Collected works of j s f.., p.701
Collected Works of J S Fletcher, page 701
“If I’d ha’ known what it meant to find three hundred pound for yon lass o’ Clough’s to get all that higher eddikation and book-learning, I’d never ha’ put my hand down for one penny on it!” muttered Charlesworth, as he battled, half-breathless, across the wind-swept moor. “It ‘ud ha’ been a deal better for her if she’d put clogs on her feet and a shawl over her head and gone to t’ mill like all t’ rest on ’em! — and a deal better for me, too! If eddikation leads to stirrin’ up strife and sedition and revolution and such like, then t’ sooner it’s done away wi’ t’ better!”
Buffetted and beaten by the storm, Charlesworth came at last to the edge of the moor, and to the last stage of his journey. It was also the most difficult one: Ellerthwaite’s ancestor, the first builder of the old family homestead, had raised its stout walls on the summit of a low hill which overlooked the moor on one side and the deep valley of the Haver on the other. He and his successors had planted the hardiest trees around it: oak, fir, pine, now grown to maturity, sheltered the house itself, but the hillside up which Charlesworth had to climb, in the teeth of the tearing wind, was bare and unprotected, and by the time he had scaled it and come within the shelter of Ellerthwaite’s door, set deeply in the massive porch of the original building, he was panting and out-of-breath.
“Ecod, but that’s a rough ‘un!” he gasped to the maid-servant who admitted him. “A wild, wild night! T’ master in, my lass?”
The girl helped him off with his coat and hat, and threw open the door of Ellerthwaite’s dining-room. Charlesworth, still out of breath, walked in upon a homely and cheerful scene. There was little sound of the raging wind and beating rain there: the walls of the old house were many feet in thickness, and the doors and windows fitted so closely that scarce a sigh of the storm stole through. And there, before a bright fire of leaping flame, sat Ellerthwaite, smoking his pipe and glancing lazily at the newspaper, and close by him his daughter, Millicent, who, as Charlesworth entered, was holding up a piece of fancy needlework before her, inspecting it with a sidelong critical glance.
Ellerthwaite turned on his old friend with a look of surprise.
“Hello!” he exclaimed. “Out on a night like this? Why—”
Charlesworth made for an easy chair on the hearth. Now that he had come under shelter and into the warmth of the room, he was conscious of a curiously faint feeling, and for the second time that day, Ellerthwaite’s sharp eyes noticed a hesitancy in his step. As Charlesworth sat down he sprang to his feet and instinctively made for the sideboard and a spirit-case that stood there.
“You’ve overdone yourself, my lad!” he said, as he took up a decanter of whiskey. “It’s a bit stiff, coming over yon moor when there’s a wind like—”
“Father!” exclaimed Milly. “Quick! He’s fainting!”
Ellerthwaite turned, to see Charlesworth’s head falling against the padded back of the deep chair into which he had dropped, and Milly darting to his side. With a hasty exclamation he set down the whiskey and seized on a decanter of brandy. But before he could reach the hearth he heard a deep, fluttering sigh, and his daughter called him again, that time in a whisper.
“Quick!” she said. “Oh! — look!”
Ellerthwaite made a sharp stride across the room. He bent down close — closer. And suddenly he raised his tall figure and laid a hand on Milly’s shoulder.
“Go and fetch the women, my lass!” he whispered in tones that shook a little. “Make no fuss — but fetch them!”
Milly glanced fearfully from his face to Charlesworth’s; her eyes went back to Ellerthwaite.
“Is it — is he — ?” she asked. “It isn’t — ?”
“He’s gone!” said Ellerthwaite, with a nod. “Gone!”
He folded his arms when the girl had left the room, and for a moment stood staring at his dead friend. He had seen death come swiftly more than once in his life, but it had never come quite so close to him as now. And suddenly remembering an old superstition of those regions, and impelled by a mood that he could not account for, he crossed to one of the curtained windows, and throwing open a casement let the liberated soul go out into the night.
END OF THE FIRST PART
Part the Second: THE MANY-HEADED
I
CHARLESWORTH MARRASHAW, WHO in his moments of leisure had travelled a good deal, and seen many fair prospects at home and abroad, always declared that the finest view he had ever set eyes on was that whereon he could gaze whenever he liked from the windows of his private room at the mill. There was the well-kept turf of the quadrangle; there were the statues of himself and his ancestors; there the old cottage in which the family fortunes had known their beginning; there the high wall of the great factory which his father had raised; there the high road along which the Marrashaw merchandise was carried on its way to every corner of the world; there the river whose stained and polluted waters bore testimony to the multiplicity of industry along its banks; then, closing in the view, the long wild frowning slopes of the hill which in every season of the year was as hard and grim and immovable as the character of the Haverthwaite folk who lived beneath the shadow. In Charlesworth’s time the aspect of that hill had changed. He could remember it when there was scarce a house on its rugged, occasionally precipitous sides, scarce a pathway by which it could be traversed. In time the lower part of the town had begun to creep up its slopes; men had scraped and trenched, laid out roads, and built houses; now there were tall chimneys rising here and there from factories and workshops erected on what was once nothing but waste of ling and heather: Haverthwaite, on that side of the river, was gradually spreading toward the hill-top. And halfway up the steep, on a broad plateau which, from a natural configuration, had been levelled and widened by pick and spade, stood, very conspicuous from Charlesworth’s office window, a small town in miniature, a place of some twenty or thirty regularly built and arranged streets, disposed about a great building which, like the smaller edifices at its foot, was built of the white stone of the district, and so, when the morning sun shone on it from one side and the evening sun from the other, gleamed bright and aggressive in its newness, and formed a noticeable landmark from far-off points of the surrounding country. There was a church, too, in this congerie of straight-lined streets, and an institute; the sharp spire of one and the square tower of the other stood out in bold relief against the never-varying dark grey of the hillside; the whole place, self-contained, was noticeable. And it was all the work of one man, Leeming, the dyer, whose imagination had been attracted by the plateau on the hill, and who had thereon built himself new works, with model dwellings and various accommodations for his people, and, the whole thing finished, had proudly christened this addition to the glories of Haverthwaite after himself and called it Leemingville.
It was to the brand-new workshops and equally brand-new streets of Leemingville that Bright Marrashaw had betaken himself when he decided on cutting adrift from the old life and striking out a new line of his own. It was not a sudden decision: Leeming, an acute and thoughtful man, who kept a sharp eye on the chemical department at the Technical College, and had observed Bright’s absorbed interest in synthetic dyestuffs, had been hinting for some time that the young man’s true field of labour was with him, away up the hill: it would do Bright no harm, he said, to have a year or two of practical experience. And so, when Bright, feeling that a breach had opened between his father and himself, determined, being of age, to go his own way, he had had nothing to do but step into Leeming’s town office and conclude an agreement arrived at with mutual satisfaction within five minutes of his entrance. Leeming cared nothing about Bright’s ideas concerning labour and capital, and was indifferent to whatever Charlesworth Marrashaw might say about his son’s doings: what he did care about was getting hold of a brainy young fellow whose mind was concentrated on his job, and who could and would talk by the hour about the various groups of basic dye-stuffs, di- and tri-phenylmethane, monazo, disazo, and trisazo; alizarin colouring matters; the phthalein group; the vexed question of aniline black; the hypotheses of chemical or mechanical theory. For such a man the big dyer had room and chance and opportunity.
“Bear one thing in mind, my lad,” said Leeming, as he and Bright shook hands, after the fashion of those parts, when their agreement was concluded. “Whatever you want up yonder in pursuance of your work, ask for. You’ve only to say the word, and the thing’s done — expense no object. Ask me for anything!”
“Good!” responded Bright. “I’ll remember. We’ll do big things.”
Then, without saying anything to Leeming about his private intentions, he went off to the model settlement on the hillside, and found rooms for himself close to the dye-works. He was going to be a workman, and he wanted to keep in touch with the actual scene of his labours. And it was in the cottage of a workman, an elderly man with no family and a managing wife, that Bright found what he wanted — two simply furnished rooms and the promise of plain food, and thither, during the rest of the day, he occupied himself in moving his necessary belongings. For the son of a wealthy man like Charlesworth Marrashaw, they were few — despite Trissie’s entreaties and sarcasm, Bright had never spent money on clothes and his shoe-wear was invariably more conspicuous for patches than for newness. His chemical apparatus and instruments, a score or so of his favourite books, his writing material and his piles of scientific memoranda, these were Bright’s household goods; it seemed to him strange that anybody could conceive of him as wanting more. From early boyhood he had always regarded the grandeurs of Marrashaw Royd with a species of disdainful wonder: puzzled that there were certain apartments in the house which were for the most part given up to silence and solitude, show-places to be proudly exhibited when there was company. He had looked on with a half-stupid, half-scornful amazement when some picture arrived for which his father had paid what seemed to him a vast sum of money: often he had felt a curiously rebellious, protesting indignation when, at Charlesworth’s table, other rich men of the district being present, he had heard Charlesworth remark, casually, that such and such a wine had stood him in twenty pounds the dozen, or that the cigars which he handed round ran to so many shillings apiece. All that sort of thing, which was evidently meat and drink to Trissie, a born lover of display and luxury, was as poison to Bright: it was not in his nature to understand it. And nothing marked the difference between his father and himself so much or widely as the contrast between Charlesworth’s library and his own. The father possessed a fine collection of standard works, arranged in the purple and fine linen of the binders’ craft, morocco, and calf, and vellum, but as Bright well knew, no volume was taken down from its shelf from year end to year end — the library at Marrashaw Royd, like the drawing-room and dining-room, was for show: it was a proper thing to have in a rich man’s house, and so it was there, as a matter of course. Now Bright’s library consisted of about two dozen volumes, most of them cheap editions, and each was dog’s eared, pencil-marked, and liberally disfigured with the imprints of thumbs and fingers fresh and unwashed from the handling of chemicals. But whereas Charlesworth would have been hard put to it to tell any foolishly pertinacious enquirer what lay behind the beautifully tooled and daintily labelled backs of his quartos and octavos, Bright knew most of his books by heart. It was not a wide range of reading that appealed to him — for some years he had confined himself to certain volumes of Ruskin and Carlyle and Emerson and Thoreau; it was significant of much that the remainder of his library consisted of books of a more or less Utopian nature, wherein the philosophy of the higher life was preached and a return to simplicity advocated as the one sure way of attaining it. Here indeed was the secret of Bright’s nature and his strangeness, and of his contrariness to conventional thought and custom, a secret which Charlesworth would not have understood had he ever been able to recognise it — Bright was a natural idealist, and being so, was heartily sick and impatient of the real world.
There was a feeling of considerable elation in him as he moved about his plain little sitting-room that night, putting straight his few belongings. For the first time in his life he was his own master, and — relatively — under his own roof. So long as he paid his rent and behaved himself, those two rooms were his. It was no matter to him that the walls were colour-washed instead of being gay with paper at fifty shillings the roll, nor that the furniture was such as a respectable working man can afford, nor that he had just made a modest supper off common earthenware: it was all clean and homely and simple, and he already loved it. He had before him precisely what he desired — days of employment in work which had a curious fascination for him, evenings in which he could do exactly what he liked without the necessity of occasionally putting on garments which he loathed, and sitting more or less silent at his father’s table while Charlesworth and his guests talked money. He whistled for sheer enjoyment of the new life as he put his shabby-backed, much thumbed books in order on a shelf above his one easy chair, and that done he filled his pipe and lighted it and sat down to read, for the thousandth time, how Thoreau lived the superior and simple life on next to nothing a year amongst the solitudes of Walden.
Leemingville got the full force of the storm that night: the winds swept along its side of the valley with the fury of a hurricane. Yet loud as the howling of the wind and beating of the rain became, their united clamour failed to silence the throbbing of a motor-car which came along the little street just as Bright was thinking of retiring to his bed, and eventually pulled up before his lodgings. He thought this curious, and going to his window drew aside the blind, and saw two glaring headlights in the street, and a figure, dark and mysterious in the gloom, move rapidly across the glistening pavement towards the house in which he had settled himself. Presently there were voices in the little passage; it seemed to him that one at any rate was agitated. And then his landlady appeared at the door.
“There’s a lady wanting to see yer, Mr. Marrashaw,” she said hesitatingly. “It’s Miss—”
But in spite of her cloaks and wraps Bright had already seen Milly Ellerthwaite behind the woman’s shoulder, and he went forward, throwing aside the book which he had kept in his hand when he walked to the window.
“Milly!” he exclaimed, staring at her with wondering eyes in which a sudden suspicion of ill news was beginning to wake. “You! Why — what—”
Milly drew a little nearer to him. She was a kindly-faced, sympathetic-natured sort of girl, not without a certain amount of somewhat homely prettiness, and Bright, who had known her intimately ever since they were children, suddenly recognised something in her that in that moment of doubt and uncertainty made an appeal to him. There were unshed tears in her eyes: he saw them plainly: they were large, soft eyes, too, and he would have been less acute than he was if he had not realised that behind them there was a feeling of pity for himself. Unconsciously he put out his hand.
“What is it?” he whispered. “There’s something wrong? Or else—”
Milly, just as unconsciously, pressed the hand that had taken hers.
“Bright!” she said in a low voice. “I’m so sorry, but — it’s your father! I had to come — father couldn’t, and Victor’s out — with Trissie.”
“Well?” demanded Bright. “What? He’s — ill? Look here!” he went on, suddenly raising his voice. “I’m — I’m all right, Milly. Say it straight out — is it — is he dead?”
Milly nodded silently, looking fixedly at him: again unconsciously she pressed his hand. He stood staring at her for a moment; then, as if he wanted to detach himself from more things than one, he backed away from her, and plunging his hands in his pockets, walked over to the window, paused, turned, and came back again.
“But — how?” he muttered. “He was all right—”
And then he suddenly paused. Something seemed to be confusing his brain: he was trying to remember when he had last seen and spoken to his father. For the moment, he could remember nothing. Was it last night, or the night before, or the night before that?
“When I last saw him,” he continued, falteringly. “All right! — except—”
He shook his head, still confused, and Milly realised that he had not yet got over the shock of her news, calm though he seemed.
“He came to our house, Bright,” she said quickly. “An hour ago. He seemed to be out of breath — he’d walked through the storm across the moor. And he sat down as soon as he got in, and — and died immediately. We — couldn’t do anything.”
Bright nodded — once, twice, thrice. He might have been a consultant physician listening to a report.
“Heart!” he muttered. “Heart! I’ve suspected it, some little time. I warned him not so long ago, from something I saw, that he oughtn’t to over-exert himself. But he said — said he reckoned to live twenty years! Walking across that moor, in this storm! Of course — heart! Well — I’ve heard him say that was — the way he’d like to go. Now — he’s gone!”
“You’ll come back with me, Bright?” said Milly. “The car’s outside.”
Bright was staring at the carpet. He seemed, she thought, to have forgotten her presence. And when he looked up his eyes were dreamy and his manner curiously abstracted.
