'That I shall never do, nephew,' said the aged patriarch quietly and deliberately.
'Of course you won't, uncle. I shouldn't think of suggesting it. I'm merely telling you what he said.' Clive laughed harshly. 'Why,' he added, 'the man must be mad!'
'What did the young woman say to that?' his uncle inquired.
Clive frowned.
'I didn't see her last night,' he said. 'I didn't ask to see her. I was too angry.'
Just then the post arrived, and there was a letter for Clive, which he read and put carefully in his waistcoat pocket.
'Eva writes asking me to go to Pireford to-night,' he said, after a pause. 'I'll soon settle it, depend on that. If Ezra Brunt refuses his consent, so much the worse for him. I wonder whether he actually imagines that a grown man and a grown woman are to be.... Ah well, I can't talk about it! It's too silly. I'll be off to the works.'
When Clive reached Pireford that night, Eva herself opened the door to him. She was wearing a gray frock, and over it a large white apron, perfectly plain.
'My girls are both out to-night,' she said, 'and I was making some puffs for the sewing-meeting tea. Come into the breakfast-room.... This way,' she added, guiding him. He had entered the house on the previous night for the first time. She spoke hurriedly, and, instead of stopping in the breakfast-room, wandered uncertainly through it into the greenhouse, to which it gave access by means of a French window. In the dark, confined space, amid the close-packed blossoms, they stood together. She bent down to smell at a musk-plant. He took her hand and drew her soft and yielding form towards him and kissed her warm face.
'Oh, Clive!' she said. 'Whatever are we to do?'
'Do?' he replied, enchanted by her instinctive feminine surrender and reliance upon him, which seemed the more precious in that creature so proud and reserved to all others. 'Do! Where is your father?'
'Reading the Signal in the dining-room.'
Every business man in the Five Towns reads the Staffordshire Signal from beginning to end every night.
'I will see him. Of course he is your father; but I will just tell him—as decently as I can—that neither you nor I will stand this nonsense.'
'You mustn't—you mustn't see him.'
'Why not?'
'It will only lead to unpleasantness.'
'That can't be helped.'
'He never, never changes when once he has said a thing. I know him.'
Clive was arrested by something in her tone, something new to him, that in its poignant finality seemed to have caught up and expressed in a single instant that bitterness of a lifetime's renunciation which falls to the lot of most women.
'Will you come outside?' he asked in a different voice.
Without replying, she led the way down the long garden, which ended in an ivy-grown brick wall and a panorama of the immense valley of industries below. It was a warm, cloudy evening. The last silver tinge of an August twilight lay on the shoulder of the hill to the left. There was no moon, but the splendid watch-fires of labour flamed from ore-heap and furnace across the whole expanse, performing their nightly miracle of beauty. Trains crept with noiseless mystery along the middle distance, under their canopies of yellow steam. Further off the far-extending streets of Hanbridge made a map of starry lines on the blackness. To the south-east stared the cold, blue electric lights of Knype railway-station. All was silent, save for a distant thunderous roar, the giant breathing of the forge at Cauldon Bar Ironworks.
Eva leaned both elbows on the wall and looked forth.
'Do you mean to say,' said Clive, 'that Mr. Brunt will actually stick by what he has said?'
'Like grim death,' said Eva.
'But what's his idea?'
'Oh! how can I tell you?' she burst out passionately.
'Perhaps I did wrong. Perhaps I ought to have warned him earlier—said to him, "Father, Clive Timmis is courting me!" Ugh! He cannot bear to be surprised about anything. But yet he must have known.... It was all an accident, Clive—all an accident. He saw you leaving the shop yesterday. He would say he caught you leaving the shop—sneaking off like——'
'But, Eva——'
'I know—I know! Don't tell me! But it was that, I am sure. He would resent the mere look of things, and then he would think and think, and the notion of your uncle's shop would occur to him again, after all these years. I can see his thoughts as plain ... My dear, if he had not seen you at Machin Street yesterday, or if you had seen him and spoken to him, all might have gone right. He would have objected, but he would have given way in a day or two. Now he will never give way! I asked you just now what was to be done, but I knew all the time that there was nothing.'
'There is one thing to be done, Eva, and the sooner the better.'
'Do you mean that old Mr. Timmis must give up his shop to my father? Never! never!'
'I mean,' said Clive quietly, 'that we must marry without your father's consent.'
She shook her head slowly and sadly, relapsing into calmness.
'You shake your head, Eva, but it must be so.'
'I can't, my dear.'
'Do you mean to say that you will allow your father's childish whim—for it's nothing else; he can't find any objection to me as a husband for you, and he knows it—that you will allow his childish whim to spoil your life and mine? Remember, you are twenty-six and I am thirty-two.'
'I can't do it! I daren't! I'm mad with myself for feeling like this, but I daren't! And even if I dared I wouldn't. Clive, you don't know! You can't tell how it is!'
Her sorrowful, pathetic firmness daunted him. She was now composed, mistress again of herself, and her moral force dominated him.
'Then, you and I are to be unhappy all our lives, Eva?'
The soft influences of the night seemed to direct her voice as, after a long pause, she uttered the words: 'No one is ever quite unhappy in all this world.' There was another pause, as she gazed steadily down into the wonderful valley. 'We must wait.'
'Wait!' echoed Clive with angry grimness. 'He will live for twenty years!'
'No one is ever quite unhappy in all this world,' she repeated dreamily, as one might turn over a treasure in order to examine it.
Now for the epilogue to the feud. Two years passed, and it happened that there was to be a Revival at the Bethesda Chapel. One morning the superintendent minister and the revivalist called on Ezra Brunt at his shop. When informed of their presence, the great draper had an impulse of anger, for, like many stouter chapel-goers than himself, he would scarcely tolerate the intrusion of religion into commerce. However, the visit had an air of ceremony, and he could not decline to see these ambassadors of heaven in his private room. The revivalist, a cheery, shrewd man, whose powers of organization were obvious, and who seemed to put organization before everything else, pleased Ezra Brunt at once.
'We want a specially good congregation at the opening meeting to-night,' said the revivalist. 'Now, the basis of a good congregation must necessarily be the regular pillars of the church, and therefore we are making a few calls this morning to insure the presence of our chief men—the men of influence and position. You will come, Mr. Brunt, and you will let it be known among your employés that they will please you by coming too?'
Ezra Brunt was by no means a regular pillar of the Bethesda, but he had a vague sensation of flattery, and he consented; indeed, there was no alternative.
The first hymn was being sung when he reached the chapel. To his surprise, he found the place crowded in every part. A man whom he did not know led him to a wooden form which had