_ One night--it was late in the afternoon of the same year, about
six months after the tragedy of the florin--Samuel Povey was
wakened up by a hand on his shoulder and a voice that whispered:
"Father!"
The thief and the liar was standing in his night-shirt by the bed.
Samuel's sleepy eyes could just descry him in the thick gloom.
"What--what?" questioned the father, gradually coming to
consciousness. "What are you doing there?"
"I didn't want to wake mother up," the boy whispered. "There's
someone been throwing dirt or something at our windows, and has
been for a long time."
"Eh, what?"
Samuel stared at the dim form of the thief and liar. The boy was
tall, not in the least like a little boy; and yet, then, he seemed
to his father as quite a little boy, a little 'thing' in a night-
shirt, with childish gestures and childish inflections, and a
childish, delicious, quaint anxiety not to disturb his mother, who
had lately been deprived of sleep owing to an illness of Amy's
which had demanded nursing. His father had not so perceived him
for years. In that instant the conviction that Cyril was
permanently unfit for human society finally expired in the
father's mind. Time had already weakened it very considerably. The
decision that, be Cyril what he might, the summer holiday must be
taken as usual, had dealt it a fearful blow. And yet, though
Samuel and Constance had grown so accustomed to the companionship
of a criminal that they frequently lost memory of his guilt for
long periods, nevertheless the convention of his leprosy had more
or less persisted with Samuel until that moment: when it vanished
with strange suddenness, to Samuel's conscious relief.
There was a rain of pellets on the window.
"Hear that?" demanded Cyril, whispering dramatically. "And it's
been like that on my window too."
Samuel arose. "Go back to your room!" he ordered in the same
dramatic whisper; but not as father to son--rather as conspirator
to conspirator.
Constance slept. They could hear her regular breathing.
Barefooted, the elderly gowned figure followed the younger, and
one after the other they creaked down the two steps which
separated Cyril's room from his parents'.
"Shut the door quietly!" said Samuel.
Cyril obeyed.
And then, having lighted Cyril's gas, Samuel drew the blind,
unfastened the catch of the window, and began to open it with many
precautions of silence. All the sashes in that house were
difficult to manage. Cyril stood close to his father, shivering
without knowing that he shivered, astonished only that his father
had not told him to get back into bed at once. It was, beyond
doubt, the proudest hour of Cyril's career. In addition to the
mysterious circumstances of the night, there was in the situation
that thrill which always communicates itself to a father and son
when they are afoot together upon an enterprise unsuspected by the
woman from whom their lives have no secrets.
Samuel put his head out of the window.
A man was standing there.
"That you, Samuel?" The voice came low.
"Yes," replied Samuel, cautiously. "It's not Cousin Daniel, is
it?"
"I want ye," said Daniel Povey, curtly.
Samuel paused. "I'll be down in a minute," he said.
Cyril at length received the command to get back into bed at once.
"Whatever's up, father?" he asked joyously.
"I don't know. I must put some things on and go and see."
He shut down the window on all the breezes that were pouring into
the room.
"Now quick, before I turn the gas out!" he admonished, his hand on
the gas-tap.
"You'll tell me in the morning, won't you, father?"
"Yes," said Mr. Povey, conquering his habitual impulse to say
'No.'
He crept back to the large bedroom to grope for clothes.
When, having descended to the parlour and lighted the gas there,
he opened the side-door, expecting to let Cousin Daniel in, there
was no sign of Cousin Daniel. Presently he saw a figure standing
at the corner of the Square. He whistled--Samuel had a singular
faculty of whistling, the envy of his son--and Daniel beckoned to
him. He nearly extinguished the gas and then ran out, hatless. He
was wearing most of his clothes, except his linen collar and
necktie, and the collar of his coat was turned up.
Daniel advanced before him, without waiting, into the
confectioner's shop opposite. Being part of the most modern
building in the Square, Daniel's shop was provided with the new
roll-down iron shutter, by means of which you closed your
establishment with a motion similar to the winding of a large
clock, instead of putting up twenty separate shutters one by one
as in the sixteenth century. The little portal in the vast sheet
of armour was ajar, and Daniel had passed into the gloom beyond.
At the same moment a policeman came along on his beat, cutting off
Mr. Povey from Daniel.
"Good-night, officer! Brrr!" said Mr. Povey, gathering his dignity
about him and holding himself as though it was part of his normal
habit to take exercise bareheaded and collarless in St. Luke's
Square on cold November nights. He behaved so because, if Daniel
had desired the services of a policeman, Daniel would of course
have spoken to this one.
"Goo' night, sir," said the policeman, after recognizing him.
"What time is it?" asked Samuel, bold.
"A quarter-past one, sir."
The policeman, leaving Samuel at the little open door, went
forward across the lamplit Square, and Samuel entered his cousin's
shop.
Daniel Povey was standing behind the door, and as Samuel came in
he shut the door with a startling sudden movement. Save for the
twinkle of gas, the shop was in darkness. It had the empty
appearance which a well-managed confectioner's and baker's always
has at night. The large brass scales near the flour-bins glinted;
and the glass cake-stands, with scarce a tart among them, also
caught the faint flare of the gas.
"What's the matter, Daniel? Anything wrong?" Samuel asked, feeling
boyish as he usually did in the presence of Daniel.
The well-favoured white-haired man seized him with one hand by the
shoulder in a grip that convicted Samuel of frailty.
"Look here, Sam'l," said he in his low, pleasant voice, somewhat
altered by excitement. "You know as my wife drinks?"
He stared defiantly at Samuel.
"N--no," said Samuel. "That is--no one's ever SAID---"
This was true. He did not know that Mrs. Daniel Povey, at the age
of fifty, had definitely taken to drink. There had been rumours
that she enjoyed a glass with too much gusto; but 'drinks' meant
more than that.
"She drinks," Daniel Povey continued. "And has done this last two
year!"
"I'm very sorry to hear it," said Samuel, tremendously shocked by
this brutal rending of the cloak of decency.
Always, everybody had feigned to Daniel, and Daniel had feigned to
everybody, that his wife was as other wives. And now the man
himself had torn to pieces in a moment the veil of thirty years'
weaving.
"And if that was the worst!" Daniel murmured reflectively,
loosening his grip.
Samuel was excessively disturbed. His cousin was hinting at
matters which he himself, at any rate, had never hinted at even to
Constance, so abhorrent were they; matters unutterable, which hung
like clouds in the social atmosphere of the town, and of which at
rare intervals one conveyed one's cognizance, not by words, but by
something scarce perceptible in a glance, an accent. Not often is
a town such as Bursley starred with such a woman as Mrs. Daniel
Povey.
"But what's wrong?" Samuel asked, trying to be firm.
And, "What is wrong?" he asked himself. "What does all this mean,
at after one o'clock in the morning?"
"Look here, Sam'l," Daniel recommenced, seizing his shoulder
again. "I went to Liverpool corn market to-day, and missed the
last train, so I came by mail from Crewe. And what do I find? I
find Dick sitting on the stairs in the dark pretty high naked."
"Sitting on the stairs? Dick?"
"Ay! This is what I come home to!"
"But--"
"Hold on! He's been in bed a couple of days with a feverish cold,
caught through lying in damp sheets as his mother had forgot to
air. She brings him no supper to-night. He calls out. No answer.
Then he gets up to go down-stairs and see what's happened, and he
slips on th' stairs and breaks his knee, or puts it out or summat.
Sat there hours, seemingly! Couldn't walk neither up nor down."
"And was your--wife--was Mrs.-?"
"Dead drunk in the parlour, Sam'l."
"But the servant?"
"Servant!" Daniel Povey laughed. "We can't keep our servants. They
won't stay. YOU know that."
He did. Mrs. Daniel Povey's domestic methods and idiosyncrasies
could at any rate be freely discussed, and they were.
"And what have you done?"
"Done? Why, I picked him up in my arms and carried him upstairs
again. And a fine job I had too! Here! Come here!"
Daniel strode impulsively across the shop--the counterflap was up-
-and opened a door at the back. Samuel followed. Never before had
he penetrated so far into his cousin's secrets. On the left,
within the doorway, were the stairs, dark; on the right a shut
door; and in front an open door giving on to a yard. At the
extremity of the yard he discerned a building, vaguely lit, and
naked figures strangely moving in it.
"What's that? Who's there?" he asked sharply.
"That's the bakehouse," Daniel replied, as if surprised at such a
question. "It's one of their long nights."
Never, during the brief remainder of his life, did Samuel eat a
mouthful of common bread without recalling that midnight
apparition. He had lived for half a century, and thoughtlessly
eaten bread as though loaves grew ready-made on trees.
"Listen!" Daniel commanded him.
He cocked his ear, and caught a feeble, complaining wail from an
upper floor.
"That's Dick! That is!" said Daniel Povey.
It sounded more like the distress of a child than of an
adventurous young man of twenty-four or so.
"But is he in pain? Haven't you fetched the doctor?"
"Not yet," answered Daniel, with a vacant stare.
Samuel gazed at him closely for a second. And Daniel seemed to him
very old and helpless and pathetic, a man unequal to the situation
in which he found himself; and yet, despite the dignified snow of
his age, wistfully boyish. Samuel thought swiftly: "This has been
too much for him. He's almost out of his mind. That's the
explanation. Some one's got to take charge, and I must." And all
the courageous resolution of his character braced itself to the
crisis. Being without a collar, being in slippers, and his
suspenders imperfectly fastened anyhow,--these things seemed to be
a part of the crisis.
"I'll just run upstairs and have a look at him," said Samuel, in a
matter-of-fact tone.
Daniel did not reply.
There was a glimmer at the top of the stairs. Samuel mounted,
found the gas-jet, and turned it on full. A dingy, dirty, untidy
passage was revealed, the very antechamber of discomfort. Guided
by the moans, Samuel entered a bedroom, which was in a shameful
condition of neglect, and lighted only by a nearly expired candle.
Was it possible that a house-mistress could so lose her self-
respect? Samuel thought of his own abode, meticulously and
impeccably 'kept,' and a hard bitterness against Mrs. Daniel
surged up in his soul.
"Is that you, doctor?" said a voice from the bed; the moans
ceased.
Samuel raised the candle.
Dick lay there, his face, on which was a beard of several days'
growth, distorted by anguish, sweating; his tousled brown hair was
limp with sweat.
"Where the hell's the doctor?" the young man demanded brusquely.
Evidently he had no curiosity about Samuel's presence; the one
thing that struck him was that Samuel was not the doctor.
"He's coming, he's coming,' said Samuel, soothingly.
"Well, if he isn't here soon I shall be damn well dead," said
Dick, in feeble resentful anger. "I can tell you that."
Samuel deposited the candle and ran downstairs. "I say, Daniel,"
he said, roused and hot, "this is really ridiculous. Why on earth
didn't you fetch the doctor while you were waiting for me? Where's
the missis?"
Daniel Povey was slowly emptying grains of Indian corn out of his
jacket-pocket into one of the big receptacles behind the counter
on the baker's side of the shop. He had provisioned himself with
Indian corn as ammunition for Samuel's bedroom window; he was now
returning the surplus.
"Are ye going for Harrop?" he questioned hesitatingly.
"Why, of course!" Samuel exclaimed. "Where's the missis?"
"Happen you'd better go and have a look at her," said Daniel
Povey. "She's in th' parlour."
He preceded Samuel to the shut door on the right. When he opened
it the parlour appeared in full illumination.
"Here! Go in!" said Daniel.
Samuel went in, afraid. In a room as dishevelled and filthy as the
bedroom, Mrs. Daniel Povey lay stretched awkwardly on a worn
horse-hair sofa, her head thrown back, her face discoloured, her
eyes bulging, her mouth wet and yawning: a sight horribly
offensive. Samuel was frightened; he was struck with fear and with
disgust. The singing gas beat down ruthlessly on that dreadful
figure. A wife and mother! The lady of a house! The centre of
order! The fount of healing! The balm for worry, and the refuge of
distress! She was vile. Her scanty yellow-grey hair was dirty, her
hollowed neck all grime, her hands abominable, her black dress in
decay. She was the dishonour of her sex, her situation, and her
years. She was a fouler obscenity than the inexperienced Samuel
had ever conceived. And by the door stood her husband, neat,
spotless, almost stately, the man who for thirty years had
marshalled all his immense pride to suffer this woman, the jolly
man who had laughed through thick and thin! Samuel remembered when
they were married. And he remembered when, years after their
marriage, she was still as pretty, artificial, coquettish, and
adamantine in her caprices as a young harlot with a fool at her
feet. Time and the slow wrath of God had changed her.
He remained master of himself and approached her; then stopped.
"But--" he stammered.
"Ay, Sam'l, lad!" said the old man from the door. "I doubt I've
killed her! I doubt I've killed her! I took and shook her. I got
her by the neck. And before I knew where I was, I'd done it.
She'll never drink brandy again. This is what it's come to!"
He moved away.
All Samuel's flesh tingled as a heavy wave of emotion rolled
through his being. It was just as if some one had dealt him a blow
unimaginably tremendous. His heart shivered, as a ship shivers at
the mountainous crash of the waters. He was numbed. He wanted to
weep, to vomit, to die, to sink away. But a voice was whispering
to him: "You will have to go through with this. You are in charge
of this." He thought of HIS wife and child, innocently asleep in
the cleanly pureness of HIS home. And he felt the roughness of his
coat-collar round his neck and the insecurity of his trousers. He
passed out of the room, shutting the door. And across the yard he
had a momentary glimpse of those nude nocturnal forms,
unconsciously attitudinizing in the bakehouse. And down the stairs
came the protests of Dick, driven by pain into a monotonous silly
blasphemy.
"I'll fetch Harrop," he said, melancholily, to his cousin.
The doctor's house was less than fifty yards off, and the doctor
had a night-bell, which, though he was a much older man than his
father had been at his age, he still answered promptly. No need to
bombard the doctor's premises with Indian corn! While Samuel was
parleying with the doctor through a window, the question ran
incessantly through his mind: "What about telling the police?"
But when, in advance of old Harrop, he returned to Daniel's shop,
lo! the policeman previously encountered had returned upon his
beat, and Daniel was talking to him in the little doorway. No
other soul was about. Down King Street, along Wedgwood Street, up
the Square, towards Brougham Street, nothing but gaslamps burning
with their everlasting patience, and the blind facades of shops.
Only in the second storey of the Bank Building at the top of the
Square a light showed mysteriously through a blind. Somebody ill
there!
The policeman was in a high state of nervous excitement. That had
happened to him which had never happened to him before. Of the
sixty policemen in Bursley, just he had been chosen by fate to fit
the socket of destiny. He was startled.
"What's this, what's this, Mr. Povey?" he turned hastily to
Samuel. "What's this as Mr. Councillor Povey is a-telling me?"
"You come in, sergeant," said Daniel.
"If I come in," said the policeman to Samuel, "you mun' go along
Wedgwood Street, Mr. Povey, and bring my mate. He should be on
Duck Bank, by rights."
It was astonishing, when once the stone had begun to roll, how
quickly it ran. In half an hour Samuel had actually parted from
Daniel at the police-office behind the Shambles, and was hurrying
to rouse his wife so that she could look after Dick Povey until he
might be taken off to Pirehill Infirmary, as old Harrop had
instantly, on seeing him, decreed.
"Ah!" he reflected in the turmoil of his soul: "God is not
mocked!" That was his basic idea: God is not mocked! Daniel was a
good fellow, honourable, brilliant; a figure in the world. But
what of his licentious tongue? What of his frequenting of bars?
(How had he come to miss that train from Liverpool? How?) For many
years he, Samuel, had seen in Daniel a living refutation of the
authenticity of the old Hebrew menaces. But he had been wrong,
after all! God is not mocked! And Samuel was aware of a revulsion
in himself towards that strict codified godliness from which, in
thought, he had perhaps been slipping away.
And with it all he felt, too, a certain officious self-importance,
as he woke his wife and essayed to break the news to her in a
manner tactfully calm. He had assisted at the most overwhelming
event ever known in the history of the town. _