds — a 
 lady with white hair and white eyelashes, always apparently on 
 the point of sleep, even at the liveliest dinner-table — and was 
 now inclined to see what this little provincial might be made of. 
 
 ' Oh, yes ! we are from Manchester,' said Lucy, straightening 
 herself, and preparing to do her best. ' We live in Manchester — 
 at least, of course, not in Manchester. No one could do that.' 
 
 It w\as but three years since she had ceased to do it, but new 
 habits of speech grow apace when it is a matter of social prestige. 
 She was terribly afraid lest anybody should now think of them as 
 persons who lived over their shop. 
 
 'Ah! — suppose not,' said Colonel Danbj^, carelessly. 'Land 
 in Manchester, they tell me now, is almost as costly as it is in 
 London.' 
 
 Whereat Lucy went off at score, delighted to make Manchester 
 important and to produce her own information. She had an 
 aptitude for business gossip, and she chatted eagerly about the 
 price that So-and-So had paid for their new warehouses, and the 
 sum which report said the Corporation was going to spend on a 
 fine new street. 
 
 ' And of '"ourse many people don't like it. There's always 
 grumbling about the rates. But they should have public spirit, 
 shouldn't they? Are you acquainted with Manchester?' she 
 added, more timidly. 
 
 All this time Colonel Danby had been listening with half an 
 ear, and was much more assiduously trying to make up his mind 
 whether the little bourgeoise was pretty at all. She had rather a 
 
CHAP. Ill MATURITY 473 
 
 fine pair of eyes — he supposed she had made that dress in her 
 own back parlour. 
 
 ' Manchester ? I — oh, I have spent a night at the Queen'ss 
 Hotel now and then,' said the Colonel, with a yawn. ' What do 
 you do there ? Do you amuse yourself — eh ? ' 
 
 His smile was not pleasant. He had a florid face, with bad 
 lines round the eyes and a tyrannous mouth. His physical make 
 had been magnificent, but reckless living had brought on the 
 penalties of gout before their time. 
 
 Lucy was intimidated by the mixture of familiarity and 
 patronage in the tone. 
 
 ' Oh, yes,' she said, hurriedly ; ' we get all the best companies 
 from the London theatres, and there are very good concerts.' 
 
 ' And that kind of thing amuses you ? ' said the Colonel, still 
 examining her with the same cool, fixed glance. 
 
 'I like music very much,' stammered Lucy, and then fell 
 silent. 
 
 ' Do you know all these people here ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, dear, no ! ' she cried, feeling the very question male- 
 volent. ' I don't know any of them. My husband wishes to lead 
 a very retired life,' she added, bridling a little, by way of undoing 
 the effect of her admissions. 
 
 ' And you don't wish it ? ' 
 
 The disagreeable eyes smiled again. 
 
 ' Oh ! I don't know,' said Lucy. 
 
 Colonel Danby reflected that whatever his companion might 
 be, she was not amusing. 
 
 ' Have you noticed the gentleman opposite ? ' he inquired, 
 stifling another yawn. 
 
 Lucy timidly looked across. 
 
 ' It is — it is the Dean of Bradford, isn't it ? ' 
 
 ' Yes ; it's a comfort, isn't it, when one can know a man by 
 Ms clothes ! Do you see what his deanship has had for dinner ? ' 
 
 Lucy ventured another look, and saw that the Dean had in 
 front of him a plate of biscuits and a glass of water, and that the 
 condition of his knives and forks showed him to have hitherto 
 subsisted on this fare alone. 
 
 ' Is he so very — so very religious ? ' she said, wondering. 
 
 ' A saint in gaiters ? Well, I don't know. Probably the saint 
 has dined at one. Do you feel any inclination to be a saint, Mrs. 
 Grieve ? ' 
 
 Lucy could neither meet nor parry the banter of his look. She 
 only blushed. 
 
 'I wouldn't attempt it, if I were you,' he said, laughing. 
 * Those pretty brown eyes weren't meant for it. ' 
 
 Lucy suddenly felt as though she had been struck, so free and 
 cavalier was the tone. Her cheek took a deeper crimson, and she 
 looked helplessly across at David. 
 
 ' Little fool 1 ' thought the Colonel. ' But she has certainly 
 some points.' 
 
474 . THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 At that moment Lady Driffield gave the signal, and, with a 
 half-ironical bow to his companion, Colonel Danby rose, picked 
 up her handkerchief for her, and drew his chair aside to let her 
 pass. 
 
 Presently Lucy was sitting in a corner of the magnificent green 
 drawing-room, to which Lady Driffield had carelessly led the way. 
 In her vague humiliation and unhappiness, she craved that some 
 one should come and talk to her and be kind to her — even Mrs. 
 Shepton, who had addressed a few pleasant remarks to her on their 
 way from the dining-room. But Mrs. Shepton was absorbed by Lady 
 Driffield, who sat down beside her, and took some trouble to talk. 
 ' Then why not to me ? ' was Lucy's instinctive thought. For she 
 realised that she and Mrs. Shepton were socially not far apart. 
 Yet Lady Driffield had so far addressed about six words to Mrs. 
 David Grieve, while she was now bending her aristocratic neck to 
 listen to Mrs. Shepton, who was talking entirely at her ease, with 
 her arm round the back of a neighbouring chair, and, as it 
 seemed to Lucy, about politics. 
 
 The rest of the ladies, with the exception of the Master of 
 Hounds' wife, who sat in a chair by the fire and dozed, were all 
 either old friends or relations, and they gathered in a group on the 
 Aubusson rug in front of the fire, chatting merrily about their 
 common kindred, the visits they had paid, or were to pay, the 
 fate of their fathers and brothers in the recent election, ' the 
 Duke's ' terrible embarrassments, or ' Sir Alfred's ' yachting 
 party to Norway, of which little Lady Alice gave a sparkling 
 account. 
 
 In her chair on the outskirts of the talkers, Lucy sat painfully 
 turning over the leaves of a costly collection of autographs, which 
 lay on the table near her. Sometimes she tried to interest herself 
 in the splendid room, with its hangings of pale flowered silk, its 
 glass cases, full of historical relics, miniatures, and precious 
 things, representing the long and brilliant past of the house of 
 Driffield, the Sir Joshuas and Romnej-s, which repeated on the 
 walls the grace and physical perfection of some of the living 
 women below. But she had too few associations with anything 
 she saw to care for it, and, indeed, her mind was too wholly given 
 to her own vague, but overmastering sense of isolation and 
 defeat. If it were only bedtime ! 
 
 Mrs. Wellesdon glanced at the solitary figure from time to 
 time, but Lady Alice had her arm round ' Marcia's ' waist, and 
 kept close hold of her favourite cousin. At last, however, Mrs. 
 Wellesdon drew the young girl with her to the side of Lucy's 
 chair, and, sitting down by the stranger, they both tried to enter- 
 tain her, and to show her some of the things in the room. 
 
 Lucy brightened up at once, and thought them both the most 
 beautiful and fascinating of human beings. But her good fortune 
 was soon over, alas ! for the gentlemen came in, and the social 
 elements were once more redistributed. ' Reggie,' the young 
 diplomatist, freshly returned from Berlin, laid hold of his sister 
 
CHAP. Ill MATURITY 476 
 
 Marcia, and his cousin Lady Alice, and carried tliem off for a 
 family gossip into a corner of the room, whence peals of young 
 laughter were soon to be heard from him and Lady Alice. 
 
 Mr. Edwardes and Colonel Danby passed Mrs. Grieve by, in 
 quest of metal more attractive ; Lord Driffield, the Dean, Canon 
 Aylwin, and David stood absorbed in conversation ; while Lady 
 Driffield transferred her attentions to Mr. Shepton, and the 
 husband of the lady by the fire walked up to her, insisting, some- 
 what crossly, on waking her. Lucy was once more left alone. 
 
 ' Lavinia, haven't we done our duty to this apartment ? ' cried 
 Lord Driffield, impatiently ; ' it always puts me on stilts. The 
 library is ten times more comfortable. I propose an adjournment. ' 
 
 Lady Driffield shrugged her shoulders, and assented. So the 
 whole party, Lucy timidly attaching herself to Mrs. Shepton, 
 moved slowly through a long suite of beautiful rooms, till they 
 reached the great cedar-fitted library, which was Lord Driffield's 
 paradise. Here was every book to be desired of the scholar to 
 make him wise, and every chair to make him comfortable. Lord 
 Driffield went to one of the bookcases, and took a vellum-bound 
 book, found a passage in it, and showed it to David Grieve. 
 Canon Aylwin and the Dean pressed in to look, and they all fell 
 back into the recess of a great oriel, talking earnestly. 
 
 The others passed on into a conservatory beyond the library, 
 where was a billard-table, and many nooks for conversation amid 
 the cunning labyrinths of flowers. 
 
 Lucy sank into a cane chair, close to a towering mass of arum 
 lilies, and looked back into the library. Nobody in the conserva- 
 tory had any thought for her. They were absorbed in each other, 
 and a merry game of pyramids had been already organised. So 
 Lucy watched her husband wistfully. 
 
 What a beautiful face was that of Canon Aylwin, with whom 
 he was talking ! She could not take her eyes from its long, thin 
 outlines, the apostolic white hair, the eager eyes and quivering 
 mouth, contrasting with the patient courtesy of manner. Yet in 
 her present soreness and heat, the saintly charm of the old man'c 
 figure did somehow but depress her the more. 
 
 A little after ten it became evident that nothing could keep 
 the lady with the white eyelashes out of bed any longer, so the 
 billiard-room party broke up, and, with a few gentlemen in 
 attendance, the ladies streamed into the hall, and possessed them- 
 selves of bedroom candlesticks. The great house seemed to be 
 alive with talk and laughter as they strolled upstairs, the girls 
 making dressing-gown appointments in each other's rooms for a 
 quarter of an hour later. 
 
 When Lucy reached her own door she stopped awkwardly. 
 Lady Driffield walked on, talking to Marcia Wellesdon. But 
 Marcia looked back : 
 
 ' Good night, Mrs. Grieve.' 
 
 She returned, and pressed Lucy's hand kindly. * I am afraid 
 you must be tired,' she said ; ' you look so.' 
 
4^6 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book IV 
 
 Lady Driffield also shook hands, but, with constitutional 
 gauxiherie, she did not second Mrs. Wellesdon's remark ; she stood 
 by silent and stiff. 
 
 ' Oh, no, thank you,' said Lucy, hurriedly, * I am quite well.' 
 
 When she had disappeared, the other two walked on. 
 
 'What a stupid little thing!' said Lady Driffield. 'The 
 husband may be interesting — Driffield says he is — but I defy 
 anybody to get anything out of the wife.' 
 
 It occurred to Marcia that nobody had been very anxious to 
 make the attempt. But she only said aloud : 
 
 ' I'm sure she is very shy. What a pity she wears that kind of 
 dress ! She might be quite pretty in something else.' 
 
 Meanwhile Lucy, after shutting the outer door of their little 
 suite behind her, was overtaken as she opened that leading to her 
 own room by a sudden gust of wind coming from a back staircase 
 emerging on to their private passage, which she had not noticed 
 before. The candle was blown out, and she entered the room in 
 complete darkness. She groped for the matches, and found the 
 little stand ; but there were none there. She must have used the 
 last in the making of her great illumination before dinner. After 
 much hesitation, she at last summoned up courage to ring the 
 bell, groping her way to it by the help of the light in the passage. 
 
 For a long time no one came. Lucy, standing near her own 
 door, seemed to hear two sounds — the angry beating of her own 
 heart., and a murmur of far-off talk and jollity, conveyed to her 
 up the mysterious staircase, which apparently led to some of the 
 servants' quarters. 
 
 Fully five minutes passed ; then steps were heard approaching, 
 and a housemaid appeared. Lucy timidly asked for fresh 
 matches. The girl said ' Yes, ma'am, ' in an off-hand way, 
 looked at Lucy with a somewhat hostile eye, and vanished. 
 
 The minutes passed, but no matches were forthcoming. The 
 whirlpool of the lower regions, where the fun was growing 
 uproarious, seemed to have engulfed the messenger. At last 
 Lucy was fain to undress by the help of a glimmer of light from 
 her door left ajar, and after many stumbles and fumblings at 
 last crept, tired and wounded, into bed. This finale seemed to 
 her of a piece with all the rest. 
 
 As she lay there in the dark, incident after incident of her 
 luckless evening coming back upon her, her heart grew hungry 
 for David. Nay, her craving for him mounted to jealousy and 
 passion. After all, though he did get on so much better in grand 
 houses than she did, though they were all kind to him and de- 
 spised her, he was hers, her very own, and no one should take him 
 from her. Beautiful Mrs. Wellesdon might talk to him and make 
 friends with him, but he did not belong to any of them, but to 
 her, Lucy. She pined for the sound of his step — thought of 
 throwing herself into his arms, and seeking consolation there for 
 the pains of an habitual self-importance crushed beyond bearing. 
 
 But when that step was actually heard ouside, her mind veered 
 
CHAP. IV MATURITY 477 
 
 in an instant. She had made him come ; he would think she had 
 disgraced him ; he had probably noticed nothing, for a certain 
 absent-mindedness in society had grown upon him of late years. 
 No, she would hold her peace. 
 
 So when David, stepping softly and shading his candle, came 
 in, and called ' Lucy ' under his breath to see whether she might 
 be awake, Lucy pretended to be sound asleep. He waited a 
 minute, and then went out to change his coat and go down to the 
 smoking-room. 
 
 Poor little Lucy ! As she lay there in the dark, the tears 
 dropping slowly on her embroidered pillow, the issue of all her 
 mortification was a new and troubled consciousness about her 
 husband. Why this difference between them ? How was it that 
 he commanded from all who knew him either a warm sympathy or 
 an involuntary respect, while she — 
 
 She had gathered from some scraps of the talk round him 
 which had reached her that it was just those sides of his life— 
 those quixotic ideal sides — which were an offence and annoyance 
 to her that touched other people's imagination, opened their 
 hearts. And she had worried and teased him all these years ! 
 Not since the beginning. For, looking back, she could well 
 remember the days when it was still an intoxication that he 
 should have married her, when she was at once in awe of him 
 and foolishly, proudly, happy. But there had come a year when 
 David's profits from his business had amounted to over 2,000Z., 
 and when, thanks to a large loan pressed upon him by his 
 Unitarian landlord, Mr. Doyle, he had taken the new premises in 
 Prince's Street. And from that moment Lucy's horizon had 
 changed, her ambitions had hardened and narrowed ; she had 
 begun to be impatient with her husband, first, that he could not 
 make her rich faster, then, after their Tantalus gleam of wealth, 
 that he would put mysterious and provoking obstacles in the way 
 of their getting rich at all. 
 
 She meant to keep awake — to wait for him. But she began to 
 think of Sandy. He would be glad to see his ' mummy ' again ! 
 In fancy she pressed his cheek against her own burning one. He 
 and David were still alive — still hers — it was all right somehow. 
 Consolation began to steal upon her, and in ten minutes she was 
 asleep. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 When David came in later, he took advantage of Lucy's sleep to 
 sit up awhile in his own room. He was excited, and any strong 
 impression, in the practical loneliness of his deepest life, always 
 now produced the impulse to write. 
 
 * Midnight. — Lucy is asleep. I hope she has been happy and 
 they have been kind to her. I saw Mrs. Wellesdon talking to her 
 after dinner. She must have liked that. But at dinner she 
 seemed to be sitting silent a good deal. 
 
478 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 ' What a strange spectacle is this country-house life to anyone 
 bringing to it a fresh and unaccustomed eye ! "After all," said 
 Mrs. Wellesdon, "you must admit that the best of anything is 
 worth keeping. And in these country-houses, with all their draw- 
 backs, you do from time to time get the best of social intercourse, 
 a phase of social life as gay, complex, and highly finished as it 
 can possibly be made." 
 
 ' Certainly this applies to me to-night. When have I enjoyed 
 any social pleasure so much as my talk with her at dinner ? When 
 have I been conscious of such stimulus, such exhilaration, as the 
 evening's discussion produced in me ? In the one case, Mrs, 
 Wellesdon taught me what general conversation might be — how 
 nimble, delicate, and pleasure-giving: in the other, there was the 
 joy of the intellectual wrestle, mingled with a glad respect for 
 one's opponents. Perhaps nowhere, except on some such ground 
 and in some such circumstances as these, could a debate so 
 earnest have taken quite so wholesome a tone, so wide a range. 
 We were equals — debaters, not controversialists — friends, not 
 rivals — in the quest for truth. 
 
 ' Yet what drawbacks ! This army of servants — which might 
 be an army of slaves without a single manly right, so mute, im- 
 passive, and highly trained it is — the breeding of a tyrannous 
 temper in the men, of a certain contempt for facts and actuality 
 even in the best of the women. Mrs. Wellesdon poured out her 
 social aspirations to me. How naive and fanciful they were ! 
 They do her credit, but they will hardly do anyone else much 
 good. And it is evident that they mark her out in her own circle, 
 that they have brought her easily admiration and respect, so that 
 she has never been led to test them, as any one, with the same 
 social interest, living closer to the average realities and griefs of 
 life, must have been led to test them. 
 
 ' The culture, too, of these aristocratic women, when they are 
 cultured, is so curious. Quite unconsciously and innocently it 
 takes itself for much more than it is, merely by contrast with the 
 7niUeu — the milieu of material luxury and complication — in which 
 it moves. 
 
 ' But I am ungrateful. What a social power in the best sense 
 such a woman might become— a woman so sensitively endowed, 
 so nobly planned ! ' 
 
 David dropped his pen awhile. In the silence of the great 
 house, a silence broken only by the breathings of a rainy autumn 
 wind through the trees outside, his thought took that picture- 
 making intensity which was its peculiar gift. Images of what had 
 been in his own life, and what might have been — the dream of 
 passion which had so deeply marked and modified his manhood — 
 Elise, seen in the clearer light of his richer experience — his 
 married years — the place of the woman in the common life — on 
 these his mind brooded, one by one, till gradually the solemn 
 consciousness of opportunities for ever missed, of failure, of 
 
CHAP. IV MATURITY 479 
 
 limitation, evoked another, as solemn, but sweeter and more 
 touching, of human lives irrevocably dependent on his, of the 
 pathetic unalterable claim of marriage, the poverty and hopeless- 
 ness of all self-seeking, the essential wealth, rich and making 
 rich, of all self-spending. As he thought of his wife and son a 
 deep tenderness flooded the man's whole nature. With a long 
 sigh, it was as though he took them both in his arms, adjusting 
 his strength patiently and gladly to the familiar weight. 
 
 Then, by a natural reaction, feeling, to escape itself, passed 
 into speculative reminiscence and meditation of a wholly different 
 kind. 
 
 ' Our discussion to-night arose from an attack — if anyone so 
 gentle can be said to attack — made upon me by Canon Aylwin, 
 on the subject of those "Tracts on the New Testament "—tracts 
 of mine, of which we have published three, while I have two or 
 three more half done in my writing-table drawer. He said, with 
 a certain nervous decision, that he did not wish to discuss the 
 main question, but he would like to ask me. Could anyone be so 
 sure of supposed critical and historical fact as to be clear that he 
 was right in proclaiming it, when the proclamation of it meant 
 the inevitable disturbance in his fellow-men of conceptions 
 whereon their moral life depended ? It was certain that he could 
 destroy; it was most uncertain, even to himself, whether he could 
 do anything else, with the best intentions ; and, in ninety-nine 
 eases out of a hundred, ought not the certainty of doing a moral 
 mischief to outweigh, with any just and kindly mind, the much 
 feebler and less solid certainty he may imagine himself to have 
 attained with regard to certain matters of history and criticism ? 
 
 'It was the old question of the rights of "heresy," the 
 function of the individual in the long history of thought. We 
 fell into sides : Lord Driffield and I against the Dean and 
 Canon Aylwin. The Dean did not, indeed, contribute much. 
 He sat with his square powerful head bent forward, throwing in 
 a shrewd comment here and there, mainly on the logical course 
 of the argument. But when we came to the main question, as 
 we inevitably did, he withdrew altogether, though he listened. 
 
 '"No," he said, "no. I am not competent. It has not 
 been my line in life. I have found more than enough to tax 
 my strength in the practical administration of the goods of 
 Christ. All such questions I leave, and must leave, to experts, 
 such experts as " — and he mentioned the names of some of the 
 leading scholars of the English Church — " or as my friend here," 
 and he laid his hand affectionately on Canon Aylwin's knee, 
 
 'Strange! He leaves to experts such questions as those of 
 the independence, authenticity, and trustworthiness of the 
 Gospel records ; of the culture and idiosyncrasies of the first 
 two centuries as tending to throw light on those records ; of the 
 earliest growth of dogma, as, thanks mainly to German labour, 
 it may now be exhibited within the New Testament itself. In 
 
480 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book IV 
 
 a Church of private judgment, he takes all this at second hand, 
 after having vowed at his ordination "to be diligent in such 
 studies as help to the knowledge of the Scriptures " ! 
 
 ' Yet a better, a more God-fearing, a more sincere, and, 
 within certain lines, a more acute man than Dean Manley it 
 would certainly be difficult to find at the present time within 
 the English Church. It is an illustration of the dualism in which 
 so many minds tend to live, divided between two M-orlds, two 
 standards, two wholly different modes of thought— the one ap- 
 plied to religion even in its intellectual aspect, the other applied 
 to all the rest of existence. Yet— is truth divided ? 
 
 ' To return to Canon Aylwin. I could only meet his reproach, 
 which he had a special right to make, for he has taken the 
 kindliest interest in some of the earlier series of our " Workmen's 
 Tracts," by going back to some extent to first principles. I 
 endeavoured to argue the matter on ground more or less common 
 to us both. If both knowledge and morality have only become 
 possible for man by the perpetual action of a Divine spirit on 
 his since the dawn of conscious life ; if this action has taken 
 effect in human history, as, broadly speaking, the Canon would 
 admit, through a free and constant struggle of opposites, whether 
 in the realm of interest or the realm of opinion ; and if this 
 struggle, perpetually reconciled, perpetually renewed, is the 
 divinely ordered condition, nay, if you will, the sacred task of 
 human life,— how can the Christian, who clings, above all men, 
 to the victory of the Divine in the human, who, moreover, in 
 the course of his history has affronted and resisted all possible 
 "authorities" but that of conscience— how can he lawfully 
 resent the fullest and largest freedom of speech, employed 
 disinterestedly and in good faith, on the part of his brother 
 man ? The truth must win ; and it is only through the free life 
 of the spirit that she has hitherto prevailed. So much, at least, 
 the English Churchman must hold. 
 
 It comes to this : must there be no movement of thought 
 because the individual who lives by custom and convention may 
 at least temporarily suffer? Yet the risks of the individual 
 throughout nature— so far we w^re agreed— are the correlative 
 of his freedom and responsibility. 
 
 ' "Ah, well," said the dear old man at last, with a change 
 of expression which went to my heart, so wistful and spiritual it 
 was, "perhaps I have been faithless; perhaps the Christian 
 minister would do better to trust the Lord with His own. But 
 before we leave the subject, let me say, once for all, that I have 
 read all yonr tracts, and weighed most carefully all that they 
 contain. The matter of them bears on what for me has been the 
 study of many years, and all I can say is that I regard your 
 methods of reasoning as unsound, and your conclusions as 
 wholly false. T have been a literary man from my youth as well 
 as a theologian, and I completely dissent from your literary judg- 
 ments. I believe that if you had not been already possessed by 
 
CHAP, iv MATURITY 481 
 
 a hostile philosophy — which will allow no space for miracle and 
 revelation — you would not have arrived at them. I am old and 
 you are young. Let me bear my testimony while there is time. 
 I have taken a great interest in you and your work." 
 
 ' He spoke with the most exquisite courtesy and simplicity, 
 his look was dignified and heavenly. I felt like kneeling to ask 
 his blessing, even though he could only give it in the shape of 
 a prayer for my enlightenment. 
 
 ' But now, alone with conscience, alone with God, how does 
 the matter stand ? The challenge of such a life and conviction 
 as Canon Aylwin's is a searching one. It bids one look deep 
 into one's self, it calls one to truth and soberness. What I 
 seem to see is that he and I both approach Christianity with a 
 prepossession, with, as he says, "a philosophy." His is a pre- 
 possession in favour of a system of interference from without, 
 by Divine or maleficent powers, for their own ends, wath the 
 ordinary sequences of nature — which once covered, one may say, 
 the whole field of human thought and shaped the whole horizon 
 of humanity. From the beginning of history this prepossession 
 — which may be regarded in all its phases as an expression of 
 man's natural impatience to form a working hypothesis of things 
 — has struggled with the " impulse to know." And slowly, 
 irrevocably, from age to age the impulse to know has beaten 
 back the impulse to imagine, has confined the prepossession of 
 faith within narrower and narrower limits, till at last it is even 
 preparing to deny it the guidance of religion, which it has so 
 long claimed. For the impulse of science, justified by the long 
 wrestle of centuries, is becoming itself religious, — and there is a 
 new awe rising on the brow of Knowledge. 
 
 ' My prepossession— but let the personal pronoun be merely 
 understood as attaching me to that band of thinkers, "of all 
 countries, nations, and languages," whose pupil and creature I 
 am — is simply that of science, of the organised knowledge of the 
 race. It is drawn from the whole of experience, it governs with- 
 out dispute every department of thought, and without it, in fact, 
 neither Canon Aylwin nor I could think at all. 
 
 ' Moreover, I humbly believe that I desire the same spiritual 
 goods as he : holiness, the knowledge of God, the hope of immor- 
 tality. But while for him these things are bound up with the 
 maintenance of the older prepossession, for me there is no such 
 connection at all. 
 
 ' And again, I seem to see that when this intellect of his, so 
 keen, so richly stored, approaches the special ground of Christian 
 thought, it changes in quality. It becomes wholly subordinate 
 to the affections, to the influences of education and habitual 
 surroundings. Talk to him of Dante, of the influence of the bar- 
 barian invasions on the culture and development of Europe, of 
 the Oxford movement, you will find in him an historical sense, 
 a delicate accuracy of perception, a luminous variety of statement, 
 which carry you with h?m into the very heart of the truth. But 
 
482 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 discuss with him the critical habits and capacity of those earliest 
 Christian writers, on whose testimony so much of the Cliristian 
 canon depends— ask him to separate the strata of material in the 
 ISIew Testament, according to their relative historical and ethical 
 value, under the laws which he would himself apply to any other 
 literature in the world— invite him to exclude this as legendary 
 and that as accretion, to distinguish between the original kernel 
 and that which the fancy or the theology of the earliest hearers 
 inevitably added— and you will feel that a complete change has 
 come over the mind. However subtle and precise his arguments 
 may outwardly look, they are at bottom the arguments of affec- 
 tion, of the special pleader. He has fenced off the first century 
 from the rest of knowledge ; has invented for all its products 
 alike special criteria and a special perspective. He cannot 
 handle the New Testament in the spirit of science, for he ap- 
 proaches it on his knees. The imaginative habit of a lifetime has 
 decided for him ; and you ask of him what is impossible. 
 
 '"An end must come to scepticism somewhere!" he once 
 said in the course of our talk. "Faith must take her leap— you 
 know as well as I ! — if there is to be faith at all." 
 
 ' Yes, but where— i\t what point ? Is the clergyman who talks 
 with sincere distress about infidel views of Scripture and preaches 
 against them, while at the same time he could not possibly give 
 an intelligible account of the problem of the Synoptic Gospels as 
 it now presents itself to the best knowledge, or an outline of the 
 case pressed by science for more than half a century with in- 
 creasing force and success against the historical character of St. 
 John's Gospel— is he justified in making his ignorance the leaping- 
 point ? 
 
 * Yet the upshot of all our talk is that I am restless and op- 
 pressed. 
 
 ' ... I sit and think of these nine years since Berkeley and 
 sorrow first laid hold of me. Berkeley rooted in me the concep- 
 tion of mind as the independent antecedent of all experience, and 
 none of the scientific materialism, which so troubles Ancrum that 
 he will ultimately take refuge from it in Catholicism, affects me. 
 But the ethical inadequacy of Berkeley became very soon plain to 
 me. I remember I was going one day through one of the worst 
 slums of Ancoats, when a passage in his examination of the origin 
 of evil occurred to me : 
 
 ' ' ' But we should further consider that the very blemishes 
 and defects of nature are not without their use, in that they make 
 an agreeable sort of variety, and augment the beauty of the rest 
 of the creation, as shades in a picture serve to set off the brighter 
 and more enlightened parts." 
 
 ' I had just done my best to save a little timid scarecrow of a 
 child, aged about six, from the blows of its brutal father, who 
 had already given it a black eye — my heart blazed within me,— 
 and from that moment Berkeley had no spell for me. 
 
CHAP. IV MATURITY 483 
 
 ' Then came that moment when, after my marriage, haunted 
 as I was by the perpetual oppression of Manchester's pain and 
 poverty, the Christian mythology, the Christian theory with all 
 its varied and beautiful flowerings in human life, had for a time 
 an attraction for me so strong that Dora naturally hoped every- 
 thing, and I felt myself becoming day by day more of an orthodox 
 Christian. What checked the tendency I can hardly now remem- 
 ber in detail. It was a converging influence of books and life- 
 no doubt largely helped, with regard to the details of Christian 
 belief, by the pressure of the German historical movement, as I 
 became more and more fully acquainted with it. 
 
 ' At any rate, St. Damian's gradually came to mean nothing 
 to me, though I kept, and keep still, a close working friendship 
 with most of the people there. But I am thankful for that 
 Christian phase. It enabled me to realise as nothing else could 
 the strength of the Christian case. 
 
 ' And since then it has been a long and weary journey through 
 many paths of knowledge and philosophy, till of late years the 
 new English phase of Kantian and Hegelian thought, which has 
 been spreading in our universities, and which, is the outlet of 
 men who can neither hand themselves over to authority, like 
 Newman, nor to a scientific materialism, like Clifford and 
 Haeckel, nor to a mere patient nescience in the sphere of meta- 
 physics, like Herbert Spencer, has come to me with an ever- 
 increasing power of healing and edification. 
 
 'That the spiritual principle in nature and man exists and 
 governs ; that mind cannot be explained out of anything but 
 itself ; that the human consciousness derives from a universal 
 consciousness, and is thereby capable both of knowledge and of 
 goodness ; that the phenomena and history of conscience are the 
 highest revelation of God ; that we are called to co-operation in 
 a divine work, and in spite of pain and sin may find ground for 
 an infinite trust, covering the riddle of the individual lot, in the 
 history and character of that work in man, so far as it has gone 
 —these things are deeper and deeper realities to me. They 
 govern my life ; they give me peace ; they breathe to me hope. 
 
 ' But the last glow, the certainties, the vision, of faith ! Ah ! 
 me, I believe that He is there, yet my heart gropes in darkness. 
 All that is personality, holiness, compassion in us, must be in 
 Him intensified beyond all thought. Yet I have no familiarity 
 of prayer. I cannot use the religious language which should be 
 mine without a sense of unreality. My heart is athirst. 
 
 'And can religion possibly depend upon a long process of 
 thought ? How few can think their way to Him— perhaps none, 
 indeed, by the logical intellect alone. He reveals himself to the 
 simple. Speak to me, to me also, my Father ! ' 
 
 Sunday morning broke fresh and golden after a wet night. 
 Lucy lay still in the early dawn, thinking of the day that had to 
 be faced, feeling more cheerful, however, wdth the refreshment 
 
484 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 of sleep, and inclined to hope that she might have got over the 
 worst, and that better things might be in store for her. 
 
 So that when David said to her, ' You poor little person, did 
 they eat you up la-^t night — Lady Driffield and her set ? ' she only 
 answered evasively that Mrs. Wellesdon had been nice, but that 
 Lady Driffield had very bad manners, and she was sure every- 
 body thought so. 
 
 To which David heartily assented. Then Lucy put her 
 question : 
 
 ' Did you think, when you looked at me last night at dinner, 
 that I — that I locked nice?' she said, flushing, yet driven on by 
 an inward smart. 
 
 ' Of course I did ! ' David declared. ' Perhaps you should 
 hold yourself up a little more. The women here are so asto- 
 nishingly straight and tall, like young poplars.' 
 
 ' Mrs. Wellesdon especially,' Lucy reflected, with a pang. 
 
 'But you thought I — had done my hair nicely?' she said 
 desperately. 
 
 ' Very ! And it was the prettiest hair there ! ' he said, 
 smoothing back the golden brown curls from her temple. 
 
 His compliment so delighted her that she dressed and pre- 
 pared to descend to breakfast with a light heart. She was not 
 often now so happily susceptible to a word of praise from him ; 
 she was more exacting than she had once been, but since her 
 acquaintance with Lady Driffield she had been brought low ! 
 
 And her evil fortune returned upon her, alas, at breakfast, 
 and throughout the day. Breakfast, indeed, seemed to her a 
 more formidable meal than any. For people straggled in, and 
 the ultimate arrangement of the table seemed entirely to depend 
 upon the personal attractiveness of individuals, upon whether 
 they annexed or repelled new-comers. Lucy found herself at 
 one time alone and shivering in the close neighbourhood of Lady 
 Driffield, who was intrenched behind the tea-urn, and after 
 giving her guest a finger, had, Lucy believed, spoken once to her, 
 expressing a desire for scones. The meal itself, with its elabo- 
 rate cakes and meats and fruits, intimidated Lucy even more 
 than the dinner had done. The breach between it and any small 
 housekeeping was more complete. She felt that she was' eating 
 like a school-girl ; she devoured her toast dry, out of sheer ina- 
 bility to ask for butter ; and, sitting for the most part isolated in 
 the unpopular— that is to say, the Lady Driffield— quarter of the 
 table, went generally half-starved. 
 
 As for David, he, with Lord Driffield, Mrs. Wellesdon, Lady 
 Alice, Reggie, and Mrs. Shepton for company at the other end, 
 had on the whole an excellent time. There was, however, one 
 uncomfortable moment of friction between him and Colonel 
 Danby, who had strolled in last of all, with the vicious look of a 
 man who has not had the good night to which he considered 
 himself entitled, and must somehow wreak it on the world. 
 
 Just before he entered. Lady Driffield, looking round to see 
 
CHAP. IV MATURITY 485 
 
 that the servants had departed, had languidly started the ques- 
 tion : ' Does one talk to one's maid ? Do you, Marcia, talk to 
 your maid ? How can anyone ever find anything to say to one's 
 maid?' 
 
 The topic proved unexpectedly interesting. Both Marcia 
 Wellesdon and Lady Alice declared that their maids were their 
 bosom friends. Lady Driffield shrugged her shoulders, then 
 looked at Mrs. Grieve, who had sat silent, opened her mouth to 
 speak, recollected herself, and said nothing. At that moment 
 Colonel Danby entered. 
 
 ' I say, Danby ! ' called the young attache, Marcia's brother, 
 ' do you talk to your valet ? ' 
 
 ' Talk to my valet ! ' said the Colonel, putting up his eye-glass 
 to look at the dishes on the side table— he spoke with suavity, 
 but there was an ominous pucker in the brow—' \^iat should I 
 do that for ? I don't pay the fellow for his conversation, I pre- 
 sume, but to button my boots, and precious badly he does it too. 
 I don't even know what his elegant surname is. "Thomas," or 
 " James," or " William " is enough peg for me to hang my orders 
 on. I generally christen them fresh when they come to me.' 
 
 Little Lady Alice looked indignant. Lucy caught her husband's 
 face, and saw it suddenly pale, as it easily did under a quick 
 emotion. He was thinking of the valet he had seen at the station 
 standing by the Danbys' luggage— a dark, anxious-looking man, 
 whose likeness to one of the compositors in his own office — a 
 young fellow for whom he had a particular friendship— had 
 attracted his notice. 
 
 ' Why do you suppose he puts up with you — your servant?' 
 he said, bending across to Colonel Danby. He smiled a little, 
 but his eyes betrayed him. 
 
 ' Puts up with me ! ' Colonel Danby lifted his brows, regard- 
 ing David with an indescribable air of insolent surprise. ' Because 
 I make it worth his while in pounds, shillings, and pence ; that's 
 
 all.' 
 
 And he put down his pheasant salmi with a clatter, while his 
 wife handed him bread and other propitiations. 
 
 'Probably because he has a mother or sister,' said David, 
 slowly. ' We trust a good deal to the patience of our " masters." ' 
 
 The Colonel stopped his wife's attentions with an angry hand. 
 But just as he was about to launch a reply more congruous with 
 his gout and his contempt for ' Driffield's low-life friends ' than 
 with the amenities of ordinary society, and while Lady Yenetia 
 was slowly and severely studying David through her eyeglass, 
 Lord Driffield threw himself into the breach with a nervous story 
 of some favourite ' man ' of his own, and the storm blew over. 
 
 Lady Driffield, indeed, who herself disliked Colonel Danby, as 
 one overbearing person dislikes another, and only invited him 
 because Lady Venetia was her cousin and an old friend, was 
 rather pleased with David's outbreak. After breakfast she gra- 
 ciously asked him if she should show him the picture gallery. 
 
486 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 But David was still seething with wrath, and looked at Vande- 
 veldes and De Hoochs and Rembrandts with a distracted e)'e. 
 Once, indeed, in a little alcove of the gallery hung with English 
 portraits, he woke to a start of interest. 
 
 ' Imagine that that should be Gray ! ' he said, pointing to a 
 picture— well known to him through engraving— of a little man 
 in a bob wig, with a turned-up nose and a button chin, and a 
 general air of eager servility. ' Or ay, — one of our greatest 
 poets ! ' He stood wondering, feeling it impossible to fit the 
 dignity of Gray's verse to the insignificance of Gray's outer man. 
 
 ' Oh, Gray — a great poet, you think ? I don't agree with you. 
 I have always thought the "Night Thoughts" very dull,' said 
 Lady Driffield, sweeping along to the next picture, in a sublime 
 unconsciousness. David smiled — a flash of mirth that cleared his 
 whole look— ^nd was himself again. Moreover he was soon taken 
 possession of by Lord Driffield, and the two disappeared for a 
 happy morning spent between the library and the woods. 
 
 Meanwhile Lucy went to church, and had the bliss of feeling 
 that she made one too many in the omnibus, and that, squeeze 
 herself ^is small as she might, she was still crushing Miss Danby's 
 new dress — a fact of which both mother and daughter were clearly 
 aware. Looking back upon it, Lucy could not remember that for 
 her there had been any conversation going or coming ; but it is 
 quite possible that her memory of Benet's Park was even more 
 pronounced than in reality. 
 
 David and Lord Driffield came in when lunch was half over, 
 and afterwards there was a general strolling into the garden. 
 
 * Are you all right ? ' said David to his wife, taking her arm 
 affectionately. 
 
 ' Oh yes, thank you,' she said hurriedly, perceiving that Reggie 
 Calvert was coming up to her. ' I'm all right. Don't take my 
 arm, David. It looks so odd.' 
 
 And she turned delightedly to talk to the young diplomatist, 
 who had the kindliness and charm of his race, and devoted him- 
 self to her very prettily for a while, though they had great 
 difficulty in finding topics, and he was coming finally to the end 
 of his resources when Lady Driffield announced that ' the carriage 
 would be round in half an hour.' 
 
 ' Goodness gracious ! then I must write some letters first,' ho 
 said, with the importance of the budding ambassador, and ran 
 into the house. 
 
 The others seemed to melt away — David and Canon Aylwin 
 strolling off together — and soon Lucy found herself alone. She 
 sat down in a seat round which curved a yew hedge, and whence 
 there was a somewhat wide view over a bare, hilly country, with 
 suggestions everywhere of factory life in the hollows, till on the 
 southwest it rose and melted into the Derbyshire moors. Autumn 
 — late autumn — was on all the reddening woods and in the cool 
 sunshine ; but there was a bright border of sunflowers and dahlias 
 near, which no frost had yet touched, and the gaiety both of the 
 
CHAP. ly MATURITY 487 
 
 flowers and of the clear blue distance forbade as yet any thought 
 of winter. 
 
 Lucy's absent and discontented eye saw neither flowers nor 
 distance; but it was perforce arrested before long by the figure 
 of Mrs. Shepton, who came round the corner of the yew hedge. 
 
 ' Have they gone ? ' said that lady. 
 
 ' Who ? ' said Lucy, startled. ' I heard a carriage drive off 
 Just now, I think.' 
 
 ' Ah ! then they are gone. Lady Driffield has carried off all 
 her friends — except Mrs. Wellesdon, who, I believe, is lying down 
 with a headache — to tea at Sir Wilfrid Herbart's. You see the 
 house there' — and she pointed to a dim, white patch among 
 woods, about five miles off. ' It is not very civil of a hostess, 
 perhaps, to leave her guests in this way. But Lady Driffield is 
 Lady Driffield.' 
 
 Mrs. Shepton laughed, and threw back the flapping green 
 gauze veil with which she generally shrouded a freckled and 
 serviceable complexion, in no particular danger, one would have 
 thought, of spoiling. 
 
 Lucy instinctively looked round to see how near they were to 
 the house, and whether there were any windows open. 
 
 ' It must be very difficult, I should think, to be — to be friends 
 with Lady Driffield.' 
 
 She looked up at Mrs. Shepton with the childish air of one 
 both hungry for gossip and conscious of the naughtiness of it. 
 
 Mrs. Shepton laughed again. She had never seen anyone 
 behave worse, she reflected, than Lady Driffield to this little 
 Manchester person, who might be uninteresting, but was quite 
 inoffensive. 
 
 ' Friends ! I should think so. An armed neutrality is all 
 that pays with Lady Driffield. I have been here many times, and 
 I can now keep her in order perfectly. You see. Lady Driffield 
 has a brother whom she happens to be fond of — everybody has 
 some soft place — and this brother is a Liberal member down in 
 our West Riding part of the world. And my husband is the 
 editor of a paper that possesses a great deal of political influence 
 in the brother's constituency. We have backed him up through 
 this election. He is not a bad fellow at all, though about as 
 much of a Liberal at heart as this hedge,' and Mrs. Shepton 
 struck it lightly with the parasol she carried. ' My husband 
 thinks we got him in — by the skin of his teeth. So Lady Drif- 
 field asks us periodically, and behaves herself, more or less. My 
 husband likes Lord Driffield. So do I; and an occasional descent 
 upon country houses amuses me. It especially entertains me to 
 make Lady Driffield talk politics.' 
 
 'She must be very Conservative,' said Lucy, heartily. Con- 
 servatism stood in her mind for the selfish exclusiveness of big 
 people. Her father had always been a bitter Radical. 
 
 ' Oh dear no — not at all ! Lady Driffield believes herself an 
 advanced Liberal ; that is the comedv of it. Liberals ! ' cried 
 
488 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 Mrs. Shepton, with a sudden bitterness, which transformed the 
 broad, plain, sleepy face. ' I should like to set her to work for a 
 year in one of those mills down there. She might have some 
 politics worth having by the end of it.' 
 
 Lucy looked at her in amazement. Why, the mill people were 
 very happy — most of them. 
 
 ' Ah well ! ' said Mrs. Shepton, recovering herself, ' what we 
 have to do— we intelligent middle class— for the next generation 
 or two, is to drive these aristocrats. Then it will be seen what 
 is to be done with them finally. Well, Mrs. Grieve, we must 
 amuse ourselves. Au revoir ! My husband has some writing to 
 do, and I must go and help him.' 
 
 She waved her hand and disappeared, sweeping her green and 
 yellow skirts behind her with an air as though Benet's Park were 
 already a seminary for the correction of the great. 
 
 Lucy sat on pondering till she felt dull and cold, and decided 
 to go in. On finding her way back she passed round a side of 
 the house which she had not yet seen. It was the oldest part of 
 the building, and the windows, which were mullioned and 
 narrow, and at some height from the ground, looked out upon a 
 small bowling-green, closely walled in from the rest of the 
 gardens and the park by a thick screen of trees. She lingered 
 along the path looking at a few late roses which were still bloom- 
 ing in this sheltered spot against the wall of the house, when she 
 was startled by the sound of her own name, and, looking up, she 
 saw that there was an open window above her. The temptation 
 was too great. She held her breath and listened. 
 
 ' Lord Driffield says he married her when he was quite young, 
 that accounts for it.' Was not the voice Lady Alice's ? ' But it 
 is a pity that she is not more equal to him. I never saw a more 
 striking face, did you? Yet Lord Driffield says he is not as 
 good-looking as he promised to be as a boy. I wish we had been 
 there last night after dinner, Marcia ! They say he gave Colonel 
 Danby such a dressing about some workmen's question. Colonel 
 Danby was laying down the law about strikes in his usual way — 
 be is an odious creature ! — and wishing that the Government 
 would just send an infantry regiment into the middle of the 
 Yorkshire miners that are on strike now, when Mr. Grieve fired 
 up. And everybody backed him. Reggie told me it was splendid ; 
 he never saw a better shindy. It is a pity about her. Everybody 
 says he might have a great career if he pleased. And she can't 
 be any companion to him. — Now, Marcia, you know your head is 
 better, so don't say it isn't ! Why, I have used a whole bottle of 
 eau de Cologne on you.' 
 
 So chattered pretty, kindly Lady Alice, sitting with her back 
 to the window beside Marcia Wellesdon. Lucy stood still a 
 moment, could not hear what Mrs. Wellesdon said languidly in 
 answer, then crept on, her lip quivering. 
 
 From then till long after the dark had fallen she was quite 
 alone. David, coming back from a long walk, and tea at the 
 
CHAP. IT MATURITY 489 
 
 agent's house on the further edge of the estate, found his wife 
 lying on her bed, and the stars beginning to look in upon her 
 through the unshuttered windows. 
 
 ' Why, Lucy ! aren't you well, dear ? ' he said, hurrying up to 
 her. 
 
 'Oh yes, very well, thank you,' she said, in a constrained 
 voice. ' My head aches rather.' 
 
 ' Who has been looking after you ? ' he said, instantly reproach- 
 ing himself for the enjoyment of his own afternoon. 
 
 ' I have been here since three o'clock.' 
 
 ' And nobody gave you any tea ? ' he asked, flushing. 
 
 ' No, I went down, but there was nobody in the drawing- 
 room. I suppose the footman thought nobody was in.' 
 
 ' Where was Lady Driffield ? ' 
 
 ' Oh ! she and most of them went out to tea — to a house a 
 good way off.' 
 
 Lucy's tone was dreariness itself. David sat still, his breath 
 coming quickly. Then suddenly Lucy turned round and drew 
 him down to her passionately. 
 
 ' When can we get home ? Is there an early train ?' 
 
 Then David understood. He took her in his arms, and she 
 broke down and cried, sobbing out a catalogue of griefs that was 
 only half coherent. But he saw at once that she had been neg- 
 lected and slighted, nay more, that she had been somehow 
 wounded to the quick. His clasped hand trembled on his knee. 
 This was hospitality ! He had gajiged Lady DriflBeld well. 
 
 ' An early train ?' he said, with frowning decision. ' Yes, of 
 course. There is to be an eight o'clock breakfast for those who 
 want to get off. We shall be home by a little after nine. Cheer 
 up, darling. I will look after you to-night— and think of Sandy 
 to-morrow ! ' 
 
 He laid his cheek tenderly against hers, full of a passion of 
 resentment and pity. As for her, the feeling with which she 
 clung to him was more like the feeling she had first shown him 
 on the Wakely moors, than anything she had known since. 
 
 * Sandy ! why don't you say good morning, sir ? ' said David next 
 morning, standing on the threshold of his own study, with Lucy 
 just behind. His face was beaming with the pleasures of home. 
 
 Sandy, who was lying curled up in David's arm-chair, looked 
 sleepily at his parents. His thumb was tightly wedged in his 
 mouth, and with the other he held pressed against him a hideous 
 rag doll, which had been presented to him in his cradle. 
 
 'Jane's asleep,' he said, just removing his thumb for the pur- 
 pose, and then putting it back again. 
 
 ' Heartless villain ! ' said David, taking possession of both him 
 and Jane. 'And do you mean to say you aren't glad to see 
 Daddy and Mammy ? ' 
 
 'Zes — but Sandy's so fond of child wen,' said Sandy, cuddling 
 Jane up complacently, and subsiding into his father's arms. 
 
490 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 Husband and wife laughed into each other's eyes. Then Lucy- 
 knelt down to tie the child's shoe, and David, first kissing the 
 boy, bent forward and laid another kiss on the mother's hair. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 'An exciting post,' said David to Lucy one morning as she 
 entered the dining-room for breakfast. ' Louie proposes to bring 
 her little girl over to see us, and Ancrum will be home to-night ! ' 
 
 ' Louie ! ' repeated Mrs. Grieve, standing still in her amaze- 
 ment. ' What do you mean ? ' 
 
 It w^as certainly unexpected. David had not heard from Louie 
 for more than six months ; his remittances to her, however, were 
 at all times so casually acknowledged that he had taken no par- 
 ticular notice ; and he and she had not met for two years and 
 more— since that visit to Paris, in fact, recorded in his journal. 
 
 'It is quite true,' said David; 'it seems to be one of her 
 sudden schemes. I don't see any particular reason for it. She 
 says she must " put matters before " me, and that Cecile w^ants a 
 change. I don't see that a change to Manchester in February is 
 likely to help the poor child much. No, it must mean more 
 money. We must make up our minds to that,' said David with a 
 little sad smile, looking at his wife. 
 
 ' David ! I don't see that you're called to do it at all ! ' cried 
 Lucy. ' Why, you've done mu^h more for her than anybody else 
 would have done ! What they do with the money I can't think — 
 dreadful people ! ' 
 
 She began to pour out the tea with vehemence and an angry 
 lip. She had alw^ays in her mind that vision of Louie, as she had 
 seen her for the first and only time in her life, marching up 
 Market Place in the ' loud ' hat and the black and scarlet dress, 
 stared at and staring. Nor had she ever lost her earliest impres- 
 sion of strong dislike w^hich had come upon her immediately 
 afterwards, when Louie and Reuben had mounted to Dora's sitting- 
 room, and she, Lucy, had angrily told the quick-fingered, bold- 
 eyed girl who claimed to be David Grieve's sister not to touch 
 Dora's work. Nay, every year since had but intensified it, 
 especially since their income had ceased to expand rapidly, and 
 the drain of the Montjoies' allowance had been more plainly felt. 
 She might have begun to feel a little ashamed of herself that she 
 was able to give her husband so little sympathy in his determina- 
 tion to share his gains with his co-workers. She was quite clear 
 that she was right in resenting the w^asting of his money on such 
 worthless people as the Montjoies. It was disgusting that they 
 should sponge upon them so — and with hardly a ' thank you ' all 
 the time. Oh dear, no ! — Louie took everything as her right, and 
 had once abused David through four pages because his cheque 
 had been tw^o days late. 
 
 David received his wife's remarks in a meditative silence. He 
 
CHAP. V MATURITY • 491 
 
 devoted himself a while to Sandy, who was eating porridge at his 
 right hand, and tended with great regularity to bestow on his 
 pinafore what was meant for his mouth. At last he said, pushing 
 the letter over to Lucy : 
 
 ' You had better read it, Lucy. She talks of coming next week. ' 
 
 Lucy read it with mounting wrath. It was the outcome of a 
 fit of characteristic violence. Louie declared that she could stand 
 her life no longer ; that she was coming over to put things before 
 David ; and if he couldn't help her, she and her child would just 
 go out and beg. She understood from an old Manchester 
 acquaintance whom she had met in the Rue de Rivoli about Christ- 
 mas-time that David was doing very well with his business. She 
 wished him joy of it. If he was prosperous, it was more than she 
 was. Nobody ever seemed to trouble their heads about her. 
 
 ' Well, I never ! ' said Lucy, positively choked. ' Why, it's not 
 much more than a month since you sent her that last cheque, 
 And now I know you'll be saying you can't afford yourself a new 
 great-coat. It's disgraceful ! They'll suck you dry', those kind of 
 people, if you let them. ' 
 
 She had taken no pains so far to curb her language for the 
 sake of her husband's feelings. But as she gave vent to the last 
 acid phrase she felt a sudden compunction. For David was looking 
 straight before him into vacancy, with a painful intensity in the 
 eyes, and a curious droop and contraction of the mouth. Why 
 did he so often worry himself about Louie ? He had done all he 
 could, anyway. 
 
 She got up and went over to him with his tea. He woke up 
 from his absorption and thanked her. 
 
 ' Is it right ? ' 
 
 ' Just right ! ' he said, tasting it. ' All the same, Lucy, it 
 would be really nice of you to be kind to her and poor little 
 Cecile. It won't be easy for either of us having Louie here.' 
 
 He began to cut up his bread with sudden haste, then, paus- 
 ing again, he went on in a low voice. ' But if one leaves a task 
 like that undone it makes a sore spot, a fester in the mind. ' 
 
 She went back to the place in silence. 
 
 ' What day is it to be ? ' she said presently. Certainly thejr 
 both looked dejected. 
 
 ' The 16th, isn't it ? I wonder who the Manchester acquaint- 
 ance was. He must have given a rose-coloured account. We 
 aren't so rich as all that, are we, wife ? ' 
 
 He glanced at her with a charming half-apprehensive smile, 
 which made his face young again. Lucy looked ready to cry. 
 
 ' I know you'll get out of buying that coat,' she said with 
 energy, as though referring to an already familiar topic of dis- 
 cussion between them. 
 
 ' No, I won't,' said David cheerfully. ' I'll buy it before Louie 
 comes, if that will please you. Oh, we shall do, 'dear ! I've had 
 a real good turn at the shop this last month. Things will look 
 better this quarter's end, you'll see. ' 
 
4d!S THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book i\ 
 
 'Why, I thought you'd been so busy in the printing oflBce,' 
 she said, a good deal cheered, however, by his remark. 
 
 ' So we have. But John's a brick, and doesn't care how much 
 he does. And the number of men who take a personal interest 
 in the house, who do their utmost to forward work, and to pre- 
 vent waste and scamping, is growing fast. When once we get 
 the apprentices' school into full working order, we shall see. ' 
 
 David gave himself a great stretch ; and then, thrusting his 
 hands deep into his pockets, stood by the fire enjoying it and his 
 dreams together. 
 
 ' Has it begun ? ' said Lucy. Her tone was not particularly 
 cordial ; but anyone who knew them well would perhaps have 
 reflected that six months before he would have neither made his 
 remark, nor she have asked her question. 
 
 ' Yes — what ? ' he said with a start. ' Oh, the school ! It has 
 begun tentatively. Six of our best men give in rotation two 
 hours a day to it at the time when work and the machines are 
 slackest. And we have one or two teachers from outside. 
 Twenty-three boys have entered. I have begun to pay them a 
 penny a day for attendance. ' 
 
 His face lit up with merriment as though he anticipated her 
 remonstrance. 
 
 ' David, how foolish ! If you coax them like that they won't 
 care a bit about it.' 
 
 ' Well, the experiment has been tried by a great French firm,' 
 he said, ' and it did well. It is really a slight addition to wages, 
 and pays the firm in the end. You should see the little fellows 
 hustle up for their money. I pay it them every month.' 
 
 ' And it all comes out of yow pocket — that, of course, I 
 needn't ask,' said Lucy. But her sarcasm was not bitter, and she 
 had a motherly eye the while to the way in which Sandy was 
 stuffing himself with his bread and jam. 
 
 'Well,' he said, laughing and making no attempt to excuse 
 himself, 'but I tell you, madam, you will do better this year. I 
 positively must make some money out of the shop for you and 
 myself too. So I have been going at it like twenty horses, and 
 we've sent out a splendid catalogue.' 
 
 ' Oh, I say, David ! ' said Lucy, dismayed, ' you're not going to 
 take the shop-money too to spend on the printing ? ' 
 
 ' I won't take anything that will leave you denuded,' he said 
 affectionately ; ' and whenever I want anything I'll tell you all 
 about it — if you like.' 
 
 He looked at her significantly. She did not answer for a 
 minute, then she said : 
 
 ' Don't you want me to give those boys a treat some time ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, when the weather gets more decent, if it ever does. We 
 must give them a day on the moors— take them to Clough End 
 perhaps. Oh, look here ! ' he exclaimed with a sudden change of 
 tone, ' let us ask Uncle Reuben to come and spend the day to see 
 Louie ! ' __ 
 
CHAP. V MATURITY 493 
 
 ' Why, he won't leave 7ier,' said Lucy. 
 
 * Who ? Aunt Hannah ? Oh yes, he will. It's wonderful 
 what she can do now. I saw her in November, you remember, 
 when I went to see Margaret. It's a resurrection. Poor Uncle 
 Reuben ! ' 
 
 ' What do you mean ? ' said Lucy, startled. 
 
 'Well,' said David slowly, with a half tender, half humorous 
 twist of the lip, ' he can't understand it. He prayed so many 
 years, and it made no difference. Then came a new doctor, and 
 with electricity and rubbing it was all done. Oh yes, tFncle 
 Reuben would like to see Louie. And I want to show him that 
 boy there ! ' 
 
 He nodded at Sandy, who sat staring open-mouthed and open- 
 eyed at his parents, a large piece of bread and jam slipping 
 slowly down his throat. 
 
 'David, you're silly,' said Lucy. But she went to stand by 
 him at the fire, and slipped her hand inside his arm. ' I suppose 
 she and Cecile had better have the front room,' she went on 
 slowly. 
 
 ' Yes, that would be the most cheerful.' 
 
 Then they were silent a little, he leaning his head lightly 
 against hers. 
 
 'Well, I must go,' he said, rousing himself; 'I shall just 
 catch the train. Send a line to Ancrum, there's a dear, to say I 
 will go and see him to-night. Four months ! I am afraid he has 
 been very bad.' 
 
 Lucy stood by the fire a little, lost in many contradictory feel- 
 ings. There was in her a strange sense as of some long strain 
 slowly giving way, the quiet melting of some old hardness. Ever 
 since that autumn time when, after their return from Benet's 
 Park, her husband's chivalry and delicacy of feeling had given 
 back to her the self-respect and healed the self-love which had 
 been so rudely hurt, there had been a certain readjustment of 
 Lucy's nature going on below the little commonplaces and vani- 
 ties and affections of her life which she herself would never have 
 been able to explain. It implied the gradual abandonment of 
 certain ambitions, the relinquishment bit by bit of an arid and 
 fruitless effort. 
 
 She would stand and sigh sometimes — long, regretful sighs 
 like a child — for she knew not what. But David would have his 
 way, and it was no good ; and she loved him and Sandy. 
 
 But she owed no love to Louie Montjoie ! It was a relief to 
 her now — an escape from an invading sweetness of which her 
 little heart was almost afraid— to sit down and plan how she 
 would protect David from that grasping woman and her unspeak- 
 able husband. 
 
 * David, my dear fellow ! ' said Ancrum's weak voice. 
 
 He rose with difficulty from his seat by the fire. The room 
 was the same little lodging-house sitting-room in Mortimer Road, 
 
494 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE Book iV 
 
 where David years before had poured out his boyish account of 
 himself. Neither chiffonnier, nor pictures, nor antimacassars 
 had changed at all ; the bustling landlady was still loud and 
 vigorous. But Ancrum was a shadow. 
 
 ' You are better ? ' David said, holding his hand in both his. 
 
 ' Oh yes, better for a time. Not for long, thank God ! ' 
 
 David looked at him with painful emotion. Several times 
 during these eight years had he seen Ancrum emerge from these 
 mysterious crises of his, a broken and shattered man, whom only 
 the force of a superhuman will could drag back to life and work. 
 But he had never yet seen him so beaten down, so bloodless, so 
 emaciated as this. Lung mischief had declared itself more than 
 a year before this date, and had clearly made progress during this 
 last attack of melancholia. He thought to himself that his old 
 friend could not have long to live. 
 
 ' Has Williams been to see you ? ' he asked, naming a doctor 
 whom Ancrum had long known and trusted. 
 
 ' Oh yes ! He can do nothing. He tells me to give in and go 
 to the south. But there is a little work left in me still. I wanted 
 my boys. I grew to pine for my boys— up there.' 
 
 'Up there' meant that house in Scotland where lived the 
 friends bound to him by such tragic memories of help asked and 
 rendered in a man's worst extremity, that he could never speak 
 of them when he was living his ordinary life in Manchester, pas- 
 sionately as he loved them. 
 
 They chatted a little about the boys, some of whom David had 
 been keeping an eye on. Five or six of them, indeed, were in his 
 printing-office, and learning in the apprentices' school he had just 
 
 c'j".Q'p"j"pr] 
 
 But in the middle of their talk, with a sudden change of look, 
 Ancrum stooped forward and laid his hand on David's. 
 
 ' A little more, Davy— I have just to get a little worse— and 
 she will come to me. ' 
 
 David was not sure that he understood. Ancrum had only 
 spoken of his wife once since the night when, led on by sympathy 
 and emotion, he had met David's young confession by the story 
 of his own fate. She was still teaching at Glasgow so far as 
 David knew, where she was liked and respected. 
 
 ' Yes, Davy— when I have come to the end of my tether- 
 when I can do no more but die— I shall call— and she will come. 
 It has so far killed us to be together— more than a few hours in 
 the year. But when life is all over for me— she will be kind— 
 and T shall be able to forget it all. Oh, the hours I have sat here 
 t\\\ii\mg—ih\n\mg—^\\(Xgnasliing my teeth ! My boys think me 
 a kind, gentle, harmless creature, Davy. They little know the 
 passions I have carried within me— passions of hate and bitter- 
 ness—outcries against God and man. But there has been One 
 with me through the storms '—his voice sank—' aye ! and I have 
 gone to Him again and again with the old cvj— Master!— Master! 
 — carest Thou not that we perish "? ' 
 
CHAP. V MATURITY 495 
 
 His drawn grey face worked and he mastered himself with 
 difficulty. David held his hand firm and close in a silence which 
 carried with it a love and sympathy not to be expressed. 
 
 'Let me just say this to you, Davy,' Ancrum went on pres- 
 ently, ' before we shut the door on this kind of talk— for when a, 
 man has got a few things to do and very little strength to do 'em' 
 with, he must not waste himself. You may hear any day that I 
 have been received into the Catholic Church, or you may only 
 hear it when I am dying. One way or the other, you ivill hear 
 it. It has been strange to go about all these years among my 
 Unitarian and dissenting friends and to know that this would be 
 the inevitable end of it. I have struggled alone for peace and 
 certainty. I cannot get them for myself. There is an august, 
 an inconceivable possibility which makes my heart stand still 
 when I think of it, that the Catholic Church may verily have 
 them to give, as she says she has. I am weak— I shall submit— I 
 shall throw myself upon her breast at last.' 
 
 ' But why not now,' said David, tenderly, ' if it would give you 
 comfort ? ' 
 
 Ancrum did not answer at once ; he sat rubbing his hands 
 restlessly over the fire. 
 
 ' I don't know— I don't know,' he said at last. ' I have told 
 you what the end will be, Davy. But the will still flutters- 
 flutters — in my poor breast, like a caged thing. ' 
 
 Then that beautiful half- wild smile of his lit up the face. 
 
 ' Bear with me, you strong man ! What have you been doing 
 with yourself? How many more courts have you been pulling 
 down ? And how much more of poor Madam Lucy's money have 
 you been throwing out of window ? ' 
 
 He took up his old tone, half bantering, half affectionate, and 
 teased David out of the history of the last six months. While he 
 sat listening he reflected once more, as he had so often reflected, 
 upon the difference between the reality of David Grieve's life as 
 it was and his, Ancrum's, former imaginations of what it would 
 be. A rapid rise to wealth and a new social status, removal to 
 London, a great public career, a personality, and an influence 
 conspicuous in the eyes of England— all these things he had once 
 dreamed of as belonging to the natural order of David's develop- 
 ment. What he had actually witnessed had been the struggle of 
 a hidden life to realise certain ideal aims under conditions of 
 familiar difficulty and limitation, the dying down of that initial 
 brilliance and passion to succeed, into a wrestle of conscience as 
 sensitive as it was profound, as tenacious as it was scrupulous. 
 He had watched an unsatisfactory marriage, had realised the 
 silent resolve of the north-countryman to stand by his own people, 
 of the man sprung from the poor to cling to the poor : he had 
 become familiar with the veins of melancholy by which both 
 character and life were crossed. That glittering prince of circum- 
 stance as he had once foreseen him, was still enshrined in memory 
 and fancy ; but the real man was knit to the cripple's inmost heart. 
 
496 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 Another observer, perhaps, might have w^ondered at Ancrum's 
 sense of difference and disillusion. For David after all had made 
 a mark. As he sat talking to Ancrum of the new buildings behind 
 the printing-office where he now employed from two to three 
 . hundred men, of the ups and downs of his profit-sharing experi- 
 ences, of this apprentices' school for the sons of members of the 
 ' house,' imitated from one of the same kind founded by a great 
 French printing firm, and the object just now of a passionate 
 energy of work on David's part— or as he diverged into the history 
 of an important trade dispute in Manchester, where he had been 
 appointed arbitrator by the unanimous voice of both sides— as he 
 told these things, it was not doubtful even for Ancrum that his 
 power and consideration were spreading in his own town. 
 
 But, substantially, Ancrum was right. Hard labour and 
 natural gift had secured their harvest ; "but that vivid personal 
 element in success which captivates and excites the bystander 
 seemed, in David's case, to have been replaced by something 
 austere, which pointed attention and sympathy rather to the 
 man's work than to himself. When he was young there had been 
 intoxication for such a spectator as Ancrum in the magical 
 rapidity and ease with which he seized opportunity and beat down 
 difficulty. Now that he was mature, he was but one patient toiler 
 the more at the eternal puzzles of our humanity. 
 
 Ancrum let him talk awhile. He had always felt a certain 
 interest in David's schemes, though they were not of a quality 
 and sort with which a mind like his naturally concerned itself. 
 But his interest now could not hold out so long as once it 
 could. ^ . 
 
 ' Ah, that will do— that will do, dear fellow ! ' he said, mter- 
 rupting and touching David's hand with apologetic affection. ' I 
 seem to feel your pulse beating 150 to the minute, and it tires me 
 so I can't bear myself. Gossip to me. How is Sandy ? ' 
 
 David laughed, and had as usual a new batch of ' Sandiana ' 
 to produce. Then he talked of Louie's coming and of the invita- 
 tion which had been sent to Reuben Grieve. 
 
 ' I shall come and sit in a corner and look at her,' said 
 Ancrum, nodding at Louie's name. ' What sort of a life has she 
 been leading all these years? Keither you nor I can much 
 imagine. But what beauty it used to be ! How will John stand 
 seeing her again ? ' «. ^ i 
 
 David smiled, but did not think it would affect John very 
 greatly. He was absorbed in the business of Grieve & Co., and 
 no less round, roseate, and trusty than he had always been. 
 
 ' Well, good night — good night ! ' said Ancrum, and seemed to 
 be looking at the clock uneasily. ' Come again, Davy, and I dare 
 say I shall struggle up to you.' 
 
 At that moment the door opened, and, in spite of a hasty shout 
 from Ancrum, which she did not or would not understand, Mrs. 
 Elsley,- his landlady, came into the room, bearing his supper. She 
 put down the tray, seemed to invite David's attention to it by her 
 
CHAP. V MATURITY 497 
 
 indignant look, and flounced out again like one bursting with 
 forbidden speech. 
 
 ' Ancrum, this is absurd ! ' cried David, pointing to the tea 
 and morsel of dry bread which w^ere to provide this shrunken 
 invalid with his evening meal. ' You can't live on this stuff 
 now, you know — you v»^ant something more tempting and more 
 nourishing. Do be rational ! ' 
 
 Ancrum sprang up, hobbled with unusual alacrity across the 
 rooMi, and, laying hold of David, made a feint of ejecting his 
 visitor. 
 
 ' You get along and leave me to my wittles ! ' he said with the 
 smile of a schoolboy ; ' I don't spy on you when you're at your 
 meals. ' 
 
 David crossed his arms. 
 
 ' I shall have to send Lucy down every morning to housekeep 
 with Mrs. Elsley,' he said firmly. 
 
 ' Now, David, hold your tongue ! I couldn't eat anything else 
 if I tried. And there are two boys down with typhoid in Friar's 
 Yard— drat 'em ! — and scarcely a rag on 'em : don't you under- 
 stand ? And besides, David, if she comes, I shall want a pound 
 or two, you see ? ' 
 
 He did not look at his visitor's face nor let his own be seen. 
 He simplj pushed David through the door and shut it. 
 
 ' Sandy, they're just come ! ' cried Lucy in some excitement, 
 hugging the child to her by way of a last pleasant experience 
 before the advent of her sister-in-law. Then she put the child 
 down on the sofa and went out to meet the new-comers. 
 
 Sandy sucked a meditative thumb, putting his face to the 
 window, and surveyed the arrival which was going on in the 
 front garden. There was a great deal of noise and talking ; the 
 lady in the grey cloak was scolding the cabman, and 'Daddy' 
 was taking her bags and parcels from her, and trying to make 
 her come in. On the steps stood a little girl looking frightened 
 and tired. Sandy twisted his head round and studied her care- 
 fully. But he showed no signs of running out to meet her. She 
 might be nice, or she might be nasty. Sandy had a cautious 
 philosophical way w^ith him towards novelties. He remained 
 perfectly still with his cheek pressed against the glass. 
 
 The door opened. In came Louie, with Lucy looking already 
 flushed and angry behind her, and David, last of all, holding 
 Cecile by the hand. 
 
 Louie was in the midst of denunciations of the cabman, who 
 had, according to her, absorbed into his system, or handed over 
 to an accomplice on the way, a bandbox which had certainly been 
 put in at St. Pancras, and which contained Cecile's best hat. She 
 was red and furious, and David felt himself as much attacked as 
 the cabman, for to the best of his ability he had transferred them 
 and their packages, at the Midland station, from the train to the cab. 
 
 In the midst of her tirade, however, she suddenly stopped 
 
498 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 short and looked round tlie room she had just entered — Lucy's 
 low comfortable sitting-room, with David's books overflowing into 
 every nook and corner, the tea-table spread, and the big fire 
 which Lucy had been nervously feeding during her time of 
 waiting for the travellers. 
 
 'Well, you've got a fire, anyway,' she said, brusquely. 'I 
 thought you'd have a bigger house than this by now.' 
 
 ' Oh, thank you, it's quite big enough ! ' cried Lucy, going to 
 the tea-table and holding herself very straight. ' Quite big 
 enough for anything we want ! Will you take your tea ? ' 
 
 Louie threw herself into an armchair and looked about her. 
 
 ' Where's the little boy?' she inquired. 
 
 ' I'm here,' said a small solemn voice from behind the sofa, 
 ^ but I'm not your boy.' 
 
 And Sandy, discovered with his back to the window, replaced 
 the thumb which he had removed to make the remark, and went 
 on staring with portentous gravity at the new-comers. Cecile 
 had nervously disengaged herself from David and was standing 
 by her mother. 
 
 ' Why, he's small for his age ! ' exclaimed Louie ; ' I'm sure 
 he's small for his age. Why, he's nearly five ! ' 
 
 'Come here, Sandy,' said David, 'and let your aunt and 
 cousin look at you.' 
 
 Sandy reluctantly sidled across the room so as to keep as far 
 as possible from his aunt and cousin, and fastened on his father's 
 hand. He and the little girl looked at one another. 
 
 ' Go and kiss her,' said David. 
 
 Sandy most unwillingly allowed himself to be put forward. 
 Cecile with a little patronising woman-of-the-world air stooped 
 and kissed him first on one cheek and then on the other. Louie 
 only looked at him. Her black eyes — no less marvellous than of 
 yore, although now the brilliancy of them owed something to art 
 as well as nature, as Lucy at once perceived — stared him up and 
 down, taking stock minutely. 
 
 ' He's well made,' she said grudgingly, 'and his colour isn't 
 bad. Cecile, take your hat off.' 
 
 The child obeyed, and the mother with hasty fingers pulled 
 her hair forward here, and put it back there. 'Look at the 
 thickness of it,' she said, proudly pointing it out to David. 
 ' They'd have given me two guineas for it in the Rue de la Paix 
 the other day. Wliy didn't that child have your hair, I wonder ? ' 
 she added, nodding towards Sandy. 
 
 'Because he preferred his mother's, I suppose,' said David, 
 smiling at Lucy, and wondering through his discomfort what 
 Sandy could possibly be doing with his coat-tail. He seemed to" 
 be elaborately scrubbing his face with it. 
 
 ' What are you doing with my coat, villain ? ' he said, lifting 
 his son in his arms. 
 
 Sandy found his father's ear, and with infinite precaution 
 w^hispered vindictively into it : 
 
CHAP. V MATURITY 499 
 
 ' I've wiped them kisses off anyhow. ' 
 
 David suppressed him, and devoted himself to the travellers 
 and their tea. 
 
 Every now and then he took a quiet look at his sister. Louie 
 was in some ways more beautiful than ever. She carried herself 
 magnificently, and as she sat at the tea-table— restless always— 
 she fell unconsciously into one fine attitude after another, no 
 doubt because of her long practice as a sculptor's model. All the 
 girPs awkwardness had disappeared; she had the insolent ease 
 which goes with tried and conscious power. But with the angu- 
 larity and thinness of first youth had gone also that wild and 
 startling radiance which Montjoie had caught and fixed in the 
 Maenad statue— the one enduring work of a ruined talent, now to 
 be found in the Luxembourg by anyone who cares to look for it. 
 Her beauty was less original ; it had taken throughout the second- 
 rate Parisian stamp ; she had the townswoman's pallor, as com- 
 pared with the moorland red and white of her youth ; and round 
 the eyes and mouth in a full daylight were already to be seen 
 the lines which grave the history of passionate and selfish living. 
 
 But if her beauty was less original, it was infinitely more 
 finished. Lucy beside her stumbled among the cups, and grew 
 more and more self-conscious ; she had felt much the same at 
 Benet's Park beside Lady Venetia Danby ; only here there was 
 a strong personal animosity and disapproval fighting with the 
 disagreeable sense of being outshone. 
 
 She left almost all the talk to her husband, and employed 
 lierself in looking after Cecile. David, who had left his work 
 with difficulty to meet his sister, did his best to keep her going on 
 indifferent subjects, wondering the while what it was that she had 
 come all this way to say to him, and perfectly aware that her 
 sharp eyes were in every place, taking a depreciatory inventory 
 of his property, his household, and his circumstances. 
 
 Suddenly Louie said something to Cecile in violent French. 
 It was to the effect that she was to hold herself up and not stoop 
 like an idiot. 
 
 The child, who was shyly eating her tea, flushed all over, and 
 drew herself up with painful alacrity. Louie went on with a 
 loud account of the civility showTi her by some gentlemen on the 
 Paris boat and on the journey from Dover. In the middle of it 
 she stopped short, her eye flamed, she bent forward with the 
 rapidity of a cat that springs, and slapped Cecile smartly on the 
 right cheek. 
 
 ' I was watching you ! ' she cried. ' Are you never going to 
 obey me — do you think I am going to drag a hunchback about 
 with me ? ' 
 
 Both David and Lucy started forward. Cecile dropped her 
 bread and butter and began to cry in a loud, shrill voice, hitting 
 out meanwhile at her mother with her tiny hands in a frenzy of 
 rage and fear. Sandy, frightened out of his wits, set up a loud 
 iiowl also, till lais^ mother caught him up and carried him away. 
 
500 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 ' Louie, the child is tired out ! ' said David, trying to quiet 
 Cecile and dry her tears. ' What was that for ? ' 
 
 Louie's chest heaved. 
 
 'Because she won't do what I tell her,' she said fiercely. 
 'What am I to do with her w^hen she growls up? Who'll ever 
 look at her twice ? ' 
 
 She scowled at the child who had taken refuge on David's 
 knee, then with a sudden change of expression she held out her 
 arms, and said imperiously : 
 
 'Give her to me.' 
 
 David relinquished her, and the mother took the little trem- 
 bling creature on her knee. 
 
 ' Be quiet then,' she said to her roughly, always in French, ' I 
 didn't hurt you. There ! Veux-tu da gateau f ' 
 
 She cut some with eager fingers and held it to Cecile's lips. 
 The child turned away, silently refusing it, the tears rolling down 
 her cheeks. The mother devoured her wath eyes of remorse and 
 adoration, wiiile her face w\as still red with anger. 
 
 ' Bis-moi, you don't feel anything ? ' she said, kissing her 
 hungrily. ' Are you tired ? Shall 1 carry you upstairs and put 
 you on the bed to rest ? ' 
 
 And she did carry her up, not allowing David to touch her. 
 When they were at last safe in their own room, David came down 
 to his study and threw himself into his chair in the dark with a 
 groan. 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Louie and her child entered the sitting-room together when the 
 bell rang for supper-tea. Louie had put on a high red silk dress 
 of a brilliant, almost scarlet, tone, which showed her arms from 
 the elbows and was very slightly clouded here and there with 
 black ; C6cile crept beside her, a little pale shadow, in a white 
 muslin frock, adorned, however, as Lucy's vigilant eyes imme- 
 diately perceived, with some very dainty and expensive embroidery. 
 The motiier's dress reminded her of that in which she first saw 
 Louie Grieve ; so did her splendid and reckless carriage ; so did 
 the wild play of her black eyes, always on the watch for oppor- 
 tunities of explosion and offence. How did they get their dresses ? 
 Who paid for them ? And now they had come over to beg for 
 more ! Lucy could hardly keep a civil tongue in her head at all, 
 as her sister-in-law swept round the room making strong and, to 
 the mistress of the house, cutting remarks on the dift'erence 
 between ' Manchester dirt ' and the brightness and cleanliness 
 of Paris. Why, she lorded it over them as though ti)e place 
 belonged to her ! ' And she is just a pauper — living on what we 
 give her 1 ' thought Lucy to herself with exasperation. 
 
 After supper, at which Louie behaved with the same inde- 
 finable insolence — whether as regarded the food or the china, or 
 the shaky moderator lamp, a relic from David's earliest bachelor 
 
CHAP. VI MATURITY 501 
 
 days, which only he could coax into satisfactory- burning — Lucy 
 made the move, and said to her with cold constraint : 
 
 ' Will you come into the drawing-room ?— David has a pipe in 
 the study after dinner.' 
 
 'I want to speak to David,' said Louie, pushing back her 
 chair with noisy decision. ' I'll go with him. He can smoke as 
 much as he likes — I'm used to it.' 
 
 ' Well, then, come into my study,' said David, trying to speak 
 cheerfully. ' Lucy will look after Cecile.' 
 
 To Louie's evident triumph Cecile made difficulties about 
 going with her aunt, but was at last persuaded by the prospect 
 of seeing Sandy in bed. She had already shown signs in her 
 curious frightened way of a considerable interest in Sandy. 
 
 Then David led the way to the study. He put his sister into 
 his armchair and stood pipe in hand beside her, looking down 
 upon her. In his heart there was the passionate self-accusing 
 sense that he could not feel pity, or affection, or remorse for the 
 past when she was there ; every look and word roused in him the 
 old irritation, the old wish to master her, he had known so often 
 in his youth. Yet he drew himself together, striving to do his 
 best. 
 
 'Well, now, look here,' said Louie defiantly, 'I want some 
 money.' 
 
 ' So I supposed,' he said quietly, lighting his pipe. 
 
 Louie reddened. 
 
 * Well, and if I do want it,' she said, breathing quickly, ' I've 
 a right to want it. You chose to waste all that money— all my 
 money — on that marrying business, and you must take the 
 consequence. I look upon it this way — you promised to put 
 my money into your trade and give me a fair share of your 
 profits. Then you chucked it away — you made me spend it all, 
 and now, of course, I'm to have nothing to say to your profits. 
 Oh dear, no ! It's a trifle that I'm a pauper and you're rolling 
 in money compared to me anyway. Oh [ it doesn't matter 
 nothing to nobody — not at all ! All the same you couldn't have 
 made the start you did — not those few months I was with you — 
 without my money. Why can't you confess it, I want to know — 
 and behave more handsome to me now— instead of leaving me in 
 that state that I haven't a franc to bless myself with ! ' 
 
 She threw herself back in her chair, with one arm flung 
 behind her head. David stared at her tongue-tied for a while by 
 sheer amazement. 
 
 ' I gave you everything I had,' he said, at last, with a slow 
 distinctness, ' all your money, and all my own too. When I 
 came back here, I had my new stock, it is true, but it was much 
 of it unpaid for. M^ first struggle was to get my neck out of 
 debt.' 
 
 He paused, shrinking with a kind of sick repulsion from the 
 memory of that bygone year of shattered nerves and anguished 
 effort. Deliberately he let thought and speech of it drop. 
 
503 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 Louie was the last person in the world to whom he could talk 
 of it. 
 
 'I built up my business again,' he resumed, 'by degrees. 
 Mr. Doyle lent me money — it was on that capital I first began to 
 thrive. From tlie very beginning, even in I lie very year when I 
 handed over to you all our fiather's money — I sent you more. 
 And every^year since — you know as well as I do — ' 
 
 But again he looked away and paused. Once more he felt 
 himself on a wrong tack. What was the use of laying out, so 
 to speak, all that he had done in the sight of these angry eyes ? 
 Besides, a certain high pride restrained him. 
 
 Louie looked a trifle disconcerted, and her flush deepened. 
 Her audacious attempt to put him in the wrong and provide 
 herself with a grievance could not be carried on. She took 
 refuge in passion. 
 
 ' Oh, I dare say you think you've done a precious lot ! ' she 
 said, sitting straight up and locking her hands round her knee, 
 while the whole frame of her stiffened and quivered. ' I suppose 
 you think other people would think so too. I don't care ! It 
 don't matter to me. You're the only belonging I've got — who 
 else was there for me to look to ? Oh, it is all very fine ! All I 
 know is, I can't stand my life any more ! If you "^can't do any- 
 thing, I'll just pack up my traps and go. Somebody '11 have to 
 make it easier for me, that's all ! Last week — I was out of the 
 house — he found out where I kept my money, he broke the lock 
 open, and when I got home there was nothing. Nothing^ I tell 
 you! ' Her voice rose to a shrillness that made David look to see 
 that the. door between them and Lucy was securely closed. 
 ' And I'd promised a whole lot of things to the church for 
 Easter, and Cecile and I haven't got a rag between us ; and as for 
 the rent, the landlord may whistle for it 1 Oh ! the beast ! ' she 
 said, between her teeth, while the fierce tears stood in her eyes. 
 
 Lucy — any woman of normal shrewdness, putting two and 
 two together — would have allowed these complaints about half 
 their claimed weight. Upon David — unconsciously inclined to 
 measure all emotion by his own standard — they produced an 
 immediate and deep impression. 
 
 ' You poor thing ! ' he murmured, as he stood looking down 
 upon her. 
 
 She tossed her head, as though resenting his compassion. 
 
 ' Yes, I'm about tired of it ! I thought I'd come over and 
 tell you that. Now you know, — and if you hear things you don't 
 like, don't blame me, that's all 1 ' 
 
 Her great eyes blazed into his. He understood her. Her 
 child — the priests — had, so far, restrained her. Kow — what 
 strange mixture of shameless impulse — curiosity, greed, reckless 
 despair — had driven her here that she might threaten him thus 1 
 
 'Ah, I dare say you think I've had a gay life of it over there 
 with your money,' she went on, not allowing him to speak. '■My 
 Qocir 
 
CHAP. VI MATURITY 503 
 
 She shrugged her shoulders, with a scornful laugh, while the 
 tempest gathered within her. 
 
 ' Don't I know perfectly that for years I have been one of the 
 most beautiful women in Paris ! Ask the men who have painted 
 me for the Salon — ask that brute who might have made a for- 
 tune out of. me if he hadn't been the sot he is ! And what have 
 I got by it ? What do other women who are not a tenth part as 
 good-looking as I am get by it ? A comfortable life, anyway I 
 Eh Men ! essay ons ! — nous aussi. ' 
 
 The look she flung at him choked the words on his lips. 
 
 'When I think of these ten years,' she cried, 'I just wonder 
 at myself. There, — what you think about it I don't know, and I 
 don't care. I might have had a good time, and I've had a deviVs 
 time. And, upon my word, I think I'll make a change ! ' 
 
 In her wild excitement she sprang up and began to pace the 
 narrow room. 
 
 David watched her, fighting with himself, and with that 
 inbred antipathy of temperament which seemed to paralyse both 
 ■will and judgment. Was the secret of it that in their profound 
 unlikeness they were yet so much alike ? 
 
 Then he went up to her and made her sit down again. 
 
 'Let me have a word now,' he said quietly, though his hand 
 as it gripped hers had a force of which he was unconscious. 
 'You say you \7onder at yourself. Well, I can tell you this: 
 other people have wondered too 1 When I left you in Paris ten 
 years ago, I tell you frankly, I had no hopes. I said to myself — 
 don't rage at me ! — with that way of looking at things, and with 
 such a husband, what chance is there ? And for some years 
 now, Louie, I confess to you, I have been simply humbled and 
 amazed to see what — what ' — his voice sank and shook — ' love 
 — and the fear of Qod — can do. It has been hard to be miserable 
 and poor — I know that — but you have cared for Cecile, and you 
 have feared to shut yourself out from good people who spoke to 
 you in God's name. Don't do yourself injustice. Believe in 
 yourself. Look back upon these years and be thankful. With 
 all their miseries they have been a kind of victory ! Will you 
 throw them away now ? But your child is grov»ing up and will 
 understand. And there are hands to help— mine, always — always.' 
 
 He held out his to her, smiling. He could not have analysed 
 his own impulse — this strange impulse which had led him to 
 bless instead of cursing. But its effect upon Louie was startling. 
 She had looked for, perhaps in her fighting mood she had ar- 
 dently desired, an outburst of condemnation, against which her 
 mad pleasure in the sound of her own woes and hatreds might 
 once more spend itself. And instead of blaming and reproaching 
 he had — 
 
 She stared at him. Then with a sudden giving way, which 
 was a matter partly of nerves and partly of surprise, she let her 
 two arms fall upon the edge of the chair, and dropping her head 
 upon them, burst out into wild sobbing. 
 
504 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 His own eyes were wet. He soothed her hurriedly and inco- 
 herently, told her he would spare her all the money he could ; 
 that he and Lucy w^ould do their best, but that she must not 
 suppose they were very rich. He did not regard all his money 
 as his own. 
 
 He went on to explain to her something of his business posi- 
 tion. Her sobbing slackened and ceased. And pr'esently, his 
 mood changing instinctively with hers, he became more vague 
 and cautious in statement ; his tone veered back towards that 
 which he w^as accustomed to use to her. For, once her burst of 
 passion over, he felt immediately that she was once more criticis- 
 ing everything that he said and did in her own interest. 
 
 'Oh, I know you've become a regular Communist,' she said 
 sullenly at last, drying her eyes in haste. ' Well, I tell you, I 
 must have a hundred pounds. I can't do with a penny less than 
 that.' 
 
 He tried to get out of her for what precise purposes she 
 wanted it, and whether her husband had stolen from her the 
 whole of the quarter's allowance he had just sent her. She 
 answered evasively ; he felt that she was telling him falsehoods ; 
 and once more his heart grew dry within him. 
 
 ' Well,' he said at last with a certain decision, 'I will do it if 
 I can, and I think I can do it. But, Louie, understand that I 
 have got Lucy and the child to think for, that I am not alone.' 
 
 'I should think she had got more than she could expect!' 
 cried Louie, putting her hair straight with trembling hands. 
 
 His cheek flushed at the sneer, but before he could reply she 
 said abruptly : 
 
 ' Have you ever told her about Paris ? ' 
 
 ' No,' he said, with equal abrui)tness, his mouth taking a stern 
 line, ' and unless I am forced to do so I never shall. That you 
 understand, I know, for I spoke to you about it in Paris. *My 
 past died for me when I asked Lucy to be my wife. I do not ask 
 you to remember this. I take it for granted.' 
 
 'I saw that woman the other day,' said Louie with a strange 
 smile, as she sat staring into the lire. 
 
 He started, but he did not reply. He went to straighten some 
 papers on his table. It seemed to him that he did not want her 
 to say a word more, and yet he listened for it. 
 
 ' I remember they used to call her pretty,' said Louie, a hate- 
 ful scorn shining in her still reddened eyes. ' She is just a little 
 frump now — nobody would ever look at her twice. They say her 
 husband leads her a life. He poisoned himself at an operation 
 and has gone half crippled. She has to keep them both. She 
 doesn't give herself the airs she used to, anyway.' 
 
 David could bear it no longer. 
 
 'I think you had better go and take Cecile to bed,' he said 
 peremptorily. ' I heard it strike nine a few minutes ago. I will 
 go and talk business to Lucy.' 
 
 She went with a careless air. As he saw her shut the door 
 
CHAP. VI MATURITY 505 
 
 his heart felt once more dead and heavy. A few minutes before 
 there had been the flutter of a divine presence between them. 
 Now he felt nothing but the iron grip of character and life. And 
 that little picture which her last words had left upon the mind — 
 it carried with it a shock and dreariness he could only escape by 
 hard work, that best medicine of the soul. He went out early 
 next morning to his printing-office, spent himself passionately 
 upon a day of difficulties, and came back refreshed. 
 
 For the rest, he talked to Lucy, and with great difficulty 
 persuaded her in the matter of the hundred pounds. Lucy's 
 indignation may be taken for granted, and the angry proofs she 
 heaped on David that Louie was an extravagant story-telling 
 hussy, who spent everything she could get on dress and personal 
 luxury. 
 
 ' Why, her dressing-table is like a perfumer's shop ! ' she cried 
 in her wrath ; ' what she does with all the messes I can't imagine 
 —makes herself beautiful, I suppose ! Why should we pay for it 
 all ? And I tell you she has got a necklace of real pearls. I know 
 they are real, for she told Lizzie' (Lizzie was the boy's nurse) 
 ' that she always took them about with her to keep them safe out 
 of her husband's clutches— just imagine her talking to the girl 
 like that ! When will you be able to give me real pearls, and 
 where do you suppose she got them ? ' 
 
 David preferred not to inquire. What could he do, he asked 
 himself in despair— what even could he know, unless Louie chose 
 that he should know it ? But she, on the contrary, carefully 
 avoided the least recurrence to the threats of her first talk with 
 him. 
 
 Ultimately, however, he brought his wife round, and Louie 
 was informed that she could have her hundred pounds, which 
 should be paid her on the day of her departure, but that nothing 
 more, beyond her allowance, could or should be given her during 
 the current year. 
 
 She took the promise very coolly, but certainly made herself 
 more agreeable after it was given. She dressed up C6cile and set 
 her dancing in the evenings, weird dances of a Spanish type, 
 alternating between languor and a sort of 'possession,' which 
 had been taught the child by a moustached violinist from Madrid, 
 who admired her mother and paid Louie a fantastic and stormy 
 homage through her child. She also condescended to take an 
 interest in Lucy's wardrobe. The mingled temper and avidity 
 with which Lucy received her advances may be imagined. It 
 xnade her mad to have it constantly implied that her gowns and 
 bonnets would not be worn by a maid-of-all-work in Paris. At 
 the same time, when Louie's fingers had been busy with them it 
 was as plain to her as to anyone else that they became her twice 
 as well as they had before. So she submitted to be pinned and 
 pulled about and tried on, keeping as much as possible on her 
 dignity all the time, and reddening with fresh wrath each time 
 
506 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book m" 
 
 that Louie made it plain to her that she thought her sister-in-hnv 
 a provincial little fool, and was only troubling herself about her 
 to pass the time. 
 
 Dora, of course, came up to see Louie, and Louie was much 
 more communicative to her than to either Lucy or David. She 
 told stories of her husband which made Dora's hair stand on end'; 
 but she boasted in great detail of her friendships with certain 
 Legitimist ladies of the bluest blood, with one of whom she had 
 just held a quete for some Catholic object on the stairs of the 
 Salon. ' I was in blue and pink with a little silver,' she said, 
 looking quickly behind her to see that Lucy was not listening. 
 ' And Cecile was a fairy, with spangled wings — the sweetest thing 
 you ever saw. We were botli in the illustrated papers the week 
 
 after, but as nobody took any notice of Madame de C she has 
 
 behaved like a washerwoman to me ever since. As if I could 
 help her complexion or her age ! ' 
 
 But above all did she boast herself against Dora in Church 
 matters. She would go to St. Damian's on Sunday, triumph- 
 antly announcing that she should have to confess it as a sin when 
 she got home, and afterwards, when Dora, as her custom was, 
 came out to early dinner with the Grieves, Louie could not contain 
 herself on the subject of the dresses, the processions, the decora- 
 tions, the flowers, and ceremonial trappings in general, with 
 which she might, if she liked, regale herself either at Ste. Eulalie 
 or the Madeleine, in comparison with the wretched show offered 
 by St. Damian's. Dora, after an early service and much Sunday- 
 school, sat looking pale and weary under the scornful information 
 poured out upon her. She was outraged by Louie's tone ; yet 
 she was stung by her contempt. Once her gentleness was roused 
 to speech, and she endeavoured to give some of the reasons for 
 rejecting the usurped authority of the 'Bishop of Rome,' in 
 which she had been drilled at different times. But she floundered 
 and came to grief. Her adversary laughed at her, and in the 
 intervals of rating Cecile for having inked her dress, flaunted 
 some shrill controversy which left them all staring. Louie 
 vindicating the claims of the Holy See with much unction and 
 an appropriate diction ! It seemed to David, as he listened, that 
 the irony of life could hardly be carried further. 
 
 On the following day, David, not without a certain conscious- 
 ness, said to John Dalby, his faithful helper through many years, 
 and f)f late "his partner : 
 
 ' My sister is up at our place, John, with her little girl. Lucy 
 would be very glad if you would go in this evening to see them."' 
 
 John, who was already aware of the advent of Madame 
 Montjoie, accepted the invitation and went, Louie received him 
 with a manner half mocking — half patronising — and made no 
 effort whatever to be agreeable to him. She was preoccupied ; 
 and the stout, shy man in his new suit only bored her. As for 
 him, he sat and watched her ; his sm-all, amazed eyes took in her 
 ways with Cecile, alternately boastful and tyrannical ; her airs 
 
CHAP. VI MATURITY 507 
 
 towards Lucy ; her complete indifference to her brother's life and 
 interests. When he got up to go, he took leave of her with all 
 the old timid gaucherie. But if, when he entered the room, 
 there had been anything left in his mind of the old dream, he 
 was a wholly free man when he recrossed the threshold. He 
 walked home thinking much of a small solicitor's daughter, who 
 worshipped at the Congregational chapel he himself attended. 
 He had been at David Grieve's side all these years ; he loved him 
 probably more than he would now love any woman ; he devoted 
 himself with ardour to the printing and selling of the various 
 heretical works and newspapers published by Grieve & Co. ; and 
 yet for some long time past he had been— and was likely to remain 
 — a man of strong religious convictions, of a common Evangelical 
 type. 
 
 The second week of Louie's stay was a much greater trial than 
 the first to all concerned. She grew tired of dressing and patro- 
 nising Lucy ; her sharp eyes and tongue found out all her sister- 
 in-law's weak points ; the two children were a fruitful source of 
 jarring and jealousy between the mothers ; and by the end of the 
 week their relation was so much strained, and David had so much 
 diflSculty in keeping the peace, that he could only pine for the 
 Monday morning which was to see Louie's departure. Mean- 
 while nothing occurred to give him back his momentary hold 
 upon her. She took great care not to be alone with him. It 
 was as though she felt the presence of a new force in him, and 
 would give it no chance of affecting her in mysterious and incal- 
 culable ways. 
 
 On the Saturday before her last Sunday, Reuben Grieve 
 arrived in Manchester— with his wife. His nephew's letter and 
 invitation had thrown the old man into a great flutter. Ulti- 
 mately his curiosity as to David's home and child— David 
 himself he had seen several times since the marriage — and the 
 desire, which the more prosperous state of his own circumstances 
 allowed him to feel, to see what Louie might be like after all 
 these years— decided him to go. And when he told Hannah of 
 his intended journey, he found, to his amazement, that she was 
 minded to go too. ' If yo'll tell me when yo gan me a jaunt last, 
 I'll be obliged to yo ! ' she said sourly, and* he at once felt himself 
 a selfish brute that he should have thought of taking the little 
 pleasure without her. 
 
 When they were seated in the railway-carriage, he broke out 
 in a sudden excitement : 
 
 ' Wal, I never thowt, Hannah, to see yo do thissens naw moor ! ' 
 'Aye, yo wor alius yan to mak t' warst o' things,' she said to 
 him, as she slowly settled herself in her corner. 
 
 Nevertheless, Reuben's feeling was amply justified. It had 
 been a resurrection. The clever young doctor, brimful of new 
 methods, who had brought her round, had arrived just in time 
 to stop the process of physical deterioration before it had gone 
 too far ; and the recovery of power both on the paralysed side 
 
508 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 and in general health had been marvellous. She walked with a 
 stick, and was an old and blanched woman before her time. But 
 her indomitable spirit was once more provided with its necessary- 
 means of expression. She was at least as rude as ever, and it 
 was as clear as anything can be in the case of a woman who has 
 never learnt to smile, that her visit to Manchester — the first for 
 ten years — was an excitement and satisfaction to her. 
 
 David met them at the station ; but Reuben persisted in 
 going to an old-fashioned eating-house in the centre of the city, 
 where he had been accustomed to stay on the occasion of liis rare 
 visits to Manchester, in spite of his nephew's repeated offers of 
 hospitality. 
 
 ' Noa, Davy, noa,' he said, 'yo're a gen'leman now, and yo 
 conno' be moidered wi' oos. We'st coom and see yo — thank yo 
 kindly, — bit we'st do for oursels i' th' sleepin' wa3^' 
 
 To which Hannah gave a grim and energetic assent. 
 
 When Louie had been told of their expected arrival she 
 opened her black eyes to their very widest extent. 
 
 ' Well, you'd better keep Aunt Hannah and me out of each 
 other's way,' she remarked briefly. 'I shall let her have it, 
 you'll see. I'm bound to.' A remark that David did his best to 
 forget, seeing that the encounter was now past averting. 
 
 When on Sunday afternoon the door of the Grieves's sitting- 
 room opened to admit Hannah and Reuben Grieve, Louie was 
 lying half asleep in an armchair by the fire, Cecile and Sandy 
 were playing with bricks in the middle of the floor, and Dora 
 and Lucy were chatting on the sofa. 
 
 Lucy, who had seen Reuben before, but had never set eyes 
 on Hannah, sprang up ill at ease and awkward, but genuinely 
 anxious to behave nicely to her husband's relations. 
 
 ' Won't you take a chair? I'll go and call David. He's in 
 the next room. This is Miss Lomax. Louie 1 ' 
 
 Startled by the somewhat sharp call, Louie sat up and rubbed 
 her eyes. 
 
 Hannah, resting on her stick, was standing in the middle of 
 the floor. At sight of the familiar tyrannous face, grown parch- 
 ment-white in place of its old grey hue — of the tall gaunt figure 
 robed in the Sunday garb of rusty black which Louie perfectly 
 remembered, and surmounted by the old head-gear— the stiff 
 frizzled curls held in place by two small combs on the temples, 
 the black bandeau across the front of the head, and the towering 
 bonnet — Louie suddenly flushed and rose. 
 
 ' How do you do ? ' she said in a cool off-hand way, holding 
 out her hand, which Hannah's black cotton glove barely touched. 
 'Well, Uncle Reuben, do you think Tm grown? I have had 
 about time to, anyway, since you saw me. That's my little girl.' 
 
 With a patronising smile she pushed forward Cecile. The 
 short-sighted tremulous Reuben, staring uncomfortably about 
 him at the town splendours in which ' Davy ' lived, had to have 
 
CHAP. VI MATURITY 50d 
 
 the child's hand put into his by Dora before he could pull him- 
 self together enough to respond. 
 
 • Tm glad to see tha, my little dear,' he said, awkwardly 
 dropping his hat and umbrella, as he stooped to salute her. ' I'm 
 sure yo're varra kind, miss' — this w'as said apologetically to Dora, 
 who had picked up his belongings and put them on a chair. 
 ' Wal, Louie, she doan't feature her mitlicr mich, as I can see.' 
 
 He looked hurriedly at his wife for confirmation. Hannah, 
 who had seated herself on the highest and plainest chair she 
 could find, stared the child up and down, and then slowly re- 
 moved her eyes, saying nothing. Instantly lier manner woke the 
 old rage in Louie, who was observing her excitedly. 
 
 ' Come here to me, Cecile. Fd be sorry, anyway, if you were 
 like what your mother was at your age. You'd be a poor, ill- 
 treated, half-starved little wretch if you were ! ' 
 
 Hannah started, but not unpleasantly. Her grim mouth 
 curved with a sort of satisfaction. It w^as many years since 
 she had enjoyed those opportunities for battle which Louie's 
 tempers had once so freely afforded her. 
 
 ' She's nobbut a midge,' she remarked audibly to Dora, who 
 had just tried to propitiate her by a footstool. ' The chilt looks 
 as thoo she'd been fed on spiders or frogs, or summat o' that 
 soart.' 
 
 At this moment David came in, just in time to prevent another 
 explosion 'from Louie. He was genuinely glad to see his guests ; 
 his feeling of kinship w^as much stronger now than it ever had 
 been in his youth ; and in these years of independent, and on 
 the whole happy, living he had had time to forget even Hannah's 
 enormities. 
 
 ' Well, have you got a comfortable inn?' he asked Reuben 
 presently, when some preliminaries were over. 
 
 'I thank yo kindly, Davy,' said Reuben cautiously, 'we're 
 meeterly weel sarved ; bit yo conno look for mich fro teawn 
 folk.' 
 
 ' What are yo alius so mealy-mouthed for ? ' said his wife in- 
 dignantly. ' Why conno yo say reet out 'at it's a pleeace not fit 
 for ony decent dog to put liis head in, an' an ill-mannert daggle- 
 tail of a woman to keep it, as I'd like to sweep out wi th' bits of 
 a morning, an' leave her on th' muck-heap wiieer she belongs ? ' 
 
 David laughed. To an ear long accustomed to the monotony 
 of town civilities there was a not unwelcome savour of the moors 
 even in these brutalities of Hannah's. 
 
 ' Sandy, where are you ? ' he said, looking round. ' Have you 
 had a look at him. Aunt Hannah ?' 
 
 Sandy, who was sitting in the midst of his bricks sucking his 
 thumb patiently till Cecile should be given back to him by her 
 mother, and these invaders should be somehow dispersed, looked 
 up and gave his father a sleepy and stgnificant nod, as much as 
 to say, 'Leave me alone, and turn these people out.' 
 
 But David lifted him up, and carried him off for exhibition. 
 
510 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE BOOK IV 
 
 Han nail looked at him, as lie lay lazily back on his father's 
 arm, his fair curls straying over David's coat, his cheek flushed 
 by the heat. 'Aye, he's a gradely little chap,' she said, more 
 graciously it seemed to David than he ever remembered to have 
 heard Hannah Grieve speak before. His paternal vanity was in- 
 stantly delighted. 
 
 ' Sit up, Sandy, and tell your great-uncle and aunt about the 
 fine games you've been having with your cousin.' 
 
 But Sandy was lost in quite other reflections. He looked out 
 upon Hannah and Reuben with grave filmy eyes, as though from 
 a vast distance, and said absently : 
 
 ' Daddy ! ' 
 
 ' Yes, Sandy, speak up.' 
 
 ' Daddy, when everybody in the world was babies, who put 
 'em to bed ? ' 
 
 The child spoke as usual with a slow flute-like articulation, so 
 that every word could be heard. Reuben and Hannah turned 
 and looked at each other. 
 
 ' Lord alive ! ' cried Hannah * whativer put sich notions into 
 th' chilt'syed?' 
 
 David, with a happy twinkle in his eye, held up a hand for 
 silence. 
 
 * I don't know, Sandy ; give it up.' 
 
 Sandy considered a second or two, then said, with the sigh of 
 one who relinquishes speculation in favor of the conventional 
 solution : 
 
 'I s'pose God did.' 
 
 His tone was dejected, as though he would gladly have come 
 to another conclusion if he could. 
 
 ' Reuben,' said Hannah with severity, *hand me that sugar- 
 stick. ' 
 
 Reuben groped in his pockets for the barley-sugar, which, in 
 spite of Hannah's scoffs, he had bought in Market Street the 
 evening before, 'for t' childer.' He watched his wife in gaping 
 astonishment as he saw her approaching Sandy, with blandish- 
 ments which, rough and clumsy as they were, had nevertheless 
 the effect of beguiling that young man on to the lap where 
 barley-sugar was to be had. Hannah fed him triumphantly, 
 making loud remarks on his beauty and cleverness. 
 
 Meanwhile Louie stood on the other side of the fire, holding 
 Cecile close against her, with a tight defiant grip — her lip 
 twitching contemptuously. David, always sensitively alive to 
 her presence and her moods, insisted in the midst of Sandy's 
 feast that Cecile should have her share. Sandy held out the 
 barley-sugar, following it with wistful eyes. Louie beat down 
 C6cile's grasping hand. 'You shan't spoil your tea — you'll be 
 sick with that stuff!' she said imperiously. Hannah turned, 
 and brought a slow venomous scrutiny to bear upon her niece — 
 on the slim tall figure in the elegant Parisian dress, the daintily 
 curled and frizzled head, the wild angry eyes. Then she with- 
 
CHAP. VI MATURITY 511 
 
 drew her glance, coiitented. Louie's evident jealousy appeased 
 her. She had come to Manchester v»'ith one fixed determination 
 — not to be ' talked foine to by that hizzy.' 
 
 At this juncture tea made its appearance, Lucy having some 
 time ago given up the sit down tea in the dining-room, which 
 was the natural custom of her class, as not genteel. She seated 
 herself nervously to pour it out. Hannah had at the very be- 
 ginning put her down ' as a middlin' soart o' person,' and vouch- 
 safed her very little notice. 
 
 * Auntie Dora ! auntie Dora ! ' cried Sandy, escaping from 
 Hannah's knee, ' I'm coming to sit by zoo.' 
 
 And as soon as he hari grl comfortably into her pocket, he 
 pulled her head down and whispered to her, his thoughts running 
 as before in the theological gro(n'e, * Auntie Dora, God made me 
 —and God made Cecile did God make that one ?' 
 
 And he nodded across at Mnnuah, huddling himself together 
 meanwhile in a paroxysm of glee and mischief. He was excited 
 by the flatteries he had been receiving, and Dora, thankful to see 
 that Hannah had heard nothing, could only quiet him by copious 
 supplies of bread and butter. 
 
 David wooed Cecile to sit on a stool beside him, and things 
 went smoothly for a time, though Hannah made it clearly evi- 
 dent that this was not the kind of tea she had expected, and 
 that she 'didn't howd wi' new-fangled ways o' takkin' your 
 vittles.' Eeuben did his best to cover and neutralise her remarks 
 by gossip to David about the farm and the valley. ' Eh— it's 
 been nobbut raggy weather up o' the moors this winter, Davy, 
 an' a great lot o' sheep lost. Nobbut twothrey o' mine, I thank 
 th' Lord.' But in the midst of a most unflattering account of 
 the later morals and development of the Wigson family, Reuben 
 stopped dead short, with a stare at the door. 
 
 ' Wal, aaniver ! — theer's Mr. Ancrumhissel, — Idouphowdyo! ' 
 
 And the old man rose with effusion, his queer eyes and face 
 beaming and blinking with a light of affectionate memory, for 
 Ancrum stood in the doorway, smiling a mute inquiry at Lucy 
 as to whether he might come in. David sprang up"^to bring 
 him into the circle. Hannah held out an ungracious hand. 
 Never, all these years, had she forgiven the ex-minister those 
 representations he had once made on the subject of David's 
 'prenticing. 
 
 Then the new-comer sat down by Reuben cheerily, parrying 
 the farmer's concern about his altered looks, and watching Louie, 
 who had thrown him a careless word in answer to his greeting. 
 Dora, who had come to know him well, and to feel much of the 
 affectionate reverence for him that David did, in spite of some 
 bewilderment as to his religious position, went round presently 
 to talk to him, and Sandy as it happened was left on his stool 
 for a minute or two forgotten. He asked his mother plaintively 
 for cake, and she did not hear him. Meanwhile Cecile had cake, 
 and he followed her eating of it with resentful eyes. 
 
512 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 ' Come here, Cecile,' said David, 'and hold the cake while I 
 cut it ; there's a useful child.' 
 
 He handed a piece to Reuben, and then put the next into 
 Cecile's hand. 
 
 ' Ready for some more, little woman ? ' 
 
 Cecile in a furtive squirrel-like way seized the piece and was 
 retiring with it, when Sandy, beside himself, jumped from his 
 stool, rushed at his cousin and beat her wildly with his small 
 
 fists. , . , 
 
 ' Yo're a geedy thing— a geedy 'gust in' thmg ! ' he cried, 
 sobbing partly because he wanted the cake, still more because, 
 after his exaltation on Hannah's knee, he had been so unaccount- 
 ably neglected. To see Cecile battening on a second piece while 
 he was denied a first was more than could be borne. 
 
 ' You little viper, you ! ' exclaimed Louie, and springing up, 
 she swept across to Sandy, and boxed his ears smartly, just as 
 she was accustomed to box Cecile's, whenever the fancy took her. 
 The child raised a piercing cry, and David caught him up. 
 ' Give him to mo, David, give him to me,' cried Lucy, who 
 had almost upset the tea-table in Ler rush to her child. ' I'll 
 see whether that sister of yours shall beat and alnise my boy in 
 my own house! Oh, she may beat her own child as much as she 
 pleases, she does it all day long ! If she were a poor person she 
 would be had up.' 
 
 Her face glowed with passion. The exasperation of many 
 days spoke in her outburst . David, himself trembling with anger, 
 in vain tried to quiet her and Sandy. 
 
 ' Ay, I reckon she maks it hot wark for them 'at ha to live wi 
 her,' said Hannah audibly, looking round on the scene vdth a 
 certain enjoyment which contrasted with the panic and distress 
 of the rest. 
 
 Louie, who was holding Cecile— also in tears— in her arms, 
 swept her fierce, contemptuous gaze from Lucy to her ancient 
 enemy. 
 
 'You must be putting in your word, must you?— you old 
 toad, you— you that robbed us of our money till your own hus- 
 band was ashamed of you ! ' 
 
 And, totally regardless of the presence of Dora and Ancrum, 
 and of the efforts made to silence her by Dora or by the flushed 
 and unhappv Reuben, she descended on her foe. She flung 
 charge after charge in Hannah's face, showing the minutest and 
 most vindictive memory for all the sordid miseries of her child- 
 hood ; and then when her passion had spent itself on her aunt, 
 she returned to Lucy, exulting in the sobs and the excitement 
 she had produced. In vain did David try either to silence 
 her or to take Lucy away. Nothing but violence could have 
 stopped the sister's tongue ; his wife, under a sort of fascination 
 of terror and rage, would not move. Flinging all thoughts of 
 her dependence on David— of the money she had come to ask— 
 of her leave-taking on the morrow— to the winds, Louie revenged 
 
CHAP. VI MATUSITY 513 
 
 herself amply for her week's unnatural self-control, and gave 
 full rein to a mad propensity which had been gradually roused 
 and spurred to ungovernable force by the trivial incidents of the 
 afternoon. She made mock of Lucy's personal vanity ; she 
 sneered at her attempts to ape her betters, shrilly declaring that 
 no one would ever take her for anything else than what she was, 
 the daughter of a vulgar cheese-paring old hypocrite ; and, 
 finally, she attacked Sandy as a nasty, greedy, abominable little 
 monkey, not fit to associate with her child, and badly in want 
 of the stick. 
 
 Then slowly she retreated to the door out of breath, the wild 
 lightnings of her eyes flashing on them still. David was holding 
 the hysterical Lucy, while Dora was trying to quiet Sandy. 
 Otherwise a profound silence had fallen on them all, a silence 
 which seemed but to kindle Louie's fury the more. 
 
 ' Ah, you think you've got him in your power, him and his 
 money, you little white-livered cat ! ' she cried, standing in the 
 doorway, and fixing Lucy with a look beneath which her sister- 
 in-law quailed, and hid her face on David's arm. ' You think 
 you'll stop him giving it to them that have a right to look to 
 him ? Perhaps you'd better look out ; perhaps there are people 
 who know more about him than you. Do you think he would 
 ever have looked at you, you little powsement, if he hadn't been 
 taken on the rebound ? ' 
 
 She gave a mad laugh as she flung out the old Derbyshire 
 word of abuse, and stood defying them, David and all. David 
 strode forward and shut the door upon her. Then he went ten- 
 derly up to his wife, and took her and Sandy into the library. 
 
 The sound of Cecile's wails could be heard in the distance. 
 The frightened Reuben turned and looked at his wife. She had 
 grown paler even than before, but her eyes were all alive. 
 
 'A racklesome, natterin' creetur as ivir I seed,' she said 
 calmly; 'I alius telt tha, Reuben Grieve, what hoo'd coom to. 
 It's bred in her — that's yan thing to be hodden i' mind. But I'll 
 shift her in double quick-sticks if she ever cooms meddlin' i' iny 
 house, Reuben Grieve — soa yo know.' 
 
 ' She oughtn't to stay here,' said Ancrum in a quick undertone 
 to Dora ; ' she might do that mother and child a mischief.' 
 
 Dora sat absorbed in her pity for David, in her passionate 
 sympathy for this home that was as her own, 
 
 * She is going to-morrow, thank God ! ' she said with a long 
 breath ; ' oh, what an awful woman ! ' 
 
 Ancrum looked at her with a little sad smile. 
 
 ' Whom are you sorry for ? ' he asked. ' Those two in there ? ' 
 and he nodded towards the library. ' Think again, Miss Dora. 
 There is one face that v.'ill haunt me whenevar I think of this — 
 he face of that French child.' 
 
 All the afternoon visitors dispersed. The hours passed. Lucy, 
 wora out, had gone to bed with a crying which seemed to have 
 
514 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 in it some uew and heavy element she would not speak of, even 
 to David. The evening meal came, and there \Yas no sign or 
 sound from that room upstairs where Louie had locked herself 
 in, 
 
 David stood by the fire in the dining-room, his lips sternly set. 
 He had despatched a servant to Louie's door with an offer to 
 send up food for her and Cecile. But the girl had got no answer. 
 Was he bound to go — bound to bring about the possible renewal 
 of -a, degrading scene ? 
 
 At this moment Lizzie, the little nurse, tapped at the door. 
 
 ' If you please, sir — ' 
 
 ' Yes. Anything w^rong with Master Sandy ? ' 
 
 David went to tlie door in a tremor. ' He won't go to sleep, 
 sir. He wants you, and I'm afraid he'll disturb mistress again.' 
 
 David ran upstairs. 
 
 ' Sandy, what do you want ? ' 
 
 Sandy was crying violently, far down under the bedclothes. 
 When David drew him out, he was found to be grasping a piece 
 of crumbling cake, sticky with tears. 
 
 ' It's Cecile's cake,' he sobbed into his father's ear. ' I want 
 to give it her.' 
 
 And in fact, after his onslaught upon her, Cecile had dropped 
 the offending cake, which he had instantly picked up the moment 
 before Louie struck him. He had held it tight gripped ever 
 since, and repentance was busy in his sn.-all heart. 
 
 David thought a moment. 
 
 ' Come with me, Sandy,' he said at last, and, wrapping up the 
 child in an old shawl that hung near, he carried him off to Louie's 
 door. * Louie ! ' he called, after his knock, in a low voice, for he 
 was uncomfortably aware that his household was on the watch 
 for developments. 
 
 For a while there was no answer. Sandy, absorbed in the 
 •interest of tho situation, clung close to his father and stopped 
 crying. 
 
 At last Louie suddenly flung the door wide open. 
 
 ' What do you want ? ' she said defiantly, with the gesture 
 and bearing of a tragic actress. She was, however, deadly white, 
 and David, looking past her, saw that Cecile was lying wide 
 awake in her little bed. 
 
 'Sandy wants to give Cecile her cake,' he said quietly, 'and 
 to tell her that he is sorry for striking her.' 
 
 He carried his boy up to Cecile. A smile flashed over the 
 child's worn face. She held out her little arms. David, infinitely 
 touched, laid down Sandy, and the children crooned together on 
 the same pillow, he trying to stuff the cake into Cecile's mouth, 
 she gently refusing. 
 
 'She's ill,' said Louie abruptly, 'she's feverish— I want a 
 doctor.' 
 
 'We can get one directly,' he said. 'Will you come down 
 and have some food ? Lucy has gone to bed. If Lizzie comes 
 
CHAP. VII MATURITY 515 
 
 and sits by the children, perhaps they will go to sleep. I can 
 carry Sandy back later.' 
 
 Louie paused irresolutely. Then she went up to the bed, 
 knelt down by it, and took Cecile in her arms. 
 
 'You can take him away,' she said, pointing to Sandy. 'I 
 will put her to sleep. Don't you send me anything to eat. I want 
 a doctor. And if you won't order a tiy for me at twenty minutes 
 to nine to-morrow, I will go out myself, that's all.' 
 
 ' Louie ! ' he cried, holding out his hand to her in despair, 
 'why will you treat us in this way — what have we done to you? ' 
 
 ' l^ever you mind,' she said sullenly, gathering the child to 
 her and confronting him with steady eyes. There was a certain 
 magnificence in their wide unconscious despair — in this one fierce 
 passion. 
 
 She and Lucy did not meet again. In the morning David 
 paid her her hundred pounds, and took her and Cecile to the 
 station, a doctor having seen the child the night before, and 
 prescribed medicine, which had given her a quiet night. Louie 
 barely thanked him for the money. She was almost silent and 
 still very pale. 
 
 Just before they parted, the thought of the tyranny of such 
 a nature, of the life to which she was going back, wrung the 
 brother's heart. The outrage of the day before dropped from his 
 mind as of no account, effaced by sterner realities. 
 
 ' Write to me, Louie ! ' he said to her just as the train was 
 moving off ; ' I could always come if there was trouble — or Dora.' 
 
 She did not answer, and her hand dropped from his. But 
 he remembered afterwards that her eyes were fixed upon him, 
 as long as the train was in sight, and the picture of her dark 
 possessed look will be with him to the end. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 It was a warm April Sunday. Lucy and Dora were pacing up and 
 down in the garden, and Lucy was talking in a quick, low voice. 
 
 ' Oh ! there was something, Dora. You know as well as I do 
 there was something. That awful woman didn't say that for 
 nothing. I suppose he'd tell me if I asked him. ' 
 
 ' Then why don't you ask him ? ' said Dora, with a little frown. 
 
 Lucy gathered a sprig of budding lilac, and restlessly stripped 
 off its young green. 
 
 ' It isn't very pleasant,' she said at last, slowly. 'I dare say 
 it's silly to expect your husband never to have looked at anybody 
 else — ' 
 
 She paused again, unable to explain herself. Dora glanced at 
 her, and was somewhat struck by her thin and worn appearance. 
 She had often, moreover, seemed to her cousin to be fretting 
 during these last weeks. Not that there was much difference in her 
 wajs with David and Sandy. But her small vanities, prejudices, 
 
516 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iy 
 
 and passions were certainly less apparent of late ; she ordered 
 her two servants about less ; she was less interested in her clothes, 
 less eager for social amusement. It was as though something 
 clouding and dulling had passed over a personality which was 
 naturally restless and vivacious. 
 
 Yet it was only to-day, in the course of some conversation 
 about Louie, of whom nothing had been heard since her departure, 
 that Lucy had for the first time broken silence on the subject of 
 those insolent words of her sister-in-law, which Ancrum and Dora 
 had listened to with painful shock, while to Reuben and Hannah, 
 pre-occupied with their own long-matured ideas of Louie, they 
 had been the mere froth of a venomous tongue. 
 
 ' Why didn't you ask him about it at first — just after ? ' Dora 
 resumed. 
 
 ' I didn't want to,' said Lucy, after a minute, and then would 
 say no more. But she walked along, thinking, unhappily, of the 
 moment when David had taken her into the library to be out of 
 the sound of Louie's rage ; of her angry desire to ask him ques- 
 tions, checked by a childish fear she could not analyse, as to what 
 the answers might be ; of his troubled, stormy face ; and of the 
 tender ways by which he tried to calm and comfort her. It had 
 seemed to her that once or twice he had been on the point of 
 saying something grave and unusual, but in the end he had 
 refrained. Louie had gone away ; their everyday life had begun 
 again ; he had been very full, in the intervals of his hard daily 
 business, of the rebuilding of the James Street court, and of thte 
 apprentices' school ; and, led by a variety of impulses — by a sense 
 of jeopardised possession and a conscience speaking with new 
 emphasis and authority — she had taken care that he should talk 
 to her about both ; she had haunted him in the library, and her 
 presence there, once the signal of antagonism and dispute, had 
 ceased to have any such meaning for him. Her sympathy was 
 not very intelligent, and there was at times a childish note of 
 sulkiness and reluctance in it ; she was extremely ready to say, 
 'I told you so,' if anything went wrong ; but, nevertheless, there 
 was a tacit renunciation at the root of her new manner to him 
 which he perfectly understood, and rewarded in his own ardent, 
 affectionate way. 
 
 As she sauntered along in this pale gleam of sun, now drink- 
 ing in the soft April wind, now stooping to look at the few clumps 
 of crocuses and daffodils which were pushing through the black- 
 ened earth, Lucy had once more a vague sense that her life this 
 spring — this past year — had been hard. It was like the feeling of 
 one who first realises the intensity of some long effort or struggle 
 in looking back upon it. Her little life had been breathed into 
 by a divine breath, and growth, expansion, had brought a pain 
 and discontent she had never known before. 
 
 Dora meanwhile had her own thoughts. She was lost in 
 memories of that first talk of hers with David Grieve after his 
 return from Paris, with the marks of his fierce, mysterious grief 
 
CHAP. VII MATURITY 517 
 
 fresh upon him ; then, pursuing her recollection of him through 
 the years, she came to a point of feeling where she said, with 
 sudden energy, throwing her arm round Lucy, and taking up the 
 thread of their conversation : — 
 
 ' I w^ouldn't let what Louie said worry you a bit, Lucy. Of 
 course, she wanted to make mischief ; but you know, and I know, 
 what sort of a man David has been since you and he were 
 married. That'll be enough for you, I should think.' 
 
 Lucy flushed. She had once possessed very little reticence, 
 and had been quite ready to talk her husband over, any day and 
 all day, with Dora. But now, though she would begin in the old 
 way, there soon came a point when something tied her tongue. 
 
 This time she attacked the lilac-bushes again with a restless 
 hand. 
 
 ' Why, I thought you were shocked at his opinions,' she said, 
 proudly. 
 
 Dora sighed. Her conscience had not waited for Lucy's 
 remark to make her aware of the constant perplexity between 
 authority and natural feeling into which David's ideals were per- 
 petually throwing her. 
 
 ' They make one very sad,' she said, looking away. ' But we 
 must believe that God, who sees everything, judges as we cannot do. ' 
 
 Lucy fired up at once. It annoyed her to have Dora making 
 spiritual allowance for David in this way. 
 
 ' I don't believe God wants anything but that people should 
 be good,' she said. ' I am sure there are lots of things like that 
 in the New Testament.' 
 
 Dora shook her head slowly. ' " He that hath not the Son, 
 hath not life," ' she said under her breath, a sudden passion 
 leaping to her eye. 
 
 Lucy looked at her indignantly. 'I don't agree with you, 
 Dora — there ! And it all depends on what things mean. ' 
 
 'The meaning is quite plain,' said Dora, with rigid persist- 
 ence. ' O Lucy, don't be led away. I missed you at early service 
 this morning.' 
 
 The look she threw her cousin melted into a pathetic and 
 heavenly reproach. 
 
 ' Well, I know,' said Lucy, ungraciously, ' I was tired. I don't 
 know what's wrong with me these last weeks ; I can't get up in 
 the morning.' 
 
 Dora only looked grieved. Lucy understood that her plea 
 seemed to her cousin too trivial and sinful to be noticed. 
 
 ' Oh I I dare say I'd go,' she said in her own mind, defiantly, 
 ' if lie went.' 
 
 Aloud, she said : — ■ 
 
 ' Dora, just look at this cheek of mine ; I can't think what the 
 swelling is. ' 
 
 And she turned her right cheek to Dora, pointing to a lump, 
 not discoloured, but rather large, above the cheek-bone. Dora 
 stopped, and looked at it carefully. 
 
518 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 'Yes, I had noticed it,' she said. 'It is odd. Can't you 
 account for it in any way ? ' 
 
 ' No. It's been coming some little while. David says I must 
 ask Dr. Mildmay about it. I don't think I shall. It'll go away. 
 Oh ! there they are.' 
 
 As she spoke, David and Sandy, who had been out for a Sun- 
 day walk together, appeared on the steps of the garden-door, 
 David waved his hat to his wife, an example immediately followed 
 by Sandy, who twisted his Scotch cap madly, and then set off 
 running to her. 
 
 Lucy looked at them both with a sudden softening and bright- 
 ening which gave her charm. David came up to her, ran his 
 arm through hers, and began to give her a laughing account of 
 Sandy's behaviour. The April wind had flushed him, tumbled his 
 black hair, and called up spring lights in the eyes, which had 
 been somewhat dimmed by overmuch sedentary work and a too 
 small allowance of sleep. His plenitude of virile energy, the 
 glow of health and power which hung round him this afternoon, 
 did but make Lucy seem more languid and faded as she hung 
 upon him, smiling at his stories of their walk and of Sandy's 
 antics. 
 
 He broke off in the middle, and looked at her anxiously. 
 
 ' She isn't the thing, is she, Dora ? I believe she wants a 
 change.' 
 
 ' Oh ! thank you !' cried Lucy, ironically— 'with all .Sandy's 
 spring things and my own to look to, and some new shirts to get 
 for you, and the spring cleaning to see to. Much obliged to you.' 
 
 'All those things, madam,' said David, patting her hand, 
 ' wouldn't matter twopence, if it should please your lord and 
 master to order you off. And if this fine weather goes on, you'll 
 have to take advantage of it. By the way, I met Mildmay, and 
 asked him to come in and see you. ' 
 
 Lucy reddened. 
 
 ' Why, there's nothing,' she said, pettishly. ' This '11 go away 
 directly.' Instinctively she put up her hand to her cheek. 
 
 ' Oh ! Mildmay won't worry you,' said David ; 'he'll tell you 
 what's wrong at once. You know you like him, ' 
 
 ' Well, I must go,' said Dora. 
 
 They understood that she had a mill-girls' Bible class at half- 
 past five, and an evening service an hour later, so they did not 
 press her to stay. Lucy kissed her, and Sandy escorted her half- 
 way to the garden-door, giving her a breathless and magniloquent 
 account of the ' hy'nas and kangawoos ' she might expect to find 
 congregated in the Merton Road outside. Dora, who was some- 
 what distressed by his powers of imaginative fiction, would not 
 ' play up ' as his father did, and lie left her half-w^ay to run back 
 to David, who was always ready to turn road and back garden 
 into ' Africa country ' at a moment's notice, and people it to order 
 with savages, elephants, boomerangs, kangaroos, and all other 
 possible or impossible things that Sandy might chance to want. 
 
CHAP. VII MATURITY 519 
 
 Dora, looking back from the garden, saw them all three in a 
 group together — Sandy tugging at his mother's skirts, and shout- 
 ing at the top of his voice ; David's curly black bead bent over 
 his wife, who was gathering her brown shawl round her throat, as 
 though the light wind chilled her. But there was no chill in her 
 look. That, for the moment, as she swayed between husband 
 and child, had in it the qualities of the April sun — a brightness 
 and promise all the more radiant by comparison with the winter 
 or the cloud from which it had emerged. 
 
 Dora went home as quickly as tramcar and fast walking could 
 take her. She still lived in the same Ancoats rooms with her 
 shirt-making friend, who had kept company, poor thing ! for 
 four years with a young man, and had then given him up with 
 anguish because he was not ' the sort of man she'd been taking 
 him for,' though no one but Dora had ever known what qualities 
 or practices, intolerable to a pure mind, the sad phrase covered. 
 Dora might long ago have moved to more comfortable rooms and 
 a better quarter of the town had she been so minded, for her 
 wages as an admirable forewoman and an exceptionally skilled 
 hand were high ; but she passionately preferred to be near St. 
 Damian's and amongst her 'girls.' Also, there was the thought 
 that by staying in the place whither she had originally moved 
 she would be more easily discoverable if ever, — ay, if ever — 
 Daddy should come back to her. She was certain that he was 
 still alive ; and great as the probabilities on the other side became 
 with every passing year, few people had the heart to insist upon 
 them in the face of her sensitive faith, whereof the bravery was 
 so close akin to tears. 
 
 Only once in all these years had there been a trace of Daddy. 
 Through a silk-merchant acquaintance of his, having relations 
 with Lyons and other foreign centres, David had once come 
 across a rumour which had seemed to promise a clue. He had 
 himself gone across to Lyons at once, and had done all he could. 
 But the clue broke in his hand, and the tanned, long-faced 
 lunatic from Manchester, whereof report had spoken, could be 
 only doubtfully identified with a man who bore no likeness at all 
 to Daddy. 
 
 Dora's expectation and hope had been stirred to their depths, 
 and she bore her disappointment hardly. But she did not there- 
 fore cease to hope. Instinctively on this Sunday night, when she 
 reached home, she put Daddy's chair, which had been pushed 
 aside, in its right place by the fire, and she tenderly propped up 
 a stuffed bird, originally shot by Daddy in the Vosges, and now 
 vilely overtaken by Manchester moths. Then she set round chairs 
 and books for her girls. 
 
 Soon they came trooping up the stairs, in their neat Sunday 
 dresses, so sharply distinguished from the mill-gear of the week, 
 and she spent with them a moving and mystical hour. She was 
 expounding to them a little handbook of ' The Blessed Sacra- 
 
520 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 ment,' and her explanations wound up with a close appeal to each 
 one of them to make more use of the means of grace, to surren- 
 der themselves more fully to the awful and unspeakable mystery 
 by which the Lord gave them His very flesh to eat, His very blood 
 to drink, so fashioning within them, Communion after Com- 
 munion, the immortal and Incorruptible body which should be 
 theirs in the Resurrection. 
 
 She spoke in a low, vibrating voice, somewhat monotonous 
 in tone ; her eyes shone with strange light under her round, 
 prominent brow ; all that she said of the joys of frequent Com- 
 munion, of the mortal perils of unworthy participation, of 
 treating the heavenly food lightly — coming to it, that is, unfasting 
 and unprepared — of the need especially of Lenten self-denial, of 
 giving up 'what each one of you likes best, so far as you can,' 
 in preparation for the great Easter Eucharist — came evidently 
 from the depths of her own intense conviction. Her girls listened 
 to her with answering excitement and awe ; one of them she had 
 saved from drink, all of them had been her Sunday-school chil- 
 dren for years, and many of them possessed, under the Lancashire 
 exterior, the deep-lying poetry and emotion of the North. ■ 
 
 When she dismissed them she hurried off to church, to sit once 
 more dissolved in feeling, aspiration, penitence ; to feel the thrill 
 of the organ, the pathos of the bare altar, and the Lenten hymns. 
 
 After the service she had two or three things to settle with one 
 of the curates and with some of her co-helpers in the good vrorks 
 of the congregation, so that when she reached home she was late 
 and tired out. Her fellow-lodger was spending the Sunday with 
 friends ; there was no one to talk to her at her supper ; and after 
 supper she fell, sitting by the fire, into a mood of some flatness 
 and reaction. She tried to read a religious book, but the religious 
 nerve could respond no more, and other interests, save those of 
 her daily occupations, she had none. 
 
 In Daddy's neighbourhood, what with his travels, his whims, 
 and his quotations, there had been always something to stir the 
 daughter's mind, even if it were only to reprobation. But since 
 he had left her the circle of her thoughts had steadily and irre- 
 vocably narrowed. All secular knowledge, especially the reading 
 of other than religious books, had become gradually and painfully 
 identified, for her, with those sinister influences which made 
 David Grieve an ' unbeliever, ' and so many of the best Manchester 
 workmen 'atheists.' 
 
 So now, in her physical and moral slackness, she sat and 
 thought with some bitterness of a 'young woman' who had 
 recently entered the shop which employed her, and, by dint of a 
 clever tongue, was gaining the ear of the authorities, to the dis- 
 turbance of some of Dora's cherished methods of distributing and 
 organising the work. They might have trusted her more after all 
 these years ; but nobody appreciated her ; she counted for notliing. 
 
 Then her mind wandered on to the familiar grievances of 
 Sandy's religious teaching and Lucy's gradual defection from 
 
CHAP. viT MATURITY 521 
 
 St. Damian's. She must make more efforts with Lucy, even if it 
 angered David. She looked back on what she had done to bring 
 about the marriage, and lashed herself into a morbid sense of 
 responsibilitj^ 
 
 But her missionar}" projects were no more cheering to her than 
 her thoughts about the shop and her work, and she felt an intense 
 sense of relief when she heard the step of her room-mate, Mary 
 Styles, upon the stairs. She made Mary go into every little 
 incident of her day ; she was insatiable for gossip — a very rare 
 mood for her— and could not be chattered to enough. 
 
 And all through she leant her head against her father's chair, 
 recalling Lucy on her husband's arm, and the child at her skirts, 
 with the pathetic inarticulate longing which makes the tragedy 
 of the single life. She could have loved so well, and no one had 
 ever wished to make her his wife ; the wound of it bled some- 
 times in her inmost heart. 
 
 Meanwhile, on this same April Sunday, Lucy, after Sandy was 
 safe in bed, brought down some needlework to do beside David 
 while he read. It was not very long since she had induced 
 herself to make so great a breach in the Sunday habits of her 
 youth. As soon as David's ideals began to tease her out of- 
 thought and sympathy, his freedoms also began to affect her. She 
 was no longer so much chilled by his strictness, or so much 
 shocked by his laxity. 
 
 David had spoken of a busy evening. In reality, a lazy fit 
 overtook him. He sat smoking, and turning over the pages of 
 Eckermann's ' Conversations with Goethe. ' 
 
 ' What are you reading ? ' said Lucy at last, struck by his face 
 of enjoyment. ' Why do you like it so much ? ' 
 
 ' Because there is no one else in the world who hits the right 
 nail on the head so often as Goethe,' he said, throwing himself 
 back with a stretch of pleasure. ' So wide a brain — so acute and 
 sane a temper ! ' 
 
 Lucy looked a little lost, as she generally did when David 
 made literary remarks to her. But she did not drop the subject. 
 
 'You said something to Professor Madgwick the other day 
 about a line of Goethe you used to like so when you were a boy. 
 What did it mean ? ' 
 
 She flushed, as though she were venturing on something which 
 would make her ridiculous. 
 
 ' A line of Goethe ? ' repeated David, pondering. ' Oh ! I 
 know. Yes, it was a line from Goethe's novel of "Werther." 
 When I was young and foolish— when you and I were first 
 acquainted, in fact, and you used to scold me for going to the 
 Hall of Science ! — I often said this line to myself over and over. 
 I didn't know much German, but the swing of it carried me away.' 
 
 And, with a deep voice and rhythmic accent, he repeated : 
 * Handwerker trugen ihn ; liein Oeistlicher hat ihn begleitet.'' 
 
 * What does it mean ? ' said Lucy. 
 
522 . THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book ix 
 
 '■ Well, it comes at the end of the story. The hero commits 
 suicide for love, and Goethe says that at his burial, on the night 
 after his death, ' ' labouring men bore him ; no priest went with 
 him.'" 
 
 He bent forward, clasping his hands tightly, with the half 
 smiling, half dreamy look of one who recalls a bygone thrill of 
 feeling, partly in sympathy, partly in irony. 
 
 ' Then he wasn't a Christian ? ' said Lucy, wondering. ' Do 
 you still hate priests so much, David ? ' 
 
 ' It doesn't look like it, does it, madam,' he said, laughing, 
 ' when you think of all my clergymen friends ? ' 
 
 And, in fact, as Lucy's mind pondered his answer, she easily 
 remembered tlie readiness with vrhich any of the clergy at St. 
 Damian's would ask his help in sending away a sick child, or 
 giving a man a fresh start in life, or setting the necessary authori- 
 ties to work in the case of some moral or sanitary scandal. She 
 thought also of various Dissenting ministers who called on him 
 and corresponded with him ; of his reverent affection for Canon 
 Aylwin, for Ancrum. 
 
 ' Well, anyway, you care about the labouring men,' she went 
 on persistently. 'I suppose you're what father used to call a 
 ■ ' ' canting Socialist " ? ' 
 
 ' No,' said David, quietly — ' no, I'm not a Socialist, except' — 
 and he smiled — ' in the sense in which some one said the other 
 day, " we are all Socialists now." ' 
 
 ' Well, what does it mean ? ' said Lucy, threading another 
 needle, and feeling a certain excitement in this prolonged mental 
 effort. 
 
 David tried to explain to her the common Socialist ideal in 
 simple terms — the hope of a millennium, when all the instruments 
 of production shall be owned by the State, and when the surplus 
 profit produced by labour, over and above the maintenance of the 
 worker and the general cost of production, will go, not to the 
 capitalist, the individual rich man, but to the whole community 
 of workers ; when everybody will be made to work, and as little 
 advantage as possible will be allowed to one worker above another. 
 
 ' I think it's absurd ! ' said Lucy, up in arms at once for all 
 the superiorities she loved. ' What nonsense ! Why, they can't 
 ever do it ! ' 
 
 ' Well, it's about that ! ' said David, smiling at her. ' Still, no 
 doubt it could be done, if it ouglit to be done. But Socialism, as 
 a system, seems to vie, at any rate, to strike down and weaken the 
 most precious thing in the world, that on which the whole of 
 civilised life and progress rests — the spring of will and conscience 
 in the individual. Socialism as a spirit, as an influence, is as old 
 as organised though t^ — and from the beginning it has forced us to 
 think of the many when otherwise we should be sunk in thinking 
 of the one. But, as a modern dogmatism, it is like other dogma- 
 tisms. The new truth of the future will emerge from it as a bud 
 from its sheath, taking here and leaving there. '^ 
 
CHAP, vn MATURITY ^ 533 
 
 He sat looking into the fire, forgetting his wife a little. 
 
 ' Well, any way, I'm sure you and I won't have anything to 
 do with it,' said Lucy positively. 'I don't a bit believe Lady 
 Driffield will have to work in the mills, though Mrs. Shepton did 
 say it would do her good. I shouldn't mind something, perhaps, 
 which would make her and Colonel Danby less uppish.' 
 
 She drew her needle in and out with vindictive energy. 
 
 ' Well, I don't see much prospect of uppish people dying out 
 of the world,' said David, throwing himself back in his chair ; 
 'until—' 
 
 He paused. 
 
 ' Until what ? ' inquired Lucy. 
 
 ' Well, of course,' he said after a minute, in a low voice, ' we 
 must always hold that the world is tending to be better, that the 
 Divine Life in it will somehow realise itself, that pride will become 
 gentleness, and selfishness love. But the better life cannot be 
 imposed from without — it must grow from within.' 
 
 Lucy pondered a moment. 
 
 ' Then is it — is it because you think working-men hettei^ than 
 other people that you are so much more interested in them? 
 Because you are, you know.' 
 
 ' Oh dear no ! ' he said, smiling at her from under the hand 
 which shaded his eyes ; ' they have their own crying faults and 
 follies. But— so many of them lack the first elementary condi- 
 tions which make the better life possible— that is what tugs at 
 one's heart and fills one's mind ! How can t^-e- we who have 
 gained for ourselves health and comfort and knowledge — how can 
 we stand by patiently and see our brother diseased and miserable 
 and ignorant ?— how can we bear our luxuries, so long as a child 
 is growing up in savagery whom we might have taught, — or a 
 man is poisoning himself with drink whom we might have saved, 
 — or a woman is dropping from sorrow and overwork whom we 
 might have cherished and helped ? We are not our own — we are 
 parts of the whole. Generations of workers have toiled for us in 
 the past. And are we, in return, to carry our wretched bone off 
 to our own miserable corner ! — sharing and giving nothing ? Woe 
 to us if we do ! Upon such comes indeed the " second death," — 
 the separation final and irretrievable, as far, at any rate, as this 
 world is concerned, between us and the life of God ! ' 
 
 Lucy had dropped her work. She sat staring at him — at the 
 shining eyes, at the hand against the brow which shook a little, 
 at the paleness which went so readily in him with any expression 
 of deep emotion. Never had he so spoken to her before ; never, 
 all these years. In general no one shrank more than he from 
 ' high phrases ; ' no one was more anxious than he to give all 
 philanthropic talk a shrewd business-like aspect, which might 
 prevent questions as to what lay beneath. 
 
 Her heart fluttered a little. 
 
 ' David ! ' she broke out, ' what is it you believe ? You know 
 Dora thinks you believe nothing.' 
 
524 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 ' Does she ? ' he said, with evident shrinking. ' No, I don't 
 think she does.' 
 
 Lucy instinctively moved her chair closer to him, and laid her 
 head against his knee. 
 
 ' Yes, she does. But I don't mind about that. I just wish 
 you'd tell me why you believe in God, when you won't go to 
 church, and when you think Jesus was just — just a man.' 
 
 She drew her breath quickly. She was making a first voyage 
 of discovery in her husband's deepest mind, and she was asto- 
 nished at her own venturesomeness. 
 
 He put out a hand and touched her hair. 
 
 ' I can't read Nature and life any other way,' he said at last, 
 after a silence. ' There seems to me something in myself, and in 
 other human beings, which is beyond Nature — which, instead of 
 being made by Nature, is the condition of our knovdng there is a 
 Nature at all. This something — reason, consciousness, soul, call 
 it what you will — unites us to the world ; for everywhere in the 
 world reason is at home, and gradually finds itself ; it makes us 
 aware of a great order in which we move ; it breaks down the 
 barriers of sense between us and the absolute consciousness, the 
 eternal life — " not ourselves," yet in us and akin to us ! — whence, 
 ic there is any validity in human logic, that order must spring. 
 And so, in its most perfect work, it carries us to God — it bids us 
 claim our sonship — it gives us hope of immortality ! ' 
 
 His voice had the vibrating intensity of prayer. Lucy hardly 
 understood what he said at all, but the tears came into her eyes 
 as she sat hiding them against his knee. 
 
 ' But what makes you think God is good — that He cares any- 
 thing about us ? ' she said softly. 
 
 ' Well — I look back on human life, and I ask what reason — 
 which is the Divine Life communicated to us, striving to fulfil 
 itself in us — has done, what light it throws upon its "great 
 Original." And then I see that it has gradually e:jJpressed itself 
 in law, in knowledge, in love ; that it has gradually learnt, under 
 the pressure of something which is itself and not itself, that to be 
 gained life must be lost ; that beauty, truth, love, are the realities 
 which abide. Goodness has slowly proved itself in the world, — is 
 every day proving itself, — like a light broadening in darkness ! — 
 to be that to which reason tends, in which it realises itself. And, 
 if so, goodness here, imperfect and struggling as we see it always, 
 must be the mere shadow and hint of that goodness which is in 
 God ! — and the utmost we can conceive of human tenderness, 
 holiness, truth, though it tell us all we know, can yet suggest to 
 us only the minutest fraction of what must be the Divine tender- 
 ness, — holiness, — truth. ' 
 
 There was a silence. 
 
 ' But this,' he added after a bit, ' is not to be j^royec? by argu- 
 ment, though argument is necessary and inevitable, the mind 
 being what it is. It can only be proved by living, — by taking it 
 into our hearts, — by every little victory we gain over the evil self.' 
 
CHAP. VII MATURITY 525 
 
 The fire burnt quietly beside them. Everything was still in 
 the house. Nothing stirred but their own hearts. 
 
 At last Lucy looked up quickly. 
 
 'I am glad,' she said with a kind of sob — 'glad you think 
 God loves us, and, if Sandy and I were to die, you would find us 
 again. ' 
 
 Instead of answering, he bent forward quickly and kissed her. 
 She gave a little shrinking movement. 
 
 ' Oh ! that poor cheek ! ' he said remorsefully ; ' did I touch 
 it ? I hope Dr. Mildmay won't forget to-morrow.' 
 
 ' Oh ! never mind about it,' she said, half impatiently. 
 'David!' 
 
 Her little tliin face twitched and trembled. He was puzzled 
 by her sudden change of expression, her agitation. 
 
 ' David ! — you know — you know what Louie said. I want you 
 to tell me whether she — she meant anything.' 
 
 He gave a little start, then he understood perfectly. 
 
 ' My dear wife,' he said, laying his hand on hers, which were 
 crossed on his knee. 
 
 She waited breathlessly. 
 
 ' You shall know all there is to know,' he said at last, with 
 an effort. ' I thought perhaps you would have questioned me 
 directly after that scene, and I would have told you ; but as you 
 did not, I could not bring myself to begin. What Louie said had 
 to do with things that happened a year before I asked you to be 
 my wife. When I spoke to you, they were dead and gone. The 
 girl herself — was married. It was her story as well as my own, 
 and it seemed to concern no one else in the world — not even 
 you, dear. So I thought then, any way. Since, I have often 
 wondered whether I was right.' 
 
 ' Was it when you were in Paris ? ' she asked sharply. 
 
 He gave a sign of assent. 
 
 ' I thought so ! ' she cried, drawing her breath. ' I always 
 said there was more than being ill. I said so to Dora. Well, tell 
 me — tell me at once ! What was she like ? Was she young, and 
 good-looking ? ' 
 
 He could not help smiling at her — there was something so 
 childish in her jealous curiosity. 
 
 'Let me tell you in order,' he said, ' and then we will both 
 put it out of sight — at least, till I see Louie again.' 
 
 His heavy sigh puzzled her. But her strained and eager eyes 
 summoned him to begin. 
 
 He told her everything, with singular simplicity and frank- 
 ness. To Lucy it was indeed a critical and searching moment ! 
 No wife, whatever stuff she may be made of, can listen to such a 
 story for the first time, from the husband she loves and respects, 
 without passing thereafter into a new state of consciousness 
 towards him. Sometimes she could hardly realise at all that it 
 applied to David, this tale of passion he was putting, with averted 
 face, into these short and sharp sentences. That conception of 
 
536 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iy 
 
 him which the daily life of eight years, with its growing self- 
 surrender, its expanding spiritual force, had graven on her mind, 
 clashed so oddly wkh all that he was saying ! A certain desolate 
 feeling, too large and deep in all its issues to be harboured long 
 in her slight nature, came over her now and then. She had been 
 so near to him all these years, and had yet known nothing. It 
 was the separateness of the individual lot — that awful and myste- 
 rious chasm which divides even lover from lover — which touched 
 her here and there like a cold hand, from which she shrank. 
 
 She grew a little cold and pale when he spoke of his weeks of 
 despair, of the death from which Ancrum had rescued him. But 
 any ordinary prudish word of blame, even for his silence towards 
 her, never occurred to her. Once she asked him a wistful ques- 
 tion : — 
 
 ' You and she thought that marrying didn't matter at all when 
 people loved each other — that nobody had a right to interfere ? 
 Do you think that now, David ? ' 
 
 ' No,' he said, with deep emphasis. ' No. — I have come to 
 think the most disappointing and hopeless marriage, nobly borne, 
 to be better worth having than what people call an "ideal 
 passion," — if the ideal passion must be enjoyed at the expense of 
 one of those fundamental rules which poor human nature has 
 worked out, with such infinite difficulty and pain, for the protec- 
 tion and help of its own weakness. I did not know it, — but, so 
 far as in me lay, I was betraying and injuring that society which 
 has given me all I have.' 
 
 She sat silent. ' The most disappointing marriage.'' An 
 echo from that overheard talk at Benet's Park floated through her 
 mind. She winced, and shrank, even as she realised his perfect 
 innocence of any such reference. 
 
 Then, with eagerness, she threw herself into innumerable 
 questions about Elise — her looks, her motives, the details of what 
 she said and did. Beneath the satisfaction of her curiosity, of 
 course, there was all the time a pang — a pang not to be silenced. 
 In her flights of idle fancy she had often suspected something not 
 unlike the truth, basing her conjecture on the mystery which had 
 always hung round that Paris visit, partly on the world's general 
 experience of what happened to handsome young men. For, in 
 her heart of hearts, had there not lurked all the time a wonder 
 which was partly self-judgment ? Had David, with such a 
 temperament, never been more deeply moved than she knew 
 herself to have moved him ? More than once a secret inarticulate 
 suspicion of this kind had crossed her. The poorest and shallow- 
 est soul may have these flashes of sad insight, under the kindling 
 of its affections. 
 
 But now she kneiv, and the difference was vast. After she 
 had asked all her questions, and delivered a vehement protest 
 against the tenacity of his self-reproach with regard to Louie — for 
 what decent girl need go wrong unless she has a mind to ? — she 
 laid her head down again on David's knee. 
 
CHAP. VIII Maturity 537 
 
 *I don't think she cared much about you — I'm sure she 
 couldn't have,' she said slowly, finding a certain pleasure in the 
 words. 
 
 David did not answer. He was sunk in memory. How far 
 away lay that world of art and the artist from this dusty, practical 
 life in which he was now immersed ! At no time had he been 
 really akin to it. The only art to which he was naturally suscep- 
 tible was the art of oratory and poetry. Elise had created in him 
 an artificial taste, which had died with his passion. Yet now, as 
 his quickened mind lingered in the past, he felt a certain wide 
 philosophic regret for the complete divorce which had come about 
 between him and so rich a section of human experience. 
 
 He was roused from his reverie, which would have reassured 
 her, could she have followed it, more than any direct speech, by a 
 movement from Lucy. Dropping the hand which had once more 
 stolen over his brow, he saw her looking at him with wide, wet 
 eyes. 
 
 ' David I ' 
 
 'Yes.' 
 
 * Come here ! close to me ! ' 
 
 He moved forward, and laid his arm round her shoulders, as 
 she sat in her low chair beside him. 
 
 ' What is it, dear ? I have been keeping you up too late. ' 
 
 She lifted a hand, and brought his face near to hers. 
 
 ' David, I am a stupid little thing— but I do understand more 
 than I did, and I would never, nevei' desert you for anything,-^ 
 for any sorrow or trouble in the world ! ' 
 
 The mixture of yearning, pain, triumphant affection in her 
 tone, cannot be rendered in words. 
 
 His whole heart melted to her. As he held her to his breast, 
 the hour they had just passed through took for both of them a 
 sacred meaning and importance. Youth was going— their talk 
 had not been the talk of youth. Was true love just beginning ? 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 'My God! My God P 
 
 The cry was David's. He had reeled back against the table 
 in his study, his hand upon an open book, his face turned to 
 Doctor Mildmay, who was standing by the fireplace. 
 
 'Of course, I can't be sure,' said the doctor hastily, almost 
 guiltily. 'You must not take it on my authority alone. Try 
 and throw it off your mind. Take your wife up to town to see 
 Selby or Paget, and if I am wrong I shall be too thankful ! 
 And, above all, don't frighten her. Take care— she will be down 
 again directly.' 
 
 'You say,' said David, thickly, 'that if it were what you 
 suspect, operation would be difficult. Yes, I see there is some- 
 thing of the sort here.' 
 
 He turned, shaking all over, to the book beside him, which 
 
528 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE BooK'iv 
 
 was a medical treatise he had just taken down from his scientific 
 bookcase. 
 
 'It would be certainly difficult,' said the doctor, frowning, 
 his lower lip pushed forward in a stress of thought, ' but it 
 would have to be attempted. Only, on the temporal bone it will 
 be a puzzle to go deep enough.' 
 
 David's eye ran along the page beside him. ' Sarcoma, which 
 was originally regarded with far less terror than cancer (carci- 
 noma), is now generally held by doctors to be more malignant and 
 more deadly. There is much less pain, but surgery can do less, 
 and death is in most cases infinitely more rapid.' 
 
 ' Hush ! ' said the doctor, with short decision, ' I hear her 
 coming down again. Let me speak.' 
 
 Lucy, who had run upstairs to quiet a yell of crying from 
 Sandy immediately after Doctor Mildmay had finished his exami- 
 nation of her swollen cheek, opened the door as he spoke. She 
 was slightly flushed, and her eyes were more wide open and 
 restless than usual. David was apparently bending over a drawer 
 which he had opened on the farther side of his writing-table. 
 The doctor's face was entirely as usual. 
 
 'Well now, Mrs. Grieve,' he said cheerily, 'we have been 
 agreeing — your husband and I — that it will be best for you to go 
 up to London and have that cheek looked at by one of the crack 
 surgeons. They will give you the best advice as to what to do 
 with it. It is not a common ailment, and we are very fine fel- 
 lows down here, but of course we can't get the experience, in a 
 particular line of cases, of one of the first-rate surgical specialists. 
 Do you think you could go to-morrow ? I could make an ap- 
 pointment for you by telegraph to-day. '' 
 
 Lucy gave a little unsteady, affected laugh. 
 
 'I don't see how I can go all in a moment like that,' she said. 
 * It doesn't matter ! Why don't you give me something for it, 
 and it will go away.' 
 
 'Oh ! but it does matter,' said the doctor, firmly. 'Lumps 
 like that are serious things, and mustn't be trifled with.' 
 
 'But what will they want to do to it ?' said Lucy nervously. 
 She was standing with one long, thin hand resting lightly on the 
 back of a chair, looking from David, whose face and figure were 
 blurred to her by the dazzle of afternoon light coming in through 
 the window, to Doctor Mildmay. 
 
 The doctor cleared his throat. 
 
 ' They would only want to do what was best for you in every 
 way,' he said; 'you may be sure of that. Could you be very 
 brave if they advised you that it ought to be removed ?' 
 
 She gave a little shriek. 
 
 ' What I you mean cut it out — cut it away ! ' she cried, shak- 
 ing, and lookmg at him with the frowning anger of a child. 
 ' Why, it would leave an ugly mark, a hideous mark ! ' 
 
 'No, it wouldn't. The mark would disfigure you much less 
 than the swelling. They would take care to draw the skin to- 
 
CHAP. VIII MATURITY 529 
 
 gether again neatly, and you could easily arrange your hair a 
 little. But you ought to get a first-rate opinion.' 
 
 'What is it? what do you call it?' said Lucy, irritably. 'I 
 can't think why you make such a fuss.' 
 
 'Well, it might be various things,' he said evasively. 'Any 
 way, you take my advice, and have it seen to. I can telegraph 
 as I go from here.' 
 
 ' I could take you up to-morrow,' said David, coming forward 
 in answer to the disturbed look she threw him. Now chat her 
 flush had faded, how pale and drooping she was in the strong 
 light ! ' It would be better, dear, to do what Doctor Mildmay 
 recommends. And you never mind a day in London, you know'.' 
 
 Did she detect any difference in the voice? She moved up 
 to him, and he put his arm round her. 
 
 ' Must I ? ' she said, helplessly ; ' it's such a bore, to-morrow 
 particularly. I had promised to take Sandy out to tea.' 
 
 ' Well, let that young man go without a treat for once,' said 
 the doctor, laughing. ' He has a deal too many, anyway. Very 
 well, that's settled. I will telegraph as I go to the train. Just 
 come here a moment, Grieve.' 
 
 The two went out together. When David returned, any one 
 who had happened to be in the hall would have seen that he 
 could hardly open the sitting-room door, so fumbling were his 
 movements. As he passed through the room to reach the study 
 he caught sight of his own face in a glass, and stopping, with 
 clenched hands, pulled himself together by the effort of his whole 
 being. 
 
 When he opened the study-door, Lucy was hunting about his 
 table in a quick, impatient way. 
 
 ' I can't think where you keep your indiarubber rings, David. 
 I want to put one round a parcel for Dora.' 
 
 He found one for her. Then she stood by the fire, as the 
 sunset-light faded into dusk, and poured out to him a story of 
 domestic grievances. Sarah, their cook, wished to leave and be 
 married — it was very unexpected and very inconsiderate, and 
 Lucy did not believe the young man was steady ; and how on 
 earth was she to find another cook ? It was enough to drive one 
 wild, the difficulty of getting cooks in Manchester. 
 
 For nearly an hour, till the supper-bell rang, she stood there, 
 with her foot on the fender, chattering in a somewhat sharp, 
 shrill way. Not one word would she say, or let him say, of 
 London or the doctor's visit. 
 
 After supper, as they went back into the study, David looked 
 for the railway-guide. 'The 10.15 will do,' he said. 'Mildmay 
 has made the appointment for three. We can just get up in time.' 
 
 ' It is great nonsense ! ' said Lucy, pouting. ' The question is, 
 can we get back ? I must get back. I don't want to leave Sandy 
 for the night. He's got a cold.' 
 
 It seemed to David that something clutched at his breath and 
 yoice. Was it he or some one else that said : — 
 
530 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 'That will be too tiring, dear. We shall have to stay the 
 night.' 
 
 ' No, I must get back,' said Lucy, obstinately. 
 
 Afterwards she brought her work as usual, and he professed 
 to smoke and read. But the evening passed, for him, beneath 
 his outward quiet, in a hideous whirl of images and sensations, 
 which ultimately wore itself out, and led to a mood of dulness 
 and numbness. Every now and then, as he sat there, with the 
 fire crackling, and the familiar walls and books about him, he 
 felt himself sinking, as it were, in a sudden abyss of horror ; 
 then, again, the scene of the afternoon seemed to him absurd, 
 and he despised his own panic. He dwelt upon everything the 
 doctor had said about the rarity, the exceptional nature of such 
 an illness. Well, what is rare does not happen — not to oneself — 
 that was what he seemed to be clinging to at last. 
 
 When Lucy went up to bed, he followed her in about a 
 quarter of an hour. 
 
 ' Why, you are early ! ' she said, opening her eyes. 
 
 'I am tired,' he said. 'There was a great press of work 
 to-day. I want a long night.' 
 
 In reality, he could not bear her out of his sight. Hour after 
 hour he tossed restlessly, beside her quiet sleep, till the spring 
 morning broke. 
 
 They left Manchester next morning in a bitter east wind. As 
 she passed through the hall to the cab, Lucy left a little note for 
 Dora on the table, with instructions that it should be posted. 
 
 'I want her to come and see him at his bedtime,' she said, 
 'for of course we can't get back for that.' 
 
 David said nothing. When they got to the station, he dared 
 not even propose to her the extra comfort of first class, lest he 
 should intensify the alarm he perfectly well divined under her 
 offhand, flighty manner. 
 
 By three o'clock they were in the waiting-room of the famous 
 doctor they had come to see. Lucy looked round her nervously 
 as they entered, with quick, dilating nostrils, and aci'oss David 
 there swept a sudden choking memory of the trapped and flut- 
 tering birds he had sometimes seen in his boyhood struggling 
 beneath a birdcatcher's net on the moors. 
 
 As the appointment was at an unusual time, they were not 
 kept waiting very long by the great man. He received them with 
 a sort of kindly distance, made his examination very quickly, and 
 asked her a number of general questions, entering the answers 
 in his large patients' book. 
 
 Then he leant back in his chair, looking thoughtfully at Lucy 
 over his spectacles. 
 
 ' Well,' he said at last, with a perfectly cheerful and business- 
 like voice, ' I am quite clear there is only one thing to be done, 
 Mrs. Grieve. You must have that growth removed.' 
 
 Lucy flushed. 
 
CHAP. VIII ►, MATURITY 531 
 
 'I want you to give me something to take it away,' she said, 
 half sullenly, half defiantly. She was sitting very erect, in a 
 little tight-fitting black jacket, with her small black hat and veil 
 on her knee. 
 
 ' No, I am sorry to say nothing can be done in that way. If 
 you were my daughter or sister, I should say to you, have that 
 lump removed without a day's, an hour's ^unnecessary delay. 
 These growths are not to be trifled with.' 
 
 He spoke with a mild yet penetrating observance of her. 
 A number of reflections were passing rapidly through his mind. 
 The operation was a most unpromising one, but it was clearly the 
 surgeon's duty to try it. The chances were that it would prolong 
 life which was now speedily and directly threatened, owing to 
 the proximity of the growth to certain vital points. 
 
 ' When could you do it?' said David, so hoarsely that he had 
 to repeat his question. He vras standing with his arm on the 
 mantelpiece, looking down on the surgeon and his wife. 
 
 The great man lifted his eyebrows, and looked at his engage- 
 ment-book attentively. 
 
 'I could do it to-morrow,' he said at last ; 'and the sooner, 
 the better. Have you got lodgings ? or can I help you ? And—' 
 
 Then he stopped, and looked at Lucy. ' Let me settle things 
 with your husband, Mrs. Grieve,' he said, with a kindly smile. 
 'You look tired after your journey. You will find a fire and 
 some newspapers in the w^aiting-room.' 
 
 And, with a suavity not to be gainsaid, he ushered her him- 
 self across the hall, and shut the waiting-room door upon her. 
 Then he came back to David. 
 
 A little while after a bell rang, and the man-servant who 
 answered it presently took some brandy into the consulting- 
 room. Lucy meanwhile sat, in a dazed way, looking out of 
 window at the square garden, where the lilacs were already in 
 full leaf in spite of the east wind. 
 
 When her husband and the doctor came in she sprang up, 
 looking partly awkward, partly resentful. Why had they'been 
 discussing it all without her ? 
 
 'Well, Mrs. Grieve,' said the doctor, 'your husband is just 
 going to take you on to see the lodgings I recommend. By good 
 luck they are just vacant. Then, if you like them, you know, 
 you can settle in at once.' 
 
 ' But I haven't brought anything for the night,' cried Lucy in 
 an injured voice, looking at David. 
 
 ' We will telegraph to Dora, darling,' he said, taking up her 
 bag and umbrella from the table ; ' but now we mustn't keep Mr. 
 Selby. He has to go out.' 
 
 ' How long will it take ? ' interrupted Lucy, addressing the 
 surgeon. ' Can I get back next day ? ' 
 
 ' Oh no ! you will have to be four or five days in town. But 
 don't alarm yourself, Mrs. Grieve. You won't know anything at 
 all about the operation itself ; your husband will look after you, 
 
532 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 and then a little patience — and hope for the best. Now I really 
 must be off. Good-bye to you — good-bye to you.' 
 
 And he hurried off, leaving them to find their own cab. 
 When they got in, Lucy said, passionately : — 
 
 ' I want to go back, David. I want Sandy. I won't go to 
 these lodgings.' 
 
 Then courage came to him. He took her hand. 
 
 ' Dear, dear wife — for my sake — for Sandy's ! ' 
 
 She stared at him — at his white face. 
 
 ' Shall I die ?' she cried, with the same passionate tone. 
 
 ' No, no, no ! ' he said, kissing the quivering hand, and seeing 
 no one but her in the world, though they were driving through 
 the crowd of Regent Street. ' But we must do everything Mr, 
 Selby said. That hateful thing must be taken away — it is so near 
 — think for yourself I — to the eye and the brain ; and it might 
 go downwards to the throat. You will be brave, won't you? 
 We will look after you so — Dora and I.' 
 
 Lucy sank back in the cab, with a sudden collapse of nerve 
 and spirit. David hung over her, comforting her, one moment 
 promising her that in a few days she should have Sandy again, 
 and be quite well ; the next, checked and turned to stone by the 
 memory of the terrible possibilities freely revealed to him in his 
 private talk with Mr. Selby, and by the sense that he might be 
 soothing the present only to make the future more awful. 
 
 ' David ! she is in such fearful pain ! The nurse says she 
 must have more morphia. They didn't give her enough. Will 
 you run to Mr. Selby's house ? You won't find him, of course — 
 he is on his round — but his assistant, who was with him liere 
 just now, went back there. Run for him at once.' 
 
 It was Dora who spoke, as she closed the folding-doors of the 
 inner room where Lucy lay. David, who was crouching over the 
 fire in the sitting-room, whither the nurse had banished him 
 for a while, after the operation, sprang up, and disappeared in 
 an instant. Those faint, distant sounds of anguish which had 
 been in his ear for half an hour or more, ever since the doctors 
 had departed, declaring that everything was satisfactorily over, 
 had been more than his manhood could bear. 
 
 He returned in an incredibly short space of time with a young 
 surgeon, who at once administered another injection of morphia. 
 
 ' A highly sensitive patient,' he said to David, ' and the 
 nerves have, no doubt, been badly cut. But she will do 
 now.' 
 
 And, indeed, the moaning had ceased. She lay with closed 
 eyes— so small a creature in the wide bed— her head and face 
 swathed in bandages. But the breathing was growing even and 
 soft. She was once more unconscious. 
 
 The doctor touched David's hand and went, after a word with 
 the nurse. 
 
 'Won't 3'ou go into the next room, sir, and have your tea? 
 
CHAP. Yiii MATURITY 533 
 
 Mrs. Grieve is sure to sleep now,' said the nurse to him in her 
 compassion. 
 
 He shook his head, and sat down near the foot of the bed. 
 The nurse went into the dressing-room a moment to speak to 
 Dora, who was doing some unpacking there, and he- was left 
 alone with his wife. 
 
 Tlie sounds of tlie street came into the silent room, and every 
 now and then he l^ad a start of agony, thinking that she was 
 moving again — that she was in pain again. But no, she slept ; 
 lier breath came gently through the childish parted lips, and the 
 dim light — for the nurse had drawn the curtains on the lengthen- 
 ing April day — hid her pallor and the ghastliness of the dressings. 
 
 Forty-eight hours ago, and they were in the garden with 
 Sandy ! And now life seemed to have passed for ever into this 
 half-light of misery. Everything had dropped away from him — 
 the interests of his business, his books, his social projects. He 
 and she were shut out from the living world. Would she ever 
 rise from that bed again — ever look at him with the old look ? 
 
 He sat on there, hour after hour, till Dora coaxed him into 
 the sitting-room for a while, and tried to make him take some 
 food. But he could not touch it, and how the sudden gas which 
 the servant lit glared on his sunken eyes ! He waited on his 
 companion mechanically, then sat, with his head on his hand, 
 listening for the sound of the doctors' steps. 
 
 When they came, they hardly disturbed their patient. She 
 moaned at being touched ; but everything was right, and the 
 violent pain which had unexpectedly followed the operation was 
 not likely to recur. 
 
 ' And what a blessing that she took the chloroform so well, 
 with hardly any after-effects ! ' said Mr. Selby cheerily, drawing 
 on his gloves in the sitting-room. 'Well, Mr. Grieve, you have 
 got a good nurse, and can leave your wife to her with perfect 
 peace of mind. You must sleep, or you will knock up ; let me 
 give you a sleeping draught.' 
 
 ' Oh ! I shall sleep,' said David, impatiently. ' You considered 
 the operation successful — completely succcessful ? ' 
 
 The surgeon looked gravely into the fire. 
 
 ' I shall know more in a week or so,' he said. ' I have never 
 disguised from you, Mr. Grieve, how serious and diflBcult the case 
 was. Still, we have done what was right — we can but wait for 
 the issue.' 
 
 An hour later Dora looked into the sitting-room, and said 
 softly : — 
 
 ' She would like to see you, David.' 
 
 He went in, holding his breath. There was a night-light in 
 the room, and her face was lying in deep shadow. 
 
 He knelt down beside her, and kissed her hand. 
 
 ' My darling ! ' he said — and his voice was quite firm and 
 steady — ' are you easier now ? ' 
 
534 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 ' Yes,' she said faintly. ' Where are you going to sleep ? ' 
 
 ' In a room just beyond Dora's room. She could make me 
 hear in a moment if you wanted me.' 
 
 Then, as he looked closer, he saw that about her head was 
 thrown the broad w^hite lace scarf she had worn round her neck 
 on the journey up. And as he bent to her, she suddenly opened 
 her languid eyes, and gazed at him full. For the moment it was 
 as though she were given back to him. 
 
 ' I made Dora put it on,' she said feebly, moving her hand 
 towards the lace. ' Does it hide all those nasty bandages ? ' 
 
 ' Yes. I can't see them at all.' 
 
 ' Is it pretty ? ' 
 
 The little gleam of a smile nearly broke down his self -com 
 mand. 
 
 ' Very,' he said, with a quivering lip. 
 
 She closed her eyes again. 
 
 ' Oh ! I hope Lizzie will look after Sandy,' she said after a 
 while, with a long sigh. 
 
 Not a word now of wilfulness, of self-assertion ! After the 
 sullenness and revolt of the day before, which had lasted inter- 
 mittently almost up to the coming of the doctors, nothing could 
 be more speaking, more pathetic, than this helpless acquiescence. 
 
 ' I mustn't stay with you,' he said. ' You ought to be going 
 to sleep again. Nurse will give you something if you can't.' 
 
 ' I'm quite comfortable,' she said, sleepily. ' There isn't any 
 pain.' 
 
 And she seemed to pass quickly and easily into sleep as he sat 
 looking at her. 
 
 An hour or two later, Dora, who could not sleep from the 
 effects of fatigue and emotion, was lying in her uncomfortable 
 stretcher-bed, thinking with a sort of incredulity of all that had 
 passed since David's telegram had reached her the day before, or 
 puzzling herself to know how her employers could possibly spare 
 her for another three or four days' holiday, when she was startled 
 by some recurrent sounds from the room beyond her own. David 
 was sleeping there, and Dora, with her woman's quickness, had 
 at once perceived that the partition between them was very thin, 
 and had been as still as a mouse in going to bed. 
 
 The sound alarmed her, though she could not make it out. 
 Instinctively she put her ear to the wall. After a minute or two 
 she hastily moved away, and hiding her head under the bed- 
 clothes, fell to soft crying and praying. 
 
 For it was the deep rending sound of suppressed weeping, 
 the weeping of a strong man who believes himself alone with his 
 grief and with God. That she should have heard it at all filled 
 her with a sort of shame. 
 
 Things, however, looked much brighter on the following 
 morning. The wound caused by the operation was naturally 
 sore and stiff, and the dressing was painful; but when the 
 
CHAP. VI MATURITY 535 
 
 doctor's visit was over, and Lucy was lying in the halo of her 
 white scarf on her fresh pillows, in a room which Dora and the 
 nurse had made daintily neat and straight, her own cheerfulness 
 was astonishing. She made Dora go out and get her some pat- 
 terns for Sandy's summer suits, and when they came she lay 
 turning them over from time to time, or weakly twisting first 
 one and then another round her finger. She was, of course, per- 
 petually anxious to know when she would be well, and whether 
 the scar would be very bad ; but on the whole she was a docile and 
 promising patient, and she even began to see some gleams of virtue 
 in Mr. Selby, for whom at first she had taken the strongest dislike. 
 
 Meanwhile, David, haunted always by a horrible knowledge 
 which was hid from her, could get nothing decided for the future 
 out of the doctors. 
 
 ' We must wait,' said Mr. Selby ; * f()r the present all is heal- 
 ing well, but I wish we could get np her general strength. It 
 must have been running down badly of late.' 
 
 Whereupon David was left reproaching himself for blindness 
 and neglect, the real truth being that, with any one of Lucy's 
 thin elastic frame and restless temperament, a good deal of 
 health-degeneration may go on without its becoming conspicuous. 
 
 A few days passed. Dora was forced to go back to work ; 
 but as she was to take up her quarters at the Merton Road house, 
 and to write long accounts of Sandy to his mother every day, 
 Lucy saw her depart with considerable equanimity. Dora left 
 her patient on the sofa, a white and ghostly figure, but already 
 talking eagerly of returning to Manchester in a week. When 
 she heard the cab roll off, Lucy lay back on her cushions and 
 counted the minutes till David should come in from the British 
 Museum, whither, because of her improvement, he had gone to 
 clear up one or two bibliographical points. She caressed the 
 thought of being left alone with him, except for the nurse— left 
 to that tender and special care he was bestowing on her so richly, 
 and through which she seemed to hold and know him afresh. 
 
 When he came in she reproached him for being late, and both 
 enjoyed and scouted his pleas in answer. 
 
 ' Well, I don't care,' she said obstinately ; ' I wanted you.' 
 
 Then she heaved a long sigh. 
 
 'David, I made nurse let me look at the horrid place this 
 morning. I shall always be a fright — it's no good.' 
 
 But he knew her well enough to perceive that she was not 
 really very downcast, and that she had already devised ways and 
 means of hiding the mark as much as possible. 
 
 ' It doesn't hurt or trouble you at all ?' he asked her anxiously. 
 
 ' iTo, of course not,' she said impatiently. ' It's getting well. 
 Do ask nurse to bring me my tea.' 
 
 The nurse brought it, and she and David spoiled their invalid 
 with small attentions. 
 
 'It's nice being waited on,' said Lucy when it was over, 
 settling herself to rest with a little sigh of sensuous satisfaction. 
 
536 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book it 
 
 Another week passed, and all seemed to be doing well, 
 though Mr. Selby would say nothing as yet of allowing her to 
 move. Then came a night when she was restless ; and in the 
 morning the wound troubled her, and she was extremely irritable 
 and depressed. The moment the nurse gave him the news at his 
 door in the early morning, David's face changed. He dressed, 
 and went off for Mr. Selby, who came at once. 
 
 ' Yes,' he said gravely, after his visit, as he shut the folding- 
 doors of Lucy's room behind him — 'yes, I am sorry to say there 
 is a return. . Now the question is, what to do.' 
 
 He came and stood by the fireplace, legs apart, head down, 
 debating with himself. David, haggard and unshorn, watched 
 him helplessly. 
 
 ' We could operate again,' he said thoughtfully, 'but it would 
 cut her about terribly. And I can't disguise from you, Mr. 
 Grieve' — as he raised his head and caught sight of his companion 
 his tone softened insensibly — ' that, in my opinion, it would be 
 all but useless. I more than suspect, from my observation 
 to-day, that there are already secondary growths in the lung. 
 Probably they have been there for some time.' 
 
 There was a silence. 
 
 ' Then we can do nothing,' said David. 
 
 ' Nothing effectual, alas ! ' said the doctor, slowly. * Pallia- 
 tives, of course, we can use, of many kinds. But there will not 
 be much pain.' 
 
 ' Will it be long ? ' 
 
 David was standing with his back to the doctor, looking ont 
 of window, and Mr. Selby only just heard the words. 
 
 ' I fear it will be a rapid case,' he said reluctantly. * This 
 return is rapid, and there are many indications this morning I 
 don't like. But don't wish it prolonged, my dear sir !— have 
 courage for her and yourself. ' 
 
 The words were not mere platitudes — the soul of a good man 
 looked from the clear and masterful eyes. He described the 
 directions he had left with the nurse, and promised to come 
 again in the evening. Then he grasped David's hand, and would 
 have gone away quickly. But David, following him mechanically 
 to the door, suddenly recollected himself. 
 
 ' Could we move her ? ' he asked ; ' she may crave to get 
 home, or to some warm place.' 
 
 ' Yes, you can move her,' the doctor said, decidedly. ' With 
 an invalid-carriage and a nurse you can do it. We will talk 
 about it when I come again to-night.' 
 
 ' A ghastly case,' he was saying to himself as he went down- 
 stairs, 'and, thank heaven ! a rare one. Strange and mysterious 
 thing it is, with its ghoulish preference for the young. Poor 
 thing ! poor thing ! and yesterday she was so cheerful — she 
 would tell me all about her boy.' 
 
CHAP. IX 
 
 MATURITY 537 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 The history of the weeks that followed shall be partly told in 
 David's own words, gathered from those odds-and-ends of paper, 
 old envelopes, the half-sheets of letters, on which he would write 
 sometimes in those hours when he was necessarily apart from 
 Lucy, thrusting them on his return between the leaves of his 
 locked journal, clinging to them as the only possible record of 
 his wife's ebbing life, yet passionately avoiding the sight of them 
 when they were once written. 
 
 ' Rydal, Ambleside : May 5t7i. — We arrived this afternoon. 
 The day has been glorious. The mountains round the head of 
 the lake, as we drove along it at a foot's pace that the carriage 
 might not shake her, stood out in the sun ; the light wind drove 
 the cloud-shadows across their blues and purples ; the water was 
 a sheet of light ; the larches were all out, though other trees are 
 late ; and every breath was perfume. 
 
 'But she was too weary to look at it ; and before we had 
 gone two miles, it seemed to me that I could think of nothing but 
 the hateful length of the drive, and the ups and downs of the road. 
 
 ' When we arrived, she would walk into the cottage, and 
 before nurse or I realised what she was doing, she went straight 
 through the little passage which runs from front to back, out 
 into the garden. She stood a moment— in her shawls, with the 
 little white hood she has devised for herself drawn close round 
 her head and face— looking at the river with its rocks and foam- 
 ing water, at the shoulder of Nab Scar above the trees, at the 
 stone house with the red blinds opposite. 
 
 ' "It looks just the same," she said, and the tears rolled 
 down her cheeks. 
 
 ' We brought her in — nurse and I — and when she had been 
 put comfortably on the low couch I had sent from London be- 
 forehand, and had taken some food, she was a little cheered. 
 She made us draw her to the window of the little back sitting- 
 room, and she lay looking out till it was almost dark. But as I 
 foresaw, the pain of coming is more than equal to any pleasure 
 there may be. 
 
 ' Yet 'she would come. During those last days in London, 
 when she would hardly speak to us, when she lay in the dark in 
 that awful room all day, and every attempt to feed her or com- 
 fort her made her angry, I could not, for a long time, get her to 
 say what she wished about moving, except that she would not 
 go back to Manchester. 
 
 ' Her hand-glass could not be kept from her, and one morning 
 she cried bitterly when she saw that she could no longer so 
 arrange her laces as to completely hide the disfigurement of the 
 right side of the face. 
 
 ' " No! I will never go back to Merton Road!" she cried, 
 throwing down the glass ; " no one shall see me I " 
 
538 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iV 
 
 ' But at night, after I hoped she was asleep, she sent nurse 
 to say that she wanted to go to — RydaH— to the same cottage by 
 the Rotha we had stayed at on our honeymoon. Nurse said she 
 could — she could have an invalid carriage from door to door. 
 Would I write for the rooms at once ? And Sandy could join us 
 there. 
 
 'So, after nine yeaf^, we are here again. The house is 
 empty. We have our old rooms. Nothing is changed in the 
 valley. After she was asleep, I went out along the river, keep- 
 ing to a tiny path on the steep right bank till I reached a wooden 
 bridge, and then through a green bit, fragrant with fast-spring- 
 ing grass and flowers, to that point beside the lake I remember 
 so well. I left her there one day, sitting, and dabbling in the 
 water, while I ran up Loughrigg. She was nineteen. How she 
 tripped over the hills ! 
 
 ' To-night there was a faint moon. The air was cold, but 
 quite still, and the reflections, both of the islands and of Nab 
 Scar, seemed to sink into un fathomed depths of shadowy water. 
 Loughrigg rose boldly to my left against the night sky ; I could 
 see the rifle-butts and the soft blackness of the great larch- 
 piantation on the side of Silver How. 
 
 ' There, to my Tight, was the tower of the little church, 
 whitish against the woods, and close beside it, amid the trees, 1 
 felt the presence of Wordsworth's house, though I could not see 
 it. 
 
 ' O poet ! who wrote for me, not knowing — oh, heavenly 
 valley ! — you have but one voice ; it haunts my ears : — 
 
 ' Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed, 
 The bowers where LiLcy played ; 
 And thine, too, is the last green field 
 That Lucy's eyes surveyed.' 
 
 ' May 10^/l— She never speaks of dying, and I dare not speak 
 of it. But sometimes she is like a soul wandering in terror 
 through a place of phantoms. Her eyes grow large and strained, 
 she pushes me away from her. And she often wakes at night, 
 sinking in black gulfs of fear, from which I cannot save her. 
 
 ' Oh, my God I my heart is torn, my life is sickened with 
 pity ! Give me some power to comfort — take from me this 
 impotence, this numbness. She, so little practised in suffering, 
 so much of a child still, called to bear this monstrous thing. 
 Savage, incredible Nature ! But behind Nature there is God— 
 
 'To-night she asked me to pray with her — asked it with re- 
 proach. "You never say good things to me now!" And I 
 could not explain myself. 
 
 ' It was in this way. When Dora was with her, she used to 
 read and pray with her. I would not have interfered for the 
 world. When Dora left, I thought she would use the little 
 manual of prayers for the sick that DoVa had left behind ; the 
 nurse, who is a religious woman, and reads to her a good deal, 
 
CHAP. IX MATURITY ' 539 
 
 ^Tould have read this whenever she wished. One night I offered 
 to read it to her myself, but she would not let me. And for the 
 rest — in spite of our last talk — I was so afraid of jarring her, 
 of weakening any thought that might have sustained her. 
 
 ' But to-night she asked me, and for the first time since our 
 earliest married life I took her hand and prayed. Afterwards 
 she lay still, till suddenly her lip began to quiver. 
 
 * " I wasn't ever so very bad. I did love you and Sandy, and 
 I did help that girl, — you know — that Dora knew, who went 
 wrong. And I am so ill — so ill !"' 
 
 * May 20th. — A fortnight has passed. Sandy and his nurse 
 are lodging at a house on the hill ; every morning he comes down 
 here, and I take him for a walk. He was very puzzled and 
 grave at first when he saw her, but now he has grown used to 
 her look, and he plays merrily about among the moss-grown 
 rocks beside the river,"^ while she lies in the slung couch, to which 
 nurse and I carry her on a little stretcher, watching him. 
 
 ' There was a*^ bright hour this morning. We are in the midst 
 of a spell of dry and beautiful weather, such as often visits this 
 rainy country in the early summer, before any visitors come. 
 The rhododendrons and azaleas are coming out in the gardens 
 under Loughrigg — some little copses here and there are sheets of 
 blue — and the green is rushing over the valley. We had put her 
 among the rocks under a sycamore-tree — a singularly beautiful 
 tree,' with two straight stems dividing its rounded masses of 
 young leaf. There were two wagtails perching on the stones in 
 the river, and swinging their long tails ; and the light flickered 
 through the trees on to the water foaming round the stones or 
 slipping in brown cool sheets between them. There was a 
 hawthorn-tree in bloom near by ; in the garden of the house 
 opposite a woman was hanging out some clothes to dry ; the 
 Grasmere coach passed with a clatter, and Sandy with the two 
 children from the lodgings ran out to the bridge to look at it. 
 
 'Yes, she had a moment of enjoyment ! I bind the thought 
 of it to my heart. Lizzie was sitting sewing near the edge of the 
 river, that she might look after Sandy. He was told not to 
 climb on to the stones in the current of the stream, but as he 
 was bent on catching the vain, provoking wagtails who strutted 
 about on them, the prohibition was unendurable. As soon as 
 Lizzie's head was bent over her work, he would clamber in and 
 out till he reached some quite forbidden rock ; and then, looking 
 back with dancing eyes and the tip of his little tongue showing 
 between his white teeth, he would say, " Go on with your work, 
 Nana, da7'ling f^'— And his mother's 'look never left him all the 
 time. 
 
 ' Once he had been digging with his little spade among the 
 fine grey gravel silted up here and there among the hollows of 
 the rocks. He had been digging with great energy, and for May 
 the air was hot. Lizzie looked up and said to him, '• Sandy, it's 
 
540 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book n 
 
 time for me to take you to bed" — that is, for his midday sleep. 
 "Yes," he said, with a languid air, sitting down on a stone with 
 his spade between his knees — "yes, I think I'd better come to 
 bed. My heart is very dreary." " What do you mean ?" " My 
 heart is very dreary— dreary means tired, you know." "Oh, 
 indeed I — where is your heart?" "Here," he said, laying his 
 hand lackadaisically on the small of his back. 
 
 ' And then she smiled, for the first time for so many, many 
 days ! I came to sit by her ; she left her hand in mine ; and 
 after the child was gone the morning slipped by peacefully, with 
 only the sound of the river and the wheels of a few passing carts 
 to break the silence. 
 
 ' In the afternoon she asked me if I should not have to go back 
 to Manchester. How could all those men and those big printing- 
 rooms get on without me ? I told her that John reported to me 
 every other day ; that a batch of our best men had sent word to 
 me, through him, that everything was going well, and I was not 
 to worry ; that there had been a strike of some importance 
 among the Manchester compositors, but that our men had not 
 joined. 
 
 ' She listened to it all, and then she shut her eyes and said : — 
 
 ' " I'm glad you did that about the men. I don't understand 
 quite — but Fm glad." 
 
 ' . . . You can see nothing of her face now in its white 
 draperies but the small, pointed chin and nose ; and theq the 
 eyes, with their circles of pain, the high centre of the brow, and 
 a wave or two of her pretty hair tangled in the lace edge of the 
 hood. 
 
 ' " My darling, — my darling ! God have mercy upon us !''''' 
 
 ' June 2nd. — "^or the hardness of your hearts he tvrote you 
 this command menty How profoundly must he who spoke the 
 things reported in this passage have conceived of marriage ! 
 For the hardness of your hearts. Himself governed wholly by 
 the inward voice, unmoved by the mere external authority of the 
 great Mosaic name, he handles the law presented to him with a 
 sort of sad irony. The words imply the presence in him of a 
 slowly formed and passionately held ideal, Neither sin, nor 
 suffering, nor death can nor ought to destroy the marriage bond, 
 once created. It is not there for our pleasure, nor for its mere 
 natural object, — but to form the soul. 
 
 ' The world has marched since that day, in law — still more, 
 as it supposes, in sentiment. But are we yet able to bear such a 
 saying ? 
 
 ' . . . Then compare with these words the magnificent out- 
 burst in which, a little earlier, he sweeps from his path his 
 mother and his brethren. There are plentiful signs— take the 
 "corban" passage, for instance, still more, the details of the 
 Prodigal Son — of the same deep and tender thinking as we find 
 in the most authentic sayings about marriage applied to the 
 
CHAP. IX MATURITY 541 
 
 parental and brotherly relation. But he himself, realising, as it 
 would seem, with peculiar poignancy, the sacredness of marriage 
 and the claim of the family, is yet alone, and must be alone to 
 the end. The fabric of the Kingdom rises before him ; his soul 
 burns in the tire of his message ; and the lost sheep call. 
 
 ' She has been fairly at ease this afternoon, and I have been 
 lying on the grass by the lake, pondering these things. The 
 narrative of Mark, full as it is already of legendary accretion, 
 brings one so close to him ; the living breath and tone are in 
 one's ears.' 
 
 ^ June Uh. — These last two days she is much worse. The 
 local trouble is stationary ; but there must be developments we 
 know nothing of elsewhere. For she perishes every day before 
 our eyes — we cannot give her sleep — there is such malaise^ 
 emaciation, weariness. 
 
 ' She is wonderfully patient. It seems to me, looking back, 
 that a few days ago came a change. I cannot remember any 
 words that marked it, but it is as though — without our knowing it 
 — her eyes had turned themselves irrevocably from us and from 
 life, to the hills of death. Yet— strange ! — she takes more 
 notice of those about her. Yesterday she showed an interest 
 just like her old self in the children's going to a little fete at 
 Ambleside. She would have them all in — Sandy and the land- 
 lady's two little girls — to look at them when they were dressed. 
 — What- strikes me with awe is that she has no more tears, tliough 
 she says every now and then the most touching things — things 
 that pierce to the very marrow. 
 
 ' She told me to-day that she wished to see her father. I have 
 written to him this evening.' 
 
 '■June 6th. — Purcell has been here a few hours, and has gone 
 back to-night. She received him with perfect calmness, though 
 they have not spoken to each other for ten years. He came in 
 with his erect, military port and heavy tread, looking little older, 
 though his hair is gray. But he blenched at sight of her. 
 
 ' " You must kiss me on the forehead," she said to him feebly, 
 "but, please, A^ery gently." 
 
 'So he kissed her, and sat down. He cleared his throat 
 often, and did not know what to say. But she asked him, by 
 degrees, about some of her mother's relations whom she had not 
 seen for long, then about himself and his health. The ice 
 thawed, but the talk was difficult. Towards the end he inquired 
 of her — and, I think, with genuine feeling — whether she had 
 "sought salvation." She said faintly, " No ; " and he, looking 
 shocked and shaken, bade her, with very much of his old voice 
 and manner, and all the old phraseology, " lay hold of the merits 
 of Jesus." 
 
 ' Towards the end of his exhortations she interrupted him. 
 
 '"You must see Sandy, and you must kiss me again. I 
 
543 THE HISTOKY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 wasn't a good daughter. But, oh ! why wouldn't you make 
 friends with me and David ? I tried — you remember I tried ? " 
 
 ' " I am ready to forgive all the past,'' he said, drawing him- 
 self up ; "I can say no more." 
 
 ' " Well, kiss me ! " she said, in a melancholy whisper. And 
 he kissed her again. 
 
 ' Then I would not let him exhaust her any more, or take auy 
 set farewell. I hurried him away as though for tea, and nurse 
 and I pronounced against his seeing her again. 
 
 ' On our walk to the coach he broke out once more, and im- 
 plored me, with much unction and some dignity, not to let my 
 infidel opinions stand in the way, but to summon some godly 
 man to see and talk with her. I said that a neighbouring clergy- 
 man had been several times to see her, since, as he probably 
 knew, she had been a Chui-chwoman for years. In my inward 
 frenzy I seemed to be hurling all sorts of wild sayings at his 
 head ; but I don't believe they came to speech, for I know at the 
 end we parted with the civility of strangers. I promised to send 
 him news. What amazed me was his endless curiosity about the 
 details of her illness. He would have the whole history of the 
 operation, and all the medical opinion she could remember from 
 the nurse. And on our walk he renewed the subject ; but I could 
 bear it no more. 
 
 ' Oh, my God ! what does it matter to me why she is dying?' 
 
 ' Then, when I got home, I found her rather excited, and she 
 whispered to me : "He asked me if I had sought salvation, and 
 I said No. I didn't seek it, David ; but it comes — when you are 
 here." Then her chest heaved, but with that strange instinct of 
 self-preservation she would not say a word more, nor would she 
 let me weep. She asked me to hold her hands in mine, and so 
 she slept a little. 
 
 ' Dora writes that in a fortnight more she can get a holiday 
 of a week or two. Will she be in time ? 
 
 ' It is two months to-day since we went to London.' 
 
 On one of the last days in June Dora arrived. It seemed to 
 her that Lucy could have but a few days to live. Working both 
 outwardly and inwardly, the terrible disease had all but done its 
 work. She had nearly lost the power of swallowing, and lived 
 mainly on the morphia injections which were regularly adminis- 
 tered to her. But at intervals she spoke a good deal, and quite 
 clearly. 
 
 And Dora had not been six hours with her before a curious 
 thing happened. The relation which, ever since their meeting as 
 girls, had prevailed between her and Lucy, seemed to be suddenly 
 reversed. She was no longer the teacher and sustainer ; in the 
 little dying creature there was now a remote and heavenly power ; 
 it could not be described, but Dora yielded with tears to the awe 
 and sovereignty of it. 
 
 She saw with some plainness, however, that it depended on 
 
CHAP. IX MATURITY 643 
 
 the relation between the husband and wife. Since she had been 
 with them last, it had been touched — this relation — by a Divine 
 alchemy. The self in both seemed to have dropped away. The 
 two lives were no longer two, but one — he cherishing, she leaning. 
 
 The niglit she came she pressed Lucy to take the Holy Com- 
 munion. Lucy assented, and the Communion was administered, 
 with David kneeling beside her pillow. But afterwards Lucy 
 was troubled, and when Dora proposed at night to read and pray 
 with her, she said faintly, 'No; David does." And thence- 
 forward, though she was all gentleness, Dora did not find it very 
 easy to get religious speech with her, and went often — poor 
 Dora ! — sadly, and in fear. 
 
 Dora had been in the house five days, when new trouble fol- 
 lowed on the old. David one morning received a letter from 
 Louie, forwarded from Manchester, and when Dora followed him 
 into the garden with a message, she found him walking about 
 distracted. 
 
 ' Read it ! ' he said. 
 
 The letter was but a few scrawled lines : — 
 
 ' Cecile has got diphtheria. Our doctor says so, but he is a 
 devil. I must have another — the best — and there is no money. 
 If she dies, you will never see me again, I swear. I dare say 
 you will think it a good job, but now you know.' 
 
 The writing was hardly legible, and the paper had been 
 twisted and crumpled by the haste of the writer. 
 
 'What is to be done?' said David, in pale despair. 'Can I 
 leave this house one hour — one minute ?' 
 
 Then a sudden thought struck him. He looked at Dora with 
 a flash of appeal. 
 
 ' Dora, you have been our friend always, and you have been 
 good to Louie. Will you go ? I need not say all shall be made 
 easy. I could get John to take you over. He has been several 
 times to Paris for me this last five years, and would be a help.' 
 
 That was indeed a struggle for Dora ! Her heart clung to 
 these people she loved, and the devote in her yearned for those 
 last opportunities with the dying, on the hope of which she still 
 fed herself. To go from this deathbed, to thatifierce mother, in 
 those horrible surroundings ! 
 
 But ]ust as she had taught Louie in the old days because David 
 Grieve asked her, so now she went, in the end, because he asked her. 
 
 She was to be away six days at least. But the doctor thought 
 it possible she might return to find Lucy alive. David made 
 every possible arrangement — telegraphed to Louie that she was 
 coming ; and to John directing him to meet her at Warrington 
 and take her on ; wrote out the times of her journey ; the address 
 of a pension in the Avenue Friedland, kept by an English lady, 
 to which he happened to be able to direct her ; and the name of 
 the English lawyer in Paris who had advised him at the time of 
 Louie's marriage, had done various things for him since, and 
 would, he knew, be a friend in need. 
 
544 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book it 
 
 Twelve hours after the arrival of Louie's letter, Dora tore 
 herself from Lucy. ' Don't say good-bye,' said David, his face 
 working, and to spare him and Lucy she went as though she were 
 just going across the road for the night. David saw her — a white 
 and silent traveller — into the car that was to take her on the first 
 stage of a journey which, apart from everything else, alarmed 
 her provincial imagination. David's gratitude threw her into a 
 mist of tears as slie drove off. Surely, of all the self-devoted acts 
 of Dora's life, this mission and this leave-taking were not the 
 least ! 
 
 Lucy heard the wheels roll away. A stony, momentary sense 
 of desolation came over her as this one more strand was cut. 
 But David came in, and the locked lips relaxed. It had been 
 necessary to tell her the reason of Dora's departure. And in the 
 course of the long June evening David gathered from the motion 
 of her face that she wished to speak to him. He bent down to 
 her, and she murmured : — 
 
 ' Tell Louie I wished I'd been kinder— I pray God will let her 
 keep Cecile. . . . She must come to Manchester again when I'm 
 gone.* 
 
 The night-watch was divided between David and the nurse. 
 At five o'clock in the summer morning — brilliant once more after 
 storm and rain — he injected morphia into the poor wasted arm, 
 and she took a few drops of brandy. Then, after a while, she 
 seemed to sleep ; and he, stretched on a sofa beside her, and con- 
 fident of waking at the slightest sound, fell into a light doze. 
 
 Lucy woke vrhen the sun was high, rather more than an hour 
 later. Her eyes were teased by a chink in the curtain ; she 
 hardly knew what it was, but her dying sense shrank, and she 
 vaguely thought of calling David, But as she lay, propped up, 
 she looked down on him, and she saw his pale, sunken face, with 
 the momentary softening of rest upon it. And there wandered 
 through her mind fragments of his sayings to her in that last 
 evening of theirs together in the Manchester house, — especially, 
 'It can only be proved hy living — hy every victory over the evil 
 self.'' In its mortal fatigue her memory soon lost hold of words 
 and ideas ; but ^le had the strength not to wake him. 
 
 Then as she lay in what seemed to her this scorching light^ — 
 in reality it was one little ray which had evaded the thick cur- 
 tains — a flood of joy seemed to pour into her soul. ' I shall not 
 live beyond to-day,' she thought, 'but I know now I shall see 
 him again.' 
 
 When at last she made a faint movement, and he woke at 
 once, he saw tliat the end was very near. He thought of Dora 
 in Paris with a pang, but there was no help for it. Through that 
 day he never stirred from her side in the darkened room, and she 
 sank fast. She spoke only one connected sentence — to say with 
 great difficulty, ' Dying is long— but — not — painful,' The words 
 woke in him a strange echo ; they had been among the last words 
 
CHAP. X MATURITY 545 
 
 of 'Lias, his childhood's friend. But she breathed one or two 
 names — the landlady of the lodging-house, and the servants, 
 especially the nurse. 
 
 They came in on tiptoe and kissed her. She had already 
 thanked each one. 
 
 Sandy was just going to bed, when David carried him in to 
 her. One of her last conscious looks was for him. He was in 
 his nightgown, with bare feet, holding his father tight round the 
 neck, and whimpering. They bent down to her, and he kissed 
 her on the cheek, as David told him, 'very softly.' Then he 
 cried to go away from this still, grey mother. David gave him 
 to the nurse and came back. 
 
 The day passed, and the night began. The doctor in his 
 evening visit said it would be a marvel if she saw the morrow. 
 David sat beside the bed, his head bowed on the hand he held ; 
 the nurse was in the farther corner. His whole life and hers 
 passed before him ; and in his mind there hovered perpetually 
 the image of the potter and the wheel. He and she — the Hand 
 so unfaltering, so divine had bound them there, through resist- 
 ance and anguish unspeakable. And now, for him there was 
 on-ly a sense of absolute surrender and submission, which in this 
 hour of agony and exaltation rose steadily into the ecstasy — ay, 
 the vision of faith ! In the pitying love which had absorbed his 
 being he had known that ' best ' at last whereat his craving youth 
 had grasped ; and losing himself wholly had found his God. 
 
 And for her, had not her weak life become one flame of love 
 — a cup of the Holy Grail, beating and pulsing with the Divine 
 Life? 
 
 The dawn came. She pulled restlessly at her white wrapper 
 — seemed to be in pain — whispered something of 'a weight.' 
 Then the last change came over her. She opened her eyes — but 
 they saw no longer. Nature ceased to resist, and the soul had 
 long since yielded itself. With a meekness and piteousness of 
 look not to be told, never to be forgotten, Lucy Grieve passed 
 away. 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 The very day after Lucy had been carried to her last rest in that 
 most poetic of all graveyards which bends its grassy shape to the 
 encircling Rotha and holds in trust the ashes of Wordsworth, 
 David- Grieve started for Paris. 
 
 He had that morning received a telegram from Dora : ' Louie 
 disappeared. Have no clue. Can you come ? ' Two days before, 
 the news of Cecile's death from diphtheria had reached him 
 in a letter from poor Dora, rendered almost inarticulate by her 
 grief for Lucy and bitter regret for her own absence from her 
 cousin's deathbed, mingling with her pity for Louie's unfortunate 
 child and her dread and panic with regard to Louie herself. 
 
 But so long as that white form lay shrouded in the cottage 
 upper room, he could not move — and he could scarcely feel. 
 
546 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE BO(m iv 
 
 The telegram broke in upon a sort of lethargy which had held 
 him ever since Lucy's last breath. He started at once. On tlie 
 way he spent two hours at Manchester. On the table in his study 
 there still lay the medical book he had taken down from his 
 scientific shelf on the night of Dr. Mildmay's visit ; in Lucy's 
 room her dresses hung as she had left them on the doors ; a red 
 woollen cap she had been knitting for Sandy was thrown down 
 half finished on the dressing-table. Of the hour he spent in that 
 room, putting away some of the little personal possessions, still 
 warm as it were from her touch, let no more be said. 
 
 When he reached Paris he inquired for Dora at the pension in 
 the Avenue Friedland, to which he had sent her. John, who had 
 also written to him, and was still in Paris, was staying, he knew, 
 at an hotel on the Quai Voltaire. But he went to Dora first. 
 
 Dora, however, was not at home. She had left for him the 
 full address of the house in the Paris banlieue where she had 
 found Louie, and full directions as to how to reach it. He took 
 one of the open cabs and drove thither in the blazing July sun. 
 
 An interminable drive !— the whole length of the Avenue de 
 la Grande- Armee and the Avenue de Neuilly, past the Seine and 
 the Rond Pont de Courbevoie, until at last turning to the left into 
 the wide and villainously paved road that leads to Rueil, Bougi- 
 val, and St. Germain, the driver and David between them with 
 difiiculty discovered a side street which answered to the name 
 Dora had several times given. 
 
 They had reached one of the most squalid parts of the western 
 hanlieiie. Houses half built and deserted in the middle, perhaps 
 by some bankrupt builder ; small traders, bakers, clmrcutierSy 
 fried-fish sellers, lodged in structures of lath and plaster, just run 
 up and already crumbling ; cabarets of the roughest and meanest 
 kind, adorned with high-sounding devices, — David mechanically 
 noticed one which had blazoned on its stained and peeling front, 
 A la renaissance du PMnix ; — heaps of rubbish and garbage 
 with sickly children playing among them ; here and there some 
 small, ill-smelling factory ; a few melancholy shrubs in new-made 
 gardens, drooping and festering under a cruel sun in a scorched 
 and unclean soil :— the place repelled and outraged every sense. 
 Was it here that little Cecile had passed from a life of pain to a 
 death of torture ? 
 
 He rang at a sinister and all but windowless house, which he 
 was able to identify from Dora's directions. John opened to him, 
 and in a little room to the right, which looked on to a rank bit of 
 neglected garden, he found Dora. A woman, with a scowling 
 brow and greedy mouth, disappeared into the back premises as he 
 entered. 
 
 Dora and he clasped hands. Then the sight of his face broke 
 down even her long-practised self-control, and she laid her head 
 down on the table and sobbed. But he showed little emotion ; 
 while John, standing shyly on the other side of the room, and the 
 weeping Dora could hardly find words to tell their own story, so 
 
CHAP. X MATURITY 547 
 
 overwhelmed were they by those indelible signs upon him of all 
 that he had gone through. 
 
 He asked them rapidly a number of questions. 
 
 In the first place Dora explained that she and John were 
 engaged in putting together whatever poor possessions the house 
 contained of a personal kind, that they might not either be seized 
 for debt, or fail into the claws of the old bonne, a woman of the 
 lowest type, who had already plundered all she could. As to the 
 wretched husband, very little information was forthcoming. 
 John believed that he had been removed to the hospital in a state 
 of alcoholic paralysis the very w^eek that Cecile was taken ill ; at 
 any rate he had made no sign. 
 
 The rest of the story which Dora had to tell may be supple- 
 mented by a few details w^hich were either unknown to his 
 informants, or remained unknown to David. 
 
 Louie, on her return to Paris with David's hundred pounds, 
 had promptly staked the greater part of it in certain Bourse 
 speculations. She was quite as sorely in need of money as she 
 had professed to be while in Manchester, but for more reasons 
 than one, as David had uncomfortably suspected. Not only did 
 her husband strip her of anything he could lay hands on, but a 
 certain fair-haired Alsatian artist a good deal younger than her- 
 self had for some months been preying upon her. What his hold 
 upon her precisely was. Father Lenoir, her director, when David 
 went to see him, either could not or— because the matter was 
 covered by the confessional seal — would not say. The artist, 
 Brenart by name, was a handsome youth, with a droll facile 
 tongue, and a recklessness of temper matching her own. He 
 became first known to her as one of her husband's drinking com- 
 panions, then, dazzled by the wife's mad beauty, he began to 
 haunt the handsome Madame Montjoie, as many other persons 
 had haunted her before him, — with no particular results except 
 to increase the arrogant self-complacency with which Louie bore 
 herself among her Catholic friends. 
 
 In the first year of his passion, Brenart came into a small 
 inheritance, much of which he spent on jewellery and other 
 presents for his idol. She accepted them without scruple, and 
 his hopes naturally rose high. But in a few months he ran 
 through his money, his drinking habits, under Montjoie's lead, 
 grew upon him, and he fell rapidly into a state of degradation 
 which would have made it very easy for Louie to shake him off, 
 had tihe been so minded. 
 
 But by this time he had, no doubt, a curious spell for hor. 
 He was a person of considerable gifts, an etcher of fantastic 
 promise, a clever musician, and the owner of a humorous carillon 
 of talk, to quote M. Kenan's word, which made life in his neigh- 
 bourhood perpetually amusing for those, at any rate, who took the 
 grossness of its themes as a matter of course. Louie found on 
 the one hand that she could not do without him, in her miserable 
 existence ; on the other that if he was not to starve she must 
 
548 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iy 
 
 keep him. His misfortunes revealed the fact that there was 
 neither chivalry nor delicacy in him ; and he learnt to live upon 
 her with surprising quickness, and on the most romantic pretexts. 
 
 So she made her pilgrimage to Manchester for money, and 
 then she played with her money to make it more, on the Bourse. 
 But clever as she was, luck was against her, and she lost. Her 
 losses made her desperate. So too did the behaviour of her hus- 
 band, who robbed her whenever he could, and spent most of his 
 time on the pavements of Paris, dragging himself from one low 
 drinking-shop to another, only coming home to cheat her out of 
 fresh supplies, and goad his wife to hideous scenes of quarrel and 
 violence, which frightened the life out of Cecile. Brenart, whom 
 she could no longer subsidise, kept aloof, for mixed reasons of his 
 own. And the landlord, not to be trifled with any longer, gave 
 them summary notice of eviction. 
 
 While she was in these straits. Father Lenoir, who even during 
 these months of vacillating passion and temptation had exercised 
 a certain influence over her, came to call upon her one afternoon, 
 being made anxious by her absence from Ste. Eulalie. He found 
 a wild-eyed haggard woman in a half -dismantled apartment, 
 whom, for the first time, he could not atfeet by any of those arts 
 of persuasion or rebuke, in which his long experience as a guide 
 of souls had trained him. She would tell him nothing either 
 about her plans, or her husband ; she did not respond to his 
 skilful and reproachful comments upon her failure to give them 
 assistance in a recent great function at Ste. Eulalie ; nor was she 
 moved by the tone of solemn and fatherly exhortation into which 
 he gradually passed. He left her, fearing the worst. 
 
 On the following morning she fled to the wretched house on 
 the outskirts of Paris where Dora had found her. She went 
 thither to escape from her husband ; to avoid the landlord's pur- 
 suit ; to cut herself adrift from the clergy of Ste. Eulalie, and to 
 concert with Brenart a new plan of life. But Brenart failed to 
 meet her there, and, a very few days after the flight, Cecile. 
 already worn to a shadow, sickened with diphtlieria. Either the 
 seeds were already in her when they left Paris, or she was 
 poisoned by the half -finished drainage and general insanitary 
 state of the quarter to which they had removed. 
 
 From the moment the child took to her bed, -Louie fell into 
 the blackest despair. She had often ill-used her daughter during 
 these last months ; the trembling child, always in the house, 
 had again and again been made the scapegoat of her mother's 
 miseries ; but she no sooner threatened to clie than Louie threw 
 everything else in the world aside and was madly determined she 
 should live. 
 
 She got a doctor, of an inferior sort, from the neighbourhood, 
 and when he seemed to her to bungle, and the child got no better, 
 she drove him out of the house with contumely. Then she her- 
 self tried to caustic Ceeile's throat, or she applied some of the old- 
 wives' remedies, suggested by the low servant she had taken. The 
 
CHAP. X MATURITY 549 
 
 result was that the poor little victim was brought to the edge of 
 the grave, and Louie, reduced to abjectness, went and humbled 
 herself to the doctor and brought him back. This time he told 
 her bluntly that the child was dying and nothing could save her. 
 Then, in her extremity, she telegraphed to David. Her brother 
 had written to her tvvice since the beginning of Lucy's illness ; 
 but when she sent her telegram, all remembrance of her sister-in- 
 law had vanished from Louie's mind— Lucy might never have 
 existed ; and whether she was alive or dead mattered nothing. 
 
 When Dora came, she found the child speechless, and near 
 the end. Tracheotomy had been performed, but its failure was 
 already clear. It seemed a question of hours. John went off 
 post-haste for a famous doctor. The great man came, agreed 
 with the local practitioner that nothing more could be done, and 
 that death was imminent. Louie, beside herself, first turned and 
 rent him, and then fell in a dead faint b'^side Cecile's bed. While 
 the nurse, whom John had also brought from Paris, was tending 
 both mother and daughter, Dora sent John— who in these years 
 had acquired a certain smattei-ing of foreign languages under the 
 pressure of printing-room needs and David's counsel — to inquire 
 for and fetch a priest. She was in an agony lest the child should 
 die without the sacraments of her Church. 
 
 The priest came— a young man of a heavy peasant type — bearing 
 the Host. Never did Dora forget that scene— the emaciated child 
 gasping her life away, the strange people, dimly seen amid the 
 wreaths of incense, who seemed to her to have flocked in from 
 the street in the wake of the priest, to look— the sacred words and 
 gestures in the midst, which, because of the quick unintelligible 
 Latin, she could only follow as a mystery of ineffable and saying 
 power, the same, so she believed, for Anglican and Catholic — 
 and by the bedside the sullen erect form bf the mother, who could 
 not be induced to take any part whatever in the ceremony. 
 
 But when it was all over, and the little procession which had 
 brought the Host was forming once more, Louie thrust Dora and 
 the nurse violently away from the bed, and bent her ear down to 
 Cecile's mouth. She gave a wild and hideous cry ; then drawing 
 herself to her full height, with a tragic magnificence of movement 
 she stretched out one shaking hand over the poor little wasted 
 body, while with the other she pointed to the priest in his white 
 officiating dress. 
 
 ' Go out of this house !— go this instant ! Who brought you 
 in ? Not I ! I tell you,— last night '—she flung the phrases out 
 in fierce gasps — ' I gave God the chance. I said to Him, Make 
 Cecile well, and I'll behave myself— I'll listen to Father Lenoir. 
 Much good Fve got by it all this time !— but I will. I'll live on a 
 crust, and I'll give all I can skin and scrape to those people at 
 Ste. Eulalie. If not— then I'll go to the devil— to the devil ! Do 
 you hear ? I swore that. ' 
 
 Her voice sank to a hoarse whisper ; she bent down, still keep- 
 ing everyone at bay and at a distance from her dead child,— 
 
550 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book I7 
 
 though Dora ran to her — her head turned over her shoulder, her 
 glowing eyes of hatred fixed upon the priest. 
 
 ' She is mad ! ' he said to himself, receding quickly, lest the 
 sacred burden he bore should suffer any indignity. 
 
 At that moment she fell heavily on her knees beside the bed 
 insensible, her dark head lying on Cecile's arm. Dora, in a pale 
 trance of terror, closed little Cecile's weary eyes, the nurse cleared 
 the room, and they laid Louie on her bed. 
 
 When she revived, she crawled to the place where Cecile lay in 
 her white grave-dress strevrn with flowers, and again put every- 
 one away, locking herself in with the body. But the rules of 
 interment in the case of infectious diseases are strict in France ; 
 the authorities concerned intervened ; and after scenes of in- 
 describable misery and violence, the little corpse was carried 
 away, and, thanks to Dora's and John's care, received tender and 
 reverent burial. 
 
 The mother was too exhausted to resist any more. When Dora 
 came back from the funeral, the nurse told her that Madame 
 Montjoie, after having refused all meat or drink for two days, 
 had roused herself from vrhat seemed the state of stupor in which 
 the departure of the funeral procession had left her, had asked 
 for brandy, which had been given her, and had then, of her own 
 accord, swallowed a couple of opium pills, which the doctor had 
 so far vainly prescribed for her, and was now heavily asleep. 
 
 Dora went to her own bed, too tired to stand, yet inexpressi- 
 bly relieved. Her bed was a heap of wraps contrived for her by 
 the nurse on the floor of the lower room — a bare den, reeking or 
 damp, which called itself the salon. But she had never rested 
 anywhere with such heli^less thankfulness. For some hours at 
 least, agony and conflict were still, and she had a moment in 
 which to weep for Lucy, the news of whose death had now lain 
 for two days a dragging weight at her heart. Hateful memory ! 
 — she had forced her way in to Louie with the letter, thinking in 
 her innocence that the knowledge of the brother's bereavement 
 must touch the sister, or at least momentarily divert her attention: 
 and Louie had dashed it down with the inconceivable words, — 
 Dora's cheek burnt with anguish and shame, as she tried to put 
 them out of her mind for ever, — 
 
 ' Very well. Now, then, you can marry him 1 You know 
 you've always wanted to ! ' 
 
 But at last that biting voice was hushed ; there was not a 
 sound in the house ; the summer night descended gently on the 
 wretched street, and in the midst of anxious discussion with her- 
 self as to how she and John were to get Louie to England, she fell 
 asleep. 
 
 When Dora awoke, Louie was not in the house. After a few 
 hours of opium-sleep, she must have noiselessly put together all 
 her valuables and money, a few trifles belonging to Cecile, and a 
 small parcel of clothes, and have then slipped out through the 
 
CHAP. X MATURITY 551 
 
 garden door, and into a back lane or track, which would ulti- 
 mately lead her down to the bank of the river. None of the three 
 other persons sleeping in the house— Dora, the nurse, the old 
 honne, had heard a sound. 
 
 When John arrived in the morning, his practical common 
 sense suggested a number of measures for Louie's pursuit, or for 
 the discovery of her fate, should she have made away with 
 herself, as lie more than suspected— measures which were 
 immediately taken by himself, or by the lawyer, Mr. O'Kelly. 
 
 Everything had so far been in vain. No trace of the fugitive 
 — living or dead— could be found. 
 
 David, sitting with his arms on the deal table m the lower 
 room and his face in his hands, listened in almost absolute 
 silence to the main facts of the story. When he looked up, it was 
 to say, ' Have you been to Father Lenoir ? ' 
 
 No Neither Dora nor John knew anything of Father Lenoir. 
 
 David went off at once. The good priest was deeply touched 
 and overcome by the story, but not astonished. He first told 
 David of the existence of Brenart, and search was instantly made 
 for the artist. He, too, was missing, but the pohce, whose cordial 
 assistance David, by the help of Lord Driffield's important friends 
 in Paris, was able to secure, were confident of immediate dis- 
 covery. Day after day passed, however ; innumerable false clues 
 were started ; but at the end of some weeks Louie's fate was much 
 of a secret as ever. 
 
 Dora and John had, of course, gone back to England directly 
 after David's arrival ; and he now felt that his child and his work 
 called him. He returned home towards the middle of August, 
 leaving the search for his sister in Mr. O'Kelly's hands. 
 
 For five months David remained doggedly at his work in 
 Prince's Street. John watched him silently from day to day, 
 showing him a quiet devotion which sometimes brought his old 
 comrade's hand upon his shoulder in a quick touch of gratitude 
 or a flash to eyes heavy with broken sleep. The winter was a bad 
 one for trade ; the profits made by Grieve & Co., even on much 
 business, were but small ; and in the consuUative council of 
 employes which David had established the chairman constantly 
 showed a dreaminess or an irritability in difficult circumstances 
 which in earlier days would have cost him influence and success. 
 But the men, who knew him well, looked at each other askance, 
 and either spoke their minds or bore with him as seemed best. 
 They were well aware that while wages everywhere else had been 
 cut down, theirs were undiminished ; that the profits from the 
 second-hand book trade which remained nominally outside the 
 profit-sharing partnership were practically all spent in furthering 
 the social ends of it ; and that the master, in his desolate house, 
 with his two maid-servants, one of them his boy's nurse, lived as 
 modestly as any of them, yet with help always to spare for the 
 sick and the unfortunate. To a man they remained loyal to the 
 
552 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book it 
 
 firm and the scheme ; but among even the best of them there was 
 a curious difference of opinion as to David and his ways. They 
 profited by them, and they would see him through ; but there was 
 an uncomfortable feeling that, if such ideas were to spread, they 
 might cut both ways and interfere too much with the easy living 
 which the artisan likes and desires as much as any other man. 
 
 Meanwhile, those who have followed the history of David 
 Grieve with any sympathy will not find it difficult to believe that 
 this autumn and v,^inter were with him a time of intense mental 
 anguish and depression. The shock and tragedy of Louie's dis- 
 appearance following on the prolonged nervous exhaustion caused 
 by Lucy's struggle for life had brought him into a state similar to 
 that in which his first young grief had left him ; only with this 
 difference, that the nature being now deeper and richer was but 
 the more capable of suffering. Tlie passion of religious faith 
 which had carried him through Lucy's death had dwindled by 
 natural reaction ; he believed, but none the less he walked in 
 darkness. The cruelty of his wife's fate, meditated upon through 
 lonely and restless nights, tortured beyond bearing a soul made 
 for pity ; and every now and then wild fits of remorse for his 
 original share in Louie's sins and misfortunes would descend upon 
 him, and leave no access to reason. 
 
 His boy, his work, and his books, these were ultimately his 
 protections from himself. Sandy climbed about him, or got into 
 mischief with salutary frequency. The child slept beside his 
 father at night, and in the evenings was always either watching 
 for him at the gate or standing thumb in mouth with his face 
 pressed against the window, and his bright eye scanning the dusk. 
 
 For the rest, after a first period of utter numbness and languor, 
 David was once more able to read, and he read with voracity — • 
 science, philosophy, belles lettres. Two subjects, however, held 
 his deepest mind all through, whatever might be added to them — 
 the study of ethics, in their bearing upon religious conceptions, 
 and the study of Christian origins. His thoughts about them found 
 occasional outlet, either in his talks with Ancrum — whose love 
 soothed him, and whose mind, with all its weaknesses and its 
 strong Catholic drift, he had long found to be infinitely freer and 
 more hospitable in the matter of ideas than the average Anglican 
 mind — or in his journal. 
 
 A few last extracts from the journal may be given. It should 
 be remembered that the southern element in him made such a 
 mode of expression more easy and natural to him than it ever can 
 be to most Englishmen. 
 
 ' November 2nd. — It seems to me that last night was the first 
 night since she died that I have not dreamt of her. As a rule, I 
 am always with her in sleep, and for that reason I am the more 
 covetous of the sleep which comes to me so hardly. It is a second 
 life. Yet before her illness, during our married life, I hardly 
 knew what it was to dream. 
 
 ' Two nights ago I thought I was standing beside her. She 
 
CHAP. X MATURITY 553 
 
 was lying on the long couch under the sj^camore tree whither we 
 used to carry her. At first, everything was wholly lifelike and 
 tamiliar. Sandy was somewhere near. She had the grey camel's 
 hair shawl over her shoulders, which I remember so well, and the 
 white frilled cap drawn loosely together under her chin over 
 bandages and dressings, as usual. She asked me to fetch some- 
 thing for her from the house, and I went, full of joy. There 
 seemed to be a strange mixed sense at the bottom of my heart 
 that I had somehow lost lier and found her again. 
 
 ' When I came back, nurse was tkere, and everything was 
 changed. Nurse looked at me with meaning, startled eyes as 
 much as to say, "Look closely, it is not as you think.'' And as I 
 went up to her, lying still and even smiling on her couch, there 
 was an imperceptible raising of her little white hand as though to 
 keep me off. Then in a flash I saw that it was not my living Lucy • 
 that It could only be her spirit. I felt an awful sense of separa- 
 tion and yet of yearning ; sitting down on one of the mossy stones 
 beside her, I wept bitterly, and so woke, bathed in tears. 
 
 ' . . . It has often seemed to me lately that certain elements 
 m the Kesurrection stories may be originally traced to such 
 experiences as these. I am irresistibly drawn to believe that the 
 strange and mystic scene beside the lake, in the appendix chapter 
 to the Gospel of St. John, arose in some such way. There is the 
 same mixture of elements— of the familiar with the ghostly, the 
 trivial with the passionate and exalted— which my own conscious- 
 ness has so often trembled under in these last visionary months. 
 The well-known lake, the old scene of fishers and fishing-boats, 
 and on the shore the mysterious figure of the Master, the same, 
 yet not the same, the little, vivid, dream like details of the fire of 
 coals, the broiled fish, and bread, the awe and longing of the 
 disciples— it is borne in upon me with extraordinary con^^ction 
 that the whole of it sprang, to begin with, from the dream of 
 grief and exhaustion. Then, in an age which attached a peculiar 
 and mystical importance to dreams, the beautiful thrilling fancy 
 passed from mouth to mouth, became almost immediately history 
 insteaa of dream,— just as here and there a parable misunderstood 
 has taken the garb of an event,— was after a while added to and 
 made more precise in the interest of apologetics, or of doctrine, 
 or of the simple love of elaboration, and so at last found a final 
 resting-place as an epilogue to the fourth Gospel.' 
 
 ' Novemher 4^^/^— To-night I have dared to read again Brown- 
 ing's " Rabbi ben Ezra." For months I have not been able to read 
 It, or think of it, though for days and weeks towards the end of 
 her life it seemed to be graven on my heart. 
 
 Look not thou down, but up ! 
 
 To uses of a cup, 
 The festal board, lamp's flash, and trumpet's peai. 
 
 The new wine's foaming glow. 
 
 The Master's lips a-glow ! 
 Thou heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel ? 
 
554 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE eook iV 
 
 'Let me think again, my God, of that astonishing ripening of 
 her last days ! — of all her little acts of love and gratitude towards 
 me, towards her nurse, towards the people in the house, who had 
 helped to tend her — of her marvellous submission, when once the 
 black cloud of the fear of death, and the agony of parting from 
 life had left her. 
 
 ' And such facts alone in the world's economy are to have no 
 meaning, point no-whither ? I could as soon believe it as that, in 
 the physical universe, the powers of the magnet, or the flash of 
 the lightning, are isolated and meaningless — tell us nothing and 
 lead nowhere.' 
 
 ^ Novemher 10th. — In the old days — there is a passage of the 
 kind in an earlier part of this journal — I was constantly troubled, 
 and not for myself only, but for others, the poor and unlearned 
 especially, who, as it seemed to me, would lose most in the crum- 
 bling of the Christian mythology — as to the intellectual difhculties 
 of the approach to God. All this philosophical travail of two 
 thousand years — and so many doubts and darknesses ! A world 
 athirst for preaching, and nothing simple or clear to preach — 
 when once the miracle-child of Bethlehem had been dispossessed. 
 And 710 w it is daylight-plain to me that in the simplest act of 
 loving self -surrender there is the germ of all faith, the essence 
 of all lasting religion. Quicken human service, purify and 
 strengthen human love, and have no fear but that the conscience 
 will find its God ! For all the time this quickening and this puri- 
 fication are His work in thee. Around thee are the institutions, 
 the ideals, the knowledge and beliefs, ethical or intellectual, in 
 which that work, that life, have been so far fragmentarily and 
 partially realised. Submit thyself and press forward. Thou 
 knowest well what it means to be bette?' : more pure, more loving, 
 more self-denying. And in thy struggle to be all these, God 
 cometh to thee and abides. . . . Bid tJie greatest of these is love /^ 
 
 ' November 20th. — To-day I have finished the last of my New 
 Testament tracts, the last at any rate for a time. While Ancrum 
 lives I have resolved to suspend them. They trouble him deeply ; 
 and I, who owe him so much, will not voluntarily add to his 
 burden. His wife is with him, a somewhat heavy, dark-faced 
 woman, with a slumbrous eye, which may, however, be capable 
 of kindling. They have left Mortimer Street, and have gone to 
 live in a little house on the road to Cheadle. He seems perfectly 
 happy, and though the doctor is discouraging, I at least can see 
 no change for the worse. She sits by him and reads or works, 
 without much talking, but is all the time attentive to his lightest 
 movement. Friends send them flowers which brighten the little 
 house, his " boys" visit him in the evenings, he is properly fed, 
 and altogether I am more happy about him than I have been for 
 long. It required considerable courage, this move, on her part ; 
 for there are a certain number of people still left who knew 
 Ancrum at college, and remember the story ; and those who 
 
CHAP. X MATURITY 555 
 
 • 
 believed him a bachelor are of course scandalised and wondering. 
 But the talk, whatever it is, does not seem to molest them much. 
 He offered to leave Manchester, but she would not let him. 
 "What would he do away from you and his boys?" she said to 
 me. There is a heroism in it all the same. 
 
 ' ... So my New Testament work may rest a while. — During 
 these autumn weeks, it has helped me through some terrible 
 hours. 
 
 ' When I look back over the mass of patient labour which has 
 accumulated during the present century round the founder of 
 Christianity and the origins of his society — when I compare the 
 text-books of the day with the text-books of sixty years ago — I 
 no longer wonder at the empty and ignorant arrogance with 
 which the French eighteenth century treated the whole subject. 
 The first stone of the modern building had not been laid when 
 Voltaire wrote, unless perhaps in the Wolfenbtittel fragments. 
 He knew, in truth, no more than the Jesuits, much less in fact 
 than the better men among them. 
 
 ' ... It has been like the unravelling of a piece of fine and 
 ancient needlework — and so discovering the secrets of its make 
 and craftsmanship. A few loose ends were first followed up ; 
 then gradually the whole tissue has been involved, till at last the 
 nature and quality of each thread, the purpose and the skill of 
 each stitch, are becoming plain, and what was mystery rises into 
 knowledge. 
 
 ' . . . But how close and fine a web ! — and how difficult and 
 patient the process by which Christian reality has to be grasped ! 
 There is no short cut — one must toil. 
 
 ' But after one has toiled, what are the rewards ? Truth first 
 —which is an end in itself and not a means to anything beyond. 
 Then — the great figure of Christianity given back to you — with 
 something at least of the first magic, the first " natural truth " 
 of look and tone. Through and beyond dogmatic overlay, and 
 Messianic theory and wonder-loving addition, to recover, at least 
 fragmentarily, the actual voice, the first meaning, which is also 
 the eternal meaning, of Jesus — Paul — "John " ! 
 
 ' Finally — a conception of Christianity in which you discern 
 once more its lasting validity and significance — its imperishable 
 place in human life. It becomes simply that preaching of the 
 Kingdom of God which belongs to and affects you — you, the 
 modern European — just as Greek philosophy. Stoic or Cynic, was 
 that preaching of it which belonged to and affected Epictetus.' 
 
 ^November 2Uh. — Mr. O'Kelly writes to me to-day his usual 
 hopeless report. No news ! I do not even know whether she is 
 alive, and I can do nothing — absolutely nothing. 
 
 ' Yes — let me correct myself, there is some news — of an event 
 which, if we could find her, might simplify matters a little. 
 Montjoie is dead in hospital — at the age of thirty-six — 
 
 ' Is there any other slavery and chain like that of tempera 
 
656 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book it 
 
 ment? As I look back on the whole course of my relation to 
 Louie, I am conscious only of a sickening sense of utter failure. 
 Our father left her to me, and I have not been able to hold her 
 back from — nay, I have helped to plunge her into the most 
 obvious and commonplace ruin. Yet I am always asking myself, 
 if it were to do again, could I do any better? Has any other 
 force developed in me which would make it possible for me now 
 to break through tlie barriers between her nature and mine, to 
 love her sincerely, asking for nothing again, to help her to a 
 saner and happier life ? 
 
 ' If sometimes I dream that so it is, it is to her I owe it — to 
 her whom I carry on my bosom, and whose hand did once, or so 
 it seemed, unlock to me the gates of God. Lucy ! my Lucy ! 
 
 ' . . . All my past life becomes sometimes intolerable to me. 
 I can see nothing in it that is not tarnished and flecked with 
 black stains of egotism., pride, hardness, moral indolence. 
 
 ' And the only reparation possible, "Be ye transformed by the 
 renewing of your minds," at which my fainting heart sinks. 
 
 'Sometimes I find much comfort in the saying of a lonely 
 thinker, " Let us humbly accept from God even our own nature ; 
 not that we are called upon to accept the evil and the disease in 
 us, but let us accept ourselves in spite of the evil and the disease." 
 
 ' Que vivre est difficile — 6 mon coeur fatigue ! ' 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 By the end of December David Grieve was near breaking down. 
 Dr. Mildmay insisted brusquely on his going away. 
 
 ' As far as I can see you will live to be an old man,' he said, 
 ' but if you go on like this, it will be with shattered powers. You 
 are driving yourself to death, yet at the present moment you 
 have no natural driving force. It is all artificial, a matter of 
 will. Do, for heaven's sake, get away from these skies and these 
 streets, and leave all work and all social reforms behind. The 
 first business of the citizen — prate as you like ! — is to keep his 
 nerves and his digestion in going order.' 
 
 David laughed and yielded. The advice, in fact, corresponded 
 to an inward thirst, and had, moreover, a coincidence to back it. 
 In one of the Manchester papers two or three mornings before he 
 had seen the advertisement of a farm to let, which had set 
 vibrating all his passion for and memory of the moorland. It 
 was a farm about half a mile from Needham Farm, on one of the 
 lower slopes of Kinder Low. It had belonged to a peasant owner, 
 lately dead. The heirs wished to sell, but failing a purchaser 
 were willing to let on a short lease. 
 
 It was but a small grazing farm, and the rent was low. David 
 went to the agent, took it at once, and in a few days, to the 
 amazement of Reuben and Hannah, to whom he wrote only the 
 night before he arrived, ho and Sandy, and a servant, were estab- 
 
CHAP. XI MATURITY 557 
 
 lished with a minimum of furniture, but a sufficiency of blankets 
 and coals, in two or three rooms of the little grey-walled house. 
 
 ' Well, it caps me, it do ! ' Hannah said to herself, in her 
 astonishment as she stood on her own doorstep the day after 
 the arrival, and watched the figures of David and Sandy disap- 
 pearing along the light crisp snow of the nearer fields in the 
 direction of the Red Brook and the sheep-fold. They had looked 
 in to ask for Reuben, and had gone in pursuit of him. 
 
 What on earth should make a man in the possession of his 
 natural senses leave a warm town-house in January, and come to 
 camp in ' owd Ben's ' farm, was, indeed, past Hannah's divination. 
 In reality, no sudden resolve could have been happier. Sandy 
 was a hardy little fellow, and with the first breath of the moor- 
 land wind David felt a load, which had been growing too heavy 
 to bear, lifting from his breast. His youth, his manhood, re- 
 asserted themselves. The bracing clearness of what seemed to 
 be the setting-in of a long frost put a new life into him ; winter's 
 ' bright and intricate device ' of ice-fringed stream, of rimy grass, 
 of snow-clad moor, of steel-blue skies, filled him once more with 
 natural joy, carried him out of himself. He could not keep him- 
 self indoors ; he went about with Reuben or the shepherd, after 
 the sheep ; he fed the cattle at Needham Farm, and brought his 
 old knowledge to bear on the rearing of a sickly calf ; he watched 
 for the grouse, or he carried his pockets full of bread for the few 
 blackbirds or moor-pippits that cheered his walks into the fissured 
 solitudes of the great Peak plateau, walks which no one to whom 
 every inch of the ground was not familiar dared have ventured, 
 seeing how misleading and treacherous even light snow-drifts may 
 become in the black bog-land" of these high and lonely moors ; or 
 he toiled up the side of the Scout with Sandy on his back, that 
 he might put the boy on one of the boulders beside the top of the 
 Downfall, and, holding him fast, bid him look down at the great 
 icicles which marked its steep and waterless bed, gleaming in the 
 short-lived sun. 
 
 The moral surroundings, too, of the change were cheering. 
 There, over the brow, in the comfortable little cottage, where he 
 had long since placed her, with a woman to look after her, was 
 Margaret^quite childish and out of her mind, but happy and 
 well cared for. He and Sandy would trudge over from time to 
 time to see her, he carrying the boy in a plaid slung round his 
 shoulders when the snow was deep. Once Sandy went to Frimley 
 with the Needham Farm shepherd, and when David came to fetch 
 him he found the boy and Margaret playing cat's-cradle together 
 by the fire, and the eagerness in Sandy's pursed lips, and on the 
 ethereally blanched and shrunken face of Margaret, brought the 
 tears to David's eyes, as he stood smiling and looking on. But 
 she did not suffer ; for memory was gone ; only the gentle 
 * imperishable child ' remained. 
 
 And at Needham Farm he had never known the atmosphere 
 so still. Reuben was singularly cheerful and placid. Whether 
 
558 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 by the mere physical weakening of years, or by some slow soften- 
 ing of the soul, Hannah and her ways were no longer the daily 
 scourge and perplexity to her husband they had once been. She 
 was a harsh and tyrannous woman still, but not now openly 
 viperish or cruel. With the disappearance of old temptations, 
 the character had, to some extent, righted itself. Her sins of 
 avarice and oppression towards Sandy's orphans had raised no 
 Nemesis that could be traced, either within or without. It is 
 doubtful whether she ever knew what self-reproach might mean ; 
 in word, at any rate, she was to the end as loudly confident as at 
 the first. Nevertheless it might certainly be said that at sixty 
 she was a better and more tolerable human being than she had 
 been at fifty. 
 
 ' Aye, if yo do but live long enoof , yo get past t' bad bits o' t' 
 road,' Reuben said one night, with a long breath, to David, and 
 then checked himself, brought up either by a look at his nephew's 
 mourning dress, or by a recollection of what David had told him 
 of Louie the night before. 
 
 It troubled Reuben indeed, something in the old fashion, that 
 his wife would show no concern whatever for Louie when he 
 repeated to her the details of that disappearance whereof so far 
 he and she had known only the bare fact. 
 
 ' Aye, I thowt she 'd bin and married soom mak o' rabble- 
 ment,' remarked Hannah. ' Yo doant suppose ony decent mon 
 ud put up wi her. What Davy wants wi lookin for her I doant 
 know. He'll be hard-set when he's f and her, I should think. ' 
 
 She was equally impervious and sarcastic with regard to 
 David's social efforts. Her sharp tongue exercised itself on the 
 ' poor way ' in which he seemed to live, and when Reuben repeated 
 to her, with some bewilderment, the facts which she had egged 
 him on to get out of David, her scorn knew no bounds. 
 
 ' Weel, it's like t' Bible after aw, Hannah,' said Reuben, per- 
 plexed and remonstrating ; ' theer 's things, yo'll remember, 
 abeawt gien t' coat off your back, an sellin aw a mon has, an th' 
 loike, 'at fairly beats me soomtimes. ' 
 
 ' Oh — go long wi yo ! ' said Hannah in high wrath. ' He an 
 his loike '11 mak a halliblash of us a\t soon, wi their silly faddle, 
 an pamperin o' workin men, wha never wor an never will be noa 
 better nor they should be. But — thank the Lord — /'ll not be 
 theer to see.' 
 
 And after this communication she found it very diflBcult to 
 treat David civilly. 
 
 But to David's son — to Sandy — Hannah Grieve capitulated, for 
 the first and only time in her life. 
 
 On the second and third day after his arrival, Sandy came 
 over with the servant to ask Hannah's help in some small matter 
 of the new household. As they neared the farm door, Tim, the 
 aged Tim, who was slouching behind, was suddenly set upon by 
 a new and ill-tempered collie of Reuben's, who threatened very 
 soon to shake the life out of his poor toothless victim. But 
 
CHAP. XI MATURITY 559 
 
 Sandy, who had a stick, rushed at him, his cheeks and oyes glow- 
 ing with passion. 
 
 ' Get away ! you great big dog, you ! and leave my middle- 
 sized dog alone ! ' 
 
 And he belaboured and pulled at the collie, without a thought 
 of fear, till the farm-man and Hannah came and separated the 
 combatants, — stalking into the farm kitchen afterwards in a 
 speechless rage at the cowardly injustice which had been done to 
 Tim. As he sat in the big rocking-chair, fiercely cuddling Tim 
 and sucking his thumb, his stormy breath subsiding by degrees, 
 Hannah thought him, as she confessed to the only female friend 
 she possessed in the world, ' the pluckiest and bonniest little grig 
 i' th' coontry side.' 
 
 Thenceforward, so far as her queer temper would allow, she 
 became his nurse and slave, and David, with all the memorials of 
 his own hard childhood about him, could not believe his eyes, 
 when he found Sandy established day after day in the Needham 
 Farm kitchen, sucking his thumb in a corner of the settle, and 
 ordering Hannah about with the airs of a three-tailed bashaw. 
 She stuffed him with hot girdle-cakes ; she provided for him a 
 store of 'humbugs,' the indigenous sweet of the district, which 
 she made and baked with her own hands, and had not made 
 before for forty years ; she took him about with her, ' rootin,' as 
 she expressed it, after the hens and pigs and the calves ; till, 
 Sandy's exactions growing with her compliance, the common fate 
 of tyrants overtook him. He one day asked too much and his 
 slave rebelled. David saw him come in one afternoon, and found 
 him a minute or two after viciously biting the blind-cord in the 
 parlour, in a black temper. AVhen his father inquired what v^^as 
 the matter, Sandy broke out in a sudden wail of tears. 
 
 ' Why can't she be a Kangawoo when I want her to ? ' 
 
 Whereupon David, with the picture of Hannah's grim figure, 
 cap and all, before his mind's eye, went into the first'fit of side- 
 shaking laughter that had befallen him for many and many a 
 month. 
 
 On a certain gusty afternoon towards the middle of February, 
 David was standing alone beside the old smithy. The frost, after 
 a temporary thaw, had set in again, there liad been tolerably 
 heavy snow the night before, and it was evident from the shifting 
 of the wind and the look of the clouds that were coming up from 
 the north-east over the Scout that another fall was impending. 
 But the day had been fine, and the sun, setting over the Cheshire 
 hills, threw a flood of pale rose into the^white bosom of the Scout 
 and on the heavy clouds piling themselves above it. It was a 
 moment of exquisite beauty and wildness. The sunlit snow 
 gleamed against the stormy sky ; the icicles lining the steep 
 channel of the Downfall shone jagged and rough between the 
 white and smoothly rounded banks of moor, or the snow- wreathed 
 shapes of the grit boulders ; to his left was the murmur of the 
 
560 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book it 
 
 Red Brook creeping between its frozen banks ; while close beside 
 him about twenty of the moor sheep were huddling against the 
 southern wall of the smithy in prescience of the coming storm. 
 Almost within reach of his stick was the pan of his childish joy, 
 the water left in it by the December rains frozen hard and white; 
 and in the crevice of the wall he had just discovered the moulder- 
 ing remains of a toy-boat. 
 
 He stood and looked out over the wide winter world, rejoicing 
 in its austerity, its solemn beauty. Physically he was conscious 
 of recovered health ; and in the mind also there was a new energy 
 of life and work. Nature seemed to say to him, ' Do but keep 
 thy heart open to me, and I have a myriad aspects and moods 
 wherewith to interest and gladden and teach thee to the end ; ' 
 while, as his eye wandered to the point wiiere Manchester lay 
 hidden on the horizon, the world of men, of knowledge, of duty, 
 summoned him back to it with much of the old magic and power 
 in the call. His grief, his love, no man should take from him ; 
 but he must play his part. 
 
 Yes— he and Sandy must go home — and soon. Yet even as he 
 so decided, the love of the familiar scene, its freedom, its loneli- 
 ness, its unstainedness, rose high within him. He stood lost in a 
 trance of memory. Here he and Louie had listened to 'Lias ; 
 there, far away amid the boulders of the Downfall, they had 
 waited for the witch ; among those snow-laden bushes yonder 
 Louie had hidden w^hen she played Jenny Crum for the discom- 
 fiture of the prayer-meeting ; and it was on the slope at his feet 
 that she had pushed the butter-scotch into his mouth, the one and 
 only sign of affection she had ever given him, that he could 
 remember, in all their forlorn childhood. 
 
 As these things rose before him, the moor, the wind, the 
 rising voice of the storm became to him so many channels, whereby 
 the bitter memory of his sister rushed upon him and took posses- 
 sion. Everything spoke of her, suggested her. Then with 
 inexorable force his visualising gift carried him on past her 
 childhood to the scenes of her miserable marriage ; and as he 
 thought of her child's death, the desolation and madness of her 
 flight, the mystery of her fate, his soul was flooded once more for 
 the hundredth tinie with anguish and horror. Here in this place, 
 where their childish lives had been so closely intertwined, he 
 could not resign himself for ever to ignorance, to silence ; his 
 whole being went out in protest, in passionate remorseful desire. 
 
 The wind was beginning to blow fiercely ; the rosy glow was 
 gone ; darkness was already falling. Wild gusts swept from time 
 to time round the white amphitheatre of moor and crag ; the 
 ghostly sounds of night and storm were on the hills. Suddenly 
 it was to him as though he heard his name called from a great 
 distance— breathed shrilly and lingeringly along the face of the 
 Scout. 
 
 'David!' 
 
 It was Louie's voice. The illusion was so strong that, as he 
 
CHAP. XI MATURITY 561 
 
 raised his hand to his ear, turning towards the Downfall, whence 
 the sound seemed to come, he trembled from head to foot. 
 
 ' David ! ' 
 
 Was it the call of some distant boy or shepherd? He could 
 not tell, could not collect himself. He sank down on one of the 
 grit-boulders by the snow-wreathed door of the smithy and sat 
 there long, heedless of the storm and cold, his mind working, a 
 sudden purpose rising and unfolding, with a mysterious rapidity 
 and excitement. 
 
 Early on the following morning he made his way down through 
 the deep snow to the station, having first asked Hannah to take 
 charge of Sandy for a day or two ; and by the night mail he left 
 London for Paris. 
 
 It was not till he walked into Mr. O'Kelly's office, on the 
 ground floor of a house in the Rue d'Assas, at about eleven o'clock 
 on the next day, that he was conscious of any reaction. Then for 
 a bewildered instant he wondered why he had come, and what he 
 was to say. 
 
 But to his amazement the lawyer rose at once, throwing up his 
 hands with the gesture of one who notes some singular and 
 unexpected stroke of good fortune. 
 
 ' This is most extraordinary, Mr. Grieve ! I have not yet 
 signed the letter on my desk— there it is '.—summoning you to 
 Paris. We have discovered Madame Montjoie ! As constantly 
 happens, we have been pursuing inquiries in all sorts of difficult 
 and remote quarters, and she is here— at our doors, living for some 
 weeks past, at any rate, without any disguise, at Barbi2on, of all 
 places in the world ! Barbizon pres Fontainebleau. You know it?' 
 
 David sat down. 
 
 * Yes,' he said, after an instant. ' I know it. Is he— is that 
 man Brenart there ? ' 
 
 ' Certainly. He has taken a miserable studio, and is making, 
 or pretending to make, some winter studies of the forest. I hear 
 that Madame Montjoie looks ill and worn ; the neighbours say the 
 menage is a very uncomfortable one, and not likely to last long. 
 I wish I had better news for you, Mr. Grieve.' 
 
 And the lawyer, remembering the handsome hollow-eyed boy 
 of twenty who had first asked his help, studied with irrepressible 
 curiosity the man's noble storm-beaten look and fast grizzling 
 hair, as David sat before him with his head bent and his hat in 
 his hands. . . 
 
 They talked a while longer, and then David said, rising : 
 
 ' Can I get over there to-night ? The snow will be deep in the 
 forest ' 
 
 ' I imagine they will keep that main road to Barbizon open in 
 some fashion,' said the lawyer. 'You may find a sledge. Let 
 me know how you speed and whether I can assist you. But, I 
 fear,'— he shrugged his shoulders—' in the end this wild life gets 
 into the blood. I have seen it so often.' 
 
563 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 He spoke with the freedom and knowledge of one who had 
 observed Louie Montjoie with some closeness for eleven years. 
 David said nothing in answer ; but at the door he turned to ask a 
 question. 
 
 ' You can't tell me anything of the habits of this man — this 
 Brenart ? ' 
 
 ' Stop ! ', said the lawyer, after a moment's thought ; ' I 
 remember this detail— my agent tojd me that M. Brenart was 
 
 engaged in some work for ' D et Cie ' — he named a great 
 
 picture-dealing firm on the Boulevard St. Germain, famous for 
 their illustrated books and editions de luxe. — ' He did not hear 
 what it was, but — ah ! I remember, — it has taken him occasion- 
 ally to Paris, or so he says, and it has been these absences which 
 have led to some of the worst scenes between him and your sister. 
 I suppose she put a jealous woman's interpretation on them. You 
 want to see her alone ? — when this man is out of the way ? I 
 have an idea : take my card and your own to this person — ' he 
 
 wrote out an address — ' he is one of the junior partners in " D 
 
 et Cie ; ' I know him, and I got his firm the sale of a famous 
 picture. He will do me a good turn. Ask him what the work is 
 that M. Brenart is doing, and when he expects him next in Paris. 
 It is possible you may get some useful information. ' 
 
 David took the card and walked at once to the Boulevard St. 
 Germain, which was close by. He w^as civilly received by the 
 man to whom O'Kelly had sent him, and learned from him that 
 Brenart was doing for the firm a series of etchings illustrating the 
 forest in winter, and intended to make part of a great book on 
 Fontainebleau and the Barbizon school. They were expecting the 
 last batch from him, were indeed desperately impatient for them. 
 But he was a difficult fellow to deal with — an exceedingly clever 
 artist, but totally untrustworthy. In his last letter to them he 
 had spoken of bringing the final instalment to them, and return- 
 ing some corrected proofs by February 16 — 'to-morrow, I see,' 
 said the speaker, glancing at an almanac on his office table. 
 ' Well, we may get them, and we mayn't. If we don't, we shall 
 have to take strong measures. And now, Monsieur, I think I 
 have told you all I can tell you of our relations to M. Brenart. ' 
 
 David bowed and took his leave. He made his way through 
 the great shop with its picture-covered walls and its floors dotted 
 with stands on which lay exposed the new etchings and engrav- 
 ings of the season. In front of him a lady in black was also 
 making her way to the door and the street. No one was attending 
 her, and instinctively he hurried forward to open the heavy glass 
 door for her. As he did so a sudden sharp presentiment shot* 
 through him. The door swung to behind them, and he found 
 himself in the covered entrance of the shop face to face with Elise 
 Delaunay. 
 
 The meeting was so startling that neither could disguise the 
 shock of it. He took off his hat mechanically ; she grew white 
 and leant against the glass window. 
 
CHAP. XI MATURITY 563 
 
 ' You ! — how can it be you ? ' she said in a quick whisper, then 
 recovering herself — ' Monsieur Grieve, old associations are pain- 
 ful, and I am neither strong — nor— nor stoical. Which way are 
 you walking ? ' 
 
 ' Towards the Rue de Seine,' he said, thrown into a bewilder- 
 ing m'3t of memory by her gesture, the crisp agitated decision of 
 her manner. ' And you ? ' 
 
 ' I also. We will walk a hundred yards together. What are 
 you in Paris for ? ' 
 
 ' I am here on some business of my sister's,' he said evasively. 
 She raised her eyes, and looked at him long and sharply. He, 
 on his side, saw, with painful agitation, that her youth was gone, 
 but not her grace, not her singular and wilful charm. The little 
 face under her black hat was lined and sallow, and she was 
 startlingly thin. The mouth had lost its colour, and gained 
 instead the hard shrewdness of a woman left to battle with the 
 world and poverty alone ; but the eyes had their old plaintive 
 trick ; the dead gold of the hair, the rings and curls of it against 
 the white temples, were still as beautiful as they had ever been ; 
 and the light form moved beside him with the same quick floating 
 gait. 
 
 ' You have grown much older,' she said abruptly. ' You look 
 as if you had suffered— but what of that?— C"e5^ comme tout le 
 monde. ' 
 
 She withdrew her look a moment, with a little bitter gesture, 
 then she resumed, drawn on by a curiosity and emotion she could 
 not control. 
 
 ' Are you married ? ' 
 ' Yes, but my wife is dead.' 
 
 She gave a start ; the first part of the answer had not prepared 
 her for the second. 
 
 ' Ah, 771071 Dieu ! ' she said, ' always grief— always I Is it 
 long ? ' 
 
 ' Eight months. I have a boy. And you ?— I heard sad news 
 of you once— the only time.' 
 
 ' You might well,' she said, with a half -ironical accent, driving 
 the point of her umbrella restlessly into the crevices of the stones, 
 as they slowly crossed a paved street. ' My husband is only a 
 cripple, confined to his chair,— I am no longer an artist but an 
 artisan,— I have not painted a picture for years,— but what I 
 paint sells for a trifle, and there is soup in the pot— of a sort. 
 For the rest I spend my life in making tisane, in lifting weights 
 too heavy for me, and bargaining for things to eat.' 
 
 ' But— you are not unhappy ! ' he said to her boldly, with a 
 change of tone. 
 
 She stopped, struck by the indescribable note in his voice. 
 They had turned into a side street, whither she had unconsciously 
 led him. She stood with her eyes on the ground, then she lifted 
 them once more, and there was in them a faint beautiful gleam, 
 which transformed the withered and sharpened face. 
 
564 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 'You are quite right,' she said, 'if he will only live. He 
 depends on me for everything. It is like a child, but it consoles. 
 Adieu ! ' 
 
 That night David found himself in the little auherge at Bar- 
 bizon. He had discovered a sledge to take him across the forest, 
 and he and his driver had pushed their way under a sky of lead 
 and through whirhng clouds of fresh sleet past the central beech- 
 wood, where the great boles stood straight and bare amid fantastic 
 masses of drift ; through the rock and fir region, where all was 
 white, and the trees drooped under their wintry load ; and 
 beneath withered and leaning oaks, throwing gaunt limbs here 
 and there from out the softening effacing mantle of the snow. 
 Night fell when the journey was half over, and as the lights of 
 the sledge flashed from side to side into these lonely fastnesses of 
 cold, how was it possible to believe that summer and joy had ever 
 tabernacled here ? 
 
 He was received at the inn, as his driver had brought him — 
 with astonishment. But Barbizon has been long accustomed, 
 bej'^ond most places in France, to the eccentricities of the English 
 and American visitor; and being a home of artists, it understands 
 the hunt for 'impressions,' and easily puts up with the unex- 
 pected. Before a couple of hours were over, David was installed 
 in a freezing room, and was being discussed in the kitchen, where 
 his arrival produced a certain animation, as the usual English 
 madman in quest of a sensation, and no doubt ready to pay for it. 
 
 There were, however, three other guests in the inn, as he 
 found, when he descended for dinner. They were all artists — 
 young, noisy, hons camarades, and of a rough and humble social 
 type. To them the winter at Barbizon was as attractive as any- 
 where else. Life at the inn was cheap, and free ; they had the 
 digestion of ostriches, eating anything that was put before them, 
 and drinking oceans of red wine at ten sous a litre ; on bad 
 days they smoked, fed, worked at their pictures or played coarse 
 practical jokes on each other and the people of the inn ; in fine 
 weather there was always the forest to be exploited, and the 
 chance of some happy and profitable inspiration. 
 
 They stared at David a good deal during the hifteli, the black 
 pudding which seemed to be a staple dish of the establishment, 
 and the omelette aux fines herhes, which the landlord's wife had 
 added in honour of the stranger. One of them, behind the 
 shelter of his glasses, drew the outline of the Englishman's head 
 and face on the table-cloth, and showed it to his neighbour. 
 
 ' Poetical, grand style, hein? ' 
 
 The other nodded carelessly. ^ Poiirtant — Vlnver lui platt,^ 
 he hummed under his breath, having some lines of Hugo's, which 
 he had chosen as a motto for a picture, running in his head. 
 
 After dinner everybody gathered round the great fire, which 
 the servant had piled with logs, while the flames, and the wreaths 
 of smoke from the four pipes alternately revealed and concealed 
 
CH-AP. XI MATURITY 565 
 
 the rough sketches of all sorts — landscape, portrait, genre — 
 legacies of bygone visitors, wherewith the walls of the salle a 
 manger were covered. David sat in his corner smoking, ready 
 enough to give an account of his journey across the forest, and to 
 speak when he was spoken to. 
 
 As soon as the strangeness of the new-comer had a little worn 
 off, the three young fellows plunged into a flood of amusing 
 gossip about the storm and the blocking of the roads, the scarcity 
 of food in Barbizon, the place in general, and its inhabitants. 
 David fell silent after a while, stiffening under a presentiment 
 which was soon realised. He heard his sister's wretched lot dis- 
 cussed with shouts of laughter — the chances of Brenart's escape 
 from the mistress he had already wearied of and deceived — the 
 perils of ' la Montjoie's ' jealousy. ' II veut bien se debarrasser 
 d'elle—mais 07i ne plaisante pas avec mie tigresse ! ' said one of 
 the speakers. So long as there was information to be got which 
 might serve him he sat motionless, withdrawn into the dark, 
 forcing himself to listen. When the talk became mere scurrility 
 and noise, he rose and went out. 
 
 He passed through the courtyard of the inn, and turned down 
 the village street. The storm had gone down, and there were a 
 few stars amid the breaking clouds. Here and there a light 
 shone from the low houses on either hand ; the snow, roughly 
 shovelled from the foot pavements, lay piled in heaps along the 
 roadway, the white roofs shone dimly against the wild sky. He 
 passed Madame Pyat's maisonnette, pausing a moment to look 
 over the wall. Not a sign of life in the dark building, and, 
 between him and it, great drifts of snow choking up and burying 
 the garden. A little further on, as he knew, lay the goal of his 
 quest. He easily made out the house from Mr. O'Kelly's descrip- 
 tions, and he lingered a minute, on the footway, under an over- 
 hanging roof to look at it. It was just a labourer's cottage 
 standing back a little from the street, and to one side rose a high 
 wooden addition which he guessed to be the studio. Through the 
 torn blind came the light of a lamp, and as he stood there, him- 
 self invisible in his patch of darkness, he heard voices — an alter- 
 cation, a woman's high shrill note. 
 
 Then he crept back to the inn vibrr.ting through all his being 
 to the shame of those young fellows' talk, the incredible difficulty 
 of the whole enterprise. Could he possibly make any impression 
 upon her whatever ? What was done w^as done ; and it would be 
 a crime on his part to jeopardise in the smallest degree the whole- 
 some brightness of Sandy's childhood by any rash proposals whicji 
 it might be wiiolly beyond his power to carry out. 
 
 He carried up a basket of logs to his room, made them blaze, 
 and crouched over them till far into the night. But in the end 
 the doubt and trouble of his mind subsided ; his purpose grew 
 clear again. ' It was my own voice that spoke to me on the moor,' 
 he thought, ' the voice of my own best life.' 
 
 About eight o'clock, with the first light of the morning, he was 
 
566 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 roused by bustle and noise under his window. He got up, and, 
 looking out, saw two sledges standing before the inn, in the cold 
 grey light. Men were busy harnessing a couple of horses to each, 
 and there were a few figures, muffled in great coats and carrying 
 bags and wraps, standing about. 
 
 'They are going over to Fontainebleau station,' bethought; 
 ' if that man keeps his appointment in Paris to-day, he will go 
 with them.' 
 
 As the words passed through his mind, a figure came striding 
 up from the lower end of the street, a young fair-haired man, in 
 a heavy coat lined with sheepskin. His delicately made face — 
 naturally merry and bon enfant— y^Si^ flushed and scowling. He 
 climbed into one of the sledges, complained of the lateness of the 
 start, swore at the ostler, who made him take another seat on the 
 plea that the one he had chosen was engaged, and finally subsided 
 into a moody silence, pulling at his moustache, and staring out 
 over the snow, till at last the signal was given, and the sledges 
 flew off on the Fontainebleau road, under a shower of snowballs 
 which a group of shivering bright-eyed urchins on their way to 
 school threw after them, as soon as the great whips were at a safe 
 distance. . 
 
 David dressed and descended. 
 
 ' Who was that fair-haired gentleman in the first sledge ? ' he 
 casually asked of the landlord who was bringing some smoking 
 hot coffee into the salle a manger. 
 
 ' That was a M. Brenart, monsieur,' said the landlord, cheer- 
 fully, absorbed all the while in the laying of his table. ' Cest un 
 drole de corps, M. Brenart. I don't take to him much myself ; 
 and as for madame — qui n'estpas madamef 
 
 He shrugged his shoulders, saw that there were no fresh rolls, 
 and departed with concern to fetch them. 
 
 David ate and drank. He would give her an hour yet. 
 
 When his watch told him that the time was come, he went out 
 slowly, inquiring on the way if there would be any means of 
 getting to Paris later in the day. Yes, the landlord thought a 
 conveyance of some sort could be managed— if monsieur would 
 pay for it ! 
 
 A few minutes later David knocked at the door of Brenart's 
 house. He could get no answer at all, and at last he tried the 
 latch. It yielded to his hand, and he went in. 
 
 There was no one in the bare kitchen, but there were the 
 remains of a fire, and of a meal. Both the crockery on the table 
 and a few rough chairs and stools the room contained struck him 
 as being in great disorder. There were two doors at the back. 
 One led into a back room which was empty, the other down a few 
 steps into a garden. He descended the steps and saw the long 
 wooden erection of the studio stretching to his left. There was a 
 door in the centre of its principal wall, which was ajar. He went 
 up to it and softly pushed it open. There, at the further end, 
 
CHAP. XI MATURITY 567 
 
 huddled over an iron stove, her face buried in her hands, her 
 shoulders shaken with fierce sobs, was Louie. 
 
 He closed the door behind him, and at the sound she turned, 
 hastily. When she saw wiio it was she gave a cry, and, sinking 
 back on her low canvas chair, she lay staring at him, and speech- 
 less. Her eyes were red with weeping ; her beauty was a wreck ; 
 and in face of the despair which breathed from her, and from her 
 miserable surroundings, all doubt, all repulsion, all condem- 
 nation fled from the brother's heart. The iron in his soul melted. 
 He ran up to her, and, kneeling beside her, he put his arms round 
 her, as he had never done in his life. 
 
 ' Oh you poor thing— you poor thing ! ' he cried, scarcely 
 knowing what he said. He took her worn, tear-stained face, 
 and, laying it on his shoulder, he kissed her, breathing inco- 
 herent words of pity and consolation. 
 
 She submitted a while, helpless with shock and amazement, 
 and still shaken with the tempest of her own passion. But there 
 came a moment when she pushed him away and tried desperately' 
 to recover herself. 
 
 ' I don't know what you want— you're not going to have any- 
 thing to do with me now — you can't. Let me alone— it will be 
 over soon — one way or'the other.' 
 
 ' And she sat upright, one hand clenched on her knees, her 
 frowning brows drawn together, and the tears faUing in spite of 
 her intense effort to drive them back. 
 
 He found a painter's stool, and sat down by her, pale and 
 determined. He told her the history of his search ; he implored 
 her to be guided by him, to let him take her home to England 
 and Manchester, where her story was unknown, save to Dora 
 and John. He would make a home for her near his own ; he 
 would try to comfort her for the loss of her child ; they would 
 understand each other better, and the past should be buried. 
 
 Louie looked at him askance. Every now and then she ceased 
 to listen to Irim at all ; while, under the kindling of her own 
 thoughts, her wild eyes flamed into fresh rage and agony. 
 
 ' Don't I — leave me alone ! ' she broke out at last, springing 
 up. ' I don't want your help, I don't want you ; I only want 
 him, — and I will have him, or we shall kill each other.' 
 
 She paced to and fro, her hands clasped on her breast, her 
 white face setting into a ghastly calm. David gazed at her with 
 horror. This was another note ! one which in all their experi- 
 ence of each other he had never heard on her lips before. She 
 loved this man .'—this mean wretch, who had lived upon her and 
 betrayed her, and, having got from her all she had to give, was 
 probably just about to cast her off into the abyss which yawns 
 for such women as Louie. He had thought of her flight to him 
 before as the frenzy of a nature which must have distraction at 
 any cost from the unfamiliar and intolerable weight of natural grief. 
 
 But this !— one moment it cut the roots from hope, the next 
 it nerved him to more vigorous action. 
 
568 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE book iv 
 
 ' You cannot have him,' he said, steadily and sternly. ' I have 
 listened to the talk here for your sake — he is already on the 
 point of deserting you — everyone else in this place knows that he 
 is tired of you — that he is unfaithful to you.' 
 
 She dropped into her chair with a groan. Even her energies 
 were spent — she was all but fainting — and her miserable heart 
 knew, with more certainty than David himself did, that all he 
 said was true. 
 
 Her unexpected weakness, the collapse of her strained nerves, 
 filled him with fresh hopes. He came close to her again and 
 pleaded, by the memory of her child, of their father — that she 
 would yield, and go away with him at once. 
 
 ' What should I do ' — she broke in passionately, her sense of 
 opposition of absurdity reviving her, ' when I get to your hateful 
 Manchester? Go to church and say my prayers! And you? 
 In a week or two, I tell you, you would be sick of having soiled 
 your hands with such mucL as I am.' 
 
 She threw herself back in her chair with a superb gesture, 
 and folded her arms, looking him defiance. 
 
 ' Try me,' he said quietly, while his lip trembled. ' I am not 
 as I was, Louie. There are things one can only learn by going 
 down — down — into the depths — of sorrow. The night before 
 Lucy died — she could hardly speak — she sent you a message : " I 
 wish I had been kinder — ask her to come to Manchester when I 
 am gone." I have not seen her die — not seen her whole life turn 
 to love — through such unspeakable suffering— for nothing. Oh 
 Louie — when we submit ourselves to God — when we ask for His 
 life — and give up our own — then, and then only, there is peace — 
 and strength. We ourselves are nothing — creatures of passion — 
 miserable — weak — but in Him and through Him — ' 
 
 His voice broke. He took her cold hand and pressed it 
 tenderly. She trembled in spite of herself, and closed her eyes. 
 
 ^ Don't — I know all about that — why did the child die? 
 There is no God — nothing. It's just talk. I told Him what I'd 
 do — I vowed I'd go to the bad, for good and all — and I have. 
 There — let me alone ! ' 
 
 But he only held her hand tighter. 
 
 ' No ! — never ! Your trouble was awful — it might well drive 
 you mad. But others have suffered, Louie — no less — and yet 
 have believed — have hoped. It is not beyond our power — for it 
 has been done again and again ! — by the most weak, the most 
 miserable. Oh ! think of that — tear yourself first from the evil 
 life — and you, too, will know what it is to be consoled — to be 
 strengthened. The mere effort to come with me — I promise it 
 you ! — will bring you healing and comfort. We make for our- 
 selves the promise of eternal life, by turning to the good. Then 
 the hope of recovering our dear ones — which was nothing to us 
 before — rises and roots itself in our heart. Come with me, — 
 conquer yourself, — ^let us begin to love each other truly, give 
 m© comfort and yourself — and you will bear to think again of 
 
CHAP. XI. MATURITY 569 
 
 Cecile and of God— there will be calm and peace beyond this 
 pain.' 
 
 His eyes shone upon her through a mist. She said no more 
 for a while. She lay exhausted and silent, the tears streaming 
 once more down her haggard cheeks. 
 
 Then, thinking she had consented, he began to speak of 
 arrangements for the journey— of the possibility of getting across 
 the forest. 
 
 Instantly her passion returned. She sprang up and put him 
 away from her. 
 
 ' It is ridiculous, I tell you— ridiculous ! How can I decide 
 in such an instant ? You must go away and leave me to think.' 
 
 'No,' he said firmly, 'my only chance is to stay with 
 you.' 
 
 She walked up and down, saying wild incoherent things to 
 herself under her breath. She wore the red dress she had worn 
 at Manchester— now a torn and shabby rag— and over it, because 
 of the cold, a long black cloak, a relic of better days. Her 
 splendid hair, uncombed and dishevelled, hung almost loose 
 round her head and neck; and the emaciation of face and figure 
 made her height and slenderness more abnormal than ever as 
 she swept tempestuously to and fro. 
 
 At last she paused in front of him. 
 
 ' Well, I dare say I'll go with you,' she said, with the old 
 reckless note. ' That fiend thinks he has me in his power for 
 good, he amuses himself with threats of leaving ?7ie— perhaps I'll 
 turn the tables. . . . But you must go— go for an hour. You 
 can find out about a carriage. There will be an old woman here 
 presently for the hoase-work. I'll get her to help me pack. 
 You'll only be in the way.' 
 
 ' You'll be ready for me in an hour ? ' he said, rising reluc- 
 tantly. . 
 
 ' \Yq\\, it don't look, does it, as if there was much to pack m 
 this hole ! ' she said with one of her wild laughs. 
 
 He looked round for the first time and saw a long bare studio, 
 containing a table covered with etcher's apparatus \ind some 
 blocks for wood engraving. There was besides an easel, and a 
 picture upon it, with a pretentious historical subject just blocked 
 in, a tall oak chair and stool of antique pattern, and in one cor- 
 ner a stand of miscellaneous arms such as many artists affect— 
 an old flintlock gun or two, some Moorish or Spanish rapiers and 
 daggers. The north window was half blocked by snow, and the 
 atmosphere of the place, in spite of the stove, was freezing. 
 
 He moved to the door, loth, most loth, to go, yet well aware, 
 by long experience, of the danger of crossing her temper or her 
 whims. After all, it would take him some time to make his 
 arrangements with the landlord, and he would be back to the 
 moment. 
 
 She watched him intently with her poor red eyes, bhe her- 
 self opened the door for him, and to his amazement put a sudden 
 
570 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE 
 
 hand on his arm, and kissed him — roughly, vehemently, with 
 lips that burnt. 
 
 ' Oh, you fool ! ' she said, ' you fool ! ' 
 
 ' What do you mean ? ' he said, stopping. ' I believe I am a 
 fool, Louie, to leave you for a moment.' 
 
 ' Nonsense ! You are a fool to want to take me to Manchester, 
 and I am a fool to think of going. There : — if I had never been 
 born ! — oh ! go, for God's sake, go ! and come back in an hour. 
 I must have some time, I tell you — ' and she gave a passionate 
 stamp — ' to think a bit, and put my things together.' 
 
 She pushed him out, and shut the door. With a great effort 
 he mastered himself and went. 
 
 He made all arrangements for the two-horse sledge that was 
 to take them to Fontainebleau. He called for his bill, and paid 
 it. Then he hung about the entrance to the forest, looking with 
 an unseeing eye at the tricks which the snow had been playing 
 with the trees, at the gleams which a pale and struggling sun 
 was shedding over the white world — till his watch told him it 
 was time. 
 
 He walked briskly back to the cottage, opened the outer 
 door, was astonished to hear neither voice nor movement, to see 
 nothing of the charwoman Louie had spoken of — rushed to the 
 studio and entered. 
 
 She sat in the tall chair, her hands dropping over the arms, 
 her head hanging forward. The cold snow-light shone on her 
 open and glazing eyes — on the red and black of her dress, on 
 the life-stream dripping among the folds, on the sharp curved 
 Algerian dagger at her feet. She was quite dead. Even in the 
 midst of his words of hope, the thought of self-destruction — of 
 her mother — had come upon her and absorbed her. That capa- 
 city for sudden intolerable despair which she had inherited, rose 
 to its full height when she had driven David from her — guided 
 her mad steps, her unshrinking hand. 
 
 He knelt by her — called for help, laid his ear to her heart, 
 her lips. Then the awfulness of the shock, and of his self- 
 reproach, the crumbling of all his hopes, became too much to bear. 
 Consciousness left him, and when the woman of whom Louie 
 had spoken did actually come in, a few minutes later, she found 
 the brother lying against the sister's knee, his arms outstretched 
 across her, while the dead Louie, with fixed and fro\vning brows, 
 sat staring beyond him into eternity — a. figure of wild fate — freed 
 at last and for ever from that fierce burden of herself. 
 
EPILOGUE 
 
Alas ! — Alas / 
 — But to part from David Grieve under the impression of this 
 scene of wreck and moral defeat would be to misread and mis- 
 judge a life, destined, notwithstanding the stress of exceptional 
 suffering it was called upon at one time to pass through, to sin- 
 gularly rich and fruitful issues. Time, kind inevitable Time, 
 dulled the paralysing horror of his sister's death, and softened 
 the memory of all that long torture of publicity, legal investiga- 
 tion, and the like, which had followed it. The natural healing 
 'in widest commonalty spread,' which flows from affection, 
 nature, and the direction of the mind to high and liberating 
 aims, came to him also as the months and years passed. His 
 wife's death, his sister's tragedy, left indeed indelible marks ; 
 but, though scarred and changed, he was in the end neither 
 crippled nor unhappy. The moral experience of life had built up 
 in him a faith which endured, and the pangs of his own pity did 
 but bring him at last to rest the more surely on a pity beyond 
 man's. During the nights of semi-delirium which followed the 
 scene at Barbizon, John, who watched him, heard him repeat 
 again and again words which seemed to have a talismanic power 
 over his restlessness. ' Neither do I condemn thee. Come^ and 
 sin no more.' They were fragments dropped from what was 
 clearly a nightmare of anguish and struggle ; but they testified 
 to a set of character, they threw light on the hopes and convic- 
 tions which ultimately repossessed themselves of the sound man. 
 
 Two years passed. It was Christmas Eve. The firm of 
 Grieve & Co. in Prince's Street was shut for the holiday, and 
 X. avid Grieve, a mile or two away, was sitting over his study fire 
 with a book. He closed it presently, and sat thinking. 
 
 There was a knock at his door. When he opened it he found 
 Dora outside. It was Dora, in the quasi-sister's garb she had 
 assumed of late— serge skirt, long black cloak, and bonnet tied 
 with white muslin strings under the throat. In her parish visit- 
 ing among the worst slums of Ancoats, she had found such a 
 dress useful. 
 
 ' I brought Sandy's present,' she said, looking round her cau- 
 tiously. ' Is his stocking hung up ? ' 
 
 ' No ! or the rascal would never go to sleep to-night. He is 
 nearly wild about his presents as it is. Give it to me. It shall 
 go into my drawer, and I will arrange everything when I go to 
 bed to-night.' 
 
 He looked at the puzzle-map she had brought with a childish 
 
574 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE 
 
 pleasure, and between them they locked it away carefully in a 
 drawer of the writing-table. 
 
 ' Do sit down and get warm,' he said to her, pushing forward 
 a chair. 
 
 ' Oh no ! I must go back to the church. We shall be deco- 
 rating till late to-night. But I had to be in Broughton, so I 
 brought this on my way home.' 
 
 Then Sandy and I will escort you, if you will have us. He 
 made me promise to take him to see the shops. I suppose 
 Market Street is a sight.' 
 
 He went outside to shout to Sandy, who was having his tea, 
 to get ready, and then came back to Dora. She was standing by 
 the fire looking at an engagement tablet filled with entries, on 
 the mantelpiece. 
 
 ' Father Russell says they have been asking you again to stand 
 for Parliament,' she said timidly, as he came in. 
 
 ' Yes, there is a sudden vacancy. Old Jacob Cherritt is dead.' 
 ' And you won't ? ' 
 He shook his head. 
 
 'No,' he said, after a pause. 'lam not their man; they 
 would be altogether disappointed in me.' 
 
 She understood the sad reverie of the face, and said no more. 
 No. For new friends, new surroundings, efforts of another 
 type, his power was now irrevocably gone ; he shrank more than 
 ever from the egotisms of competition. But within the old lines 
 he had recovered an abundant energy. Among his workmen ; 
 amid the details now fortunate, now untoward of his labours for 
 the solution of certain problems of industrial ethics ; in the 
 working of the remarkable pamphlet scheme dealing with social 
 and religious fact, which was fast making his name famous in 
 the ears of the England which thinks and labours ; and in the 
 self-devoted help of the unhappy,— he was developing more and 
 more the idealist's qualities, and here and there— inevitably— the 
 idealist's mistakes. His face, as middle life was beginning to 
 shape it— with its subtle and sensitive beauty— was at once the 
 index of his strength and his limitations. 
 
 He and Dora stood talking a while about certam public 
 schemes that were in progress for the bettering of Ancoats. 
 Then he said with sudden emphasis : 
 
 'Ah! if one could but jump a hundred years and see what 
 England will be like! But these northern towns, and this 
 northern life, on the whole fill one with hope. There is a strong 
 social spirit and strong individualities to work on.' 
 
 Dora was silent. "From her Churchwoman's point of view 
 the prospect was not so bright. 
 
 ' Well, people seem to think that co-operation is going to do 
 everything,' she said vaguely. 
 
 'We all cry our own nostrums,' he said, laughing; 'what 
 co-operation has done up here in the north is wonderful ! It has 
 been the making of thousands. But the world is not going to 
 
EPILOGUE ' 575 
 
 give itself over wholly to committees. There will be room 
 enough for the one-man-power at any rate for generations to 
 come. What we want is leaders ; but leaders who will feel them- 
 selves "members of one body," instruments of one social order.' 
 
 They stood together a minute in silence ; then he went out to 
 the stairs and called : ' Sandy, you monkey, come along ! ' 
 
 Sandy came shouting and leaping downstairs, as lithe and 
 handsome as ever, and as much of a compound of the elf and the 
 philosopher. 
 
 ' I know Auntie Dora's brought me a present,' he said, look- 
 ing up into her face,—' but father's locked it up ! ' 
 
 David chased him out of doors with contumely, and they all 
 took the tram to Victoria Street. 
 
 Once there, Sandy was in the seventh heaven. The shops 
 were ablaze with lights, and gay with every Christmas joy ; the 
 pavements were crowded with a buying and gaping throng. He 
 pulled at his father's hand, exclaiming here and pointing there, 
 till David, dragged hither and thither, had caught some of the 
 boy's mirth and pleasure. 
 
 But Dora walked apart. Her heart was a little heavy and 
 dull, her face weary. In reality, though David's deep and tender 
 gratitude and friendship towards her could not express them- 
 selves too richly, she felt, as the years went on, more and more 
 divided from him and Sandy. She was horrified at the things 
 which David published, or said in public ; she had long dropped 
 any talk with the child on all those subjects which she cared for 
 most. Young as he was, the boy showed a marvellous under- 
 standing in some ways of his father's mind, and there wei^e 
 moments when she felt a strange and dumb irritation towards 
 them both. 
 
 Christmas too, in spite of her Christian fervour, had always 
 its sadness for her. It reminded her of her father, and of the 
 loneliness of her personal life. 
 
 ' How father would have liked all thi3 crowd ! ' she said once 
 to David as they passed into Market Street. 
 
 David assented with instant sympathy, and they talked a 
 little of the vanished wanderer as they walked along, she with a 
 yearning passion which touched him profoundly. 
 
 He and Sandy escorted her up the Ancoats High Street, and 
 at last they turned into her own road. Instantly Dora perceived 
 a little crowd round her door, and, as soon as she was seen, a 
 waving of hands, and a Babel of voices. 
 
 ' What is it ? ' she cried, paling, and began to run. 
 
 David and Sandy followed. She had already flown upstairs ; 
 but the shawled mill-girls, round the door, flushed with excite- 
 ment, shouted their news into his ear. 
 
 ' It's her feyther, sir, as ha coom back after aw these years— 
 an he's sittin by the fire quite nat'ral like, Mary Styles says— and 
 they put him in a mad-house in furrin parts, they did— an nis 
 hair's quite white— an oh ! sir, yo mun just goo up an look.' 
 
576 THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE 
 
 Pushed by eager hands, and still holding Sandy, David, 
 though half unwilling, climbed the narrow stairs. 
 
 The door was half open. And there, in his old chair, sat 
 Daddy, his snow-white hair falling on his shoulders, a childish 
 excitement and delight on his blanched face. Dora was kneeling 
 at his feet, her head on his knees, sobbing. 
 
 David took Sandy up in his arms. 
 
 ' Be quiet, Sandy ; don't say a word.' 
 
 And he carried him downstairs again, and into the midst of 
 the eager crowd. 
 
 ' I think; he said, addressing them, ' I would go home if I 
 were you — if yon love her.' 
 
 They looked at his shining eyes and twitching lips, and 
 understood. 
 
 ' Aye, sir, aye, sir, yo're abeawt reet — we'st not trouble her, 
 sir.' 
 
 He carried his boy home, Sandy raining questions in a tumult 
 of excitement. Then when the child was put to bed he sat on in 
 his lonely study, stirred to his sensitive depths by the thought of 
 Dora^s long waiting and sad sudden joy— by the realisation of the 
 Christmas crowds and merriment— by the sharp memory of his 
 own dead. Towards midnight, when all was still, he opened the 
 locked drawer which held for him the few things which sym- 
 bolised and summed up his past— a portrait of Lucy, by the river 
 under the trees, taken by a travelling photographer, not more 
 than six weeks before her death— a little collection of pictures of 
 Sandy from babvhood onwards— Louie's breviary— his father's 
 dying letter— a book which had belonged to Ancrura, his vanished 
 friend. But though he took thence his wife's picture, commun- 
 ing awhile, in a passion of yearning, with its weary plaintive 
 eyes, he did not allow himself to sink for long into the languor 
 of memory and grief. He knew the perils of his own nature, and 
 there was in him a stera sense of the difficulty of living aright, 
 and the awfulness of the claim made by God and man on tiie 
 strength and will of the individual. It seemed to him that he 
 had been 'taught of God' through natural affection, through 
 repentance, through sorrow, through the constant energies of the 
 intellect. Never had the Divine voice been clearer to him, or the 
 Divine Fatherhood more real. Freely he had received— but only 
 that he might freely give. On this Christmaci night he renewed 
 every past "vow of the soul, and in so doing rose once more into 
 that state and temper which is man's pledge and earnest of 
 immortality— since already, here and now, it is the eternal life 
 begun. 
 
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 02 '93 
 
 FORAA NO. DD6 
 
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 LD 21-95m-7,'37 
 

 U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES 
 
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 DNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY