Borderland

One November evening, or rather, late in the afternoon, Otho had dropped in at the Red Gables, where he had found Gilbert and his father. Mr. Langstroth received the young man with urbanity; he had all along seemed satisfied with Gilbert’s new friend. Gilbert himself looked up from his desk, and greeted the visitor tranquilly.

‘Sit down, and make yourself at home,’ said he, pushing a tobacco-jar towards Askam.

But Otho did not at once sit down. ‘Will you come home and dine with me?’ he asked, in his curt way.

‘I’m sorry I can’t,’ Gilbert said, polite as usual. ‘You see these papers? I have more than an hour’s work upon them yet.’

Otho never scoffed at Gilbert’s ‘business,’ though he was ready to sneer at that of any one else. All he uttered now was a disappointed ‘Humph!’

‘Stay and have dinner with us,’ said Gilbert. ‘How did you come?’

‘I rode.’

‘From home? On your way anywhere?’

‘No. I’m on my way from Balder Hall,’ replied Otho, with something like a scowl.

Gilbert looked at him, carelessly, it seemed. Then he said—

‘Well, send your horse round, and stay, as I said—I want Askam to have dinner with us,’ he added, turning to his father.

‘I wish he would. We shall be delighted, if he will take us as we are,’ responded Mr. Langstroth.

Otho still seemed to hesitate a little, till Gilbert, with a rather steady look at him, which was not seen by his father, continued—

‘Look here. I’ll propose something else. I’ve been tied down to this work all day, and I haven’t had a turn out of doors. Dine with us, as I said, and afterwards I’ll walk back with you to your house. I have an errand in the town. It’ll do you no harm to travel on your own legs for once in a way, and you can send one of your fellows for your horse. How will that do?’

Otho’s brow cleared. ‘That will do very well,’ said he, taking a chair. ‘It suits me down to the ground. Get on with that work, and I’ll talk to your father.’

Gilbert, having rung and given his orders as to the accommodation of Otho’s horse, turned his back upon them, and did not address another word to them until the man announced dinner, when he put his papers in a drawer which he locked, and gave his arm to his father to support him to the dining-room. Otho followed them. Despite the poverty of the house of Langstroth, the meals there were always rather choice, well cooked, and well served. Mr. Langstroth, it was understood, depended a good deal for his health of mind as well as of body upon the due observance of such things. Soon after they had begun, Gilbert observed carelessly that they hadn’t seen Michael all day; he had expected him to dinner.

‘He’s dining at Balder Hall,’ said Otho, even more curtly than usual.

‘Ah! Had he arrived when you left?’

‘No.’

‘And how was my future sister-in-law?’

‘She said she was all right,’ was the gruff reply, as Otho fixed his eyes for a moment upon Gilbert, a little defiantly, one might almost have said. Nothing more was said about any of these topics—Balder Hall, or Michael, or Magdalen. When dinner was over, and they had gone back to the library, Gilbert settled his father with the greatest care, arranging with his own hands his easy-chair, small table, reading-lamp, and all his other requisites.

‘You won’t mind my leaving you for an hour or two?’ he asked.

‘Not at all, Gilbert. You want some air and exercise. Go and get it.’

‘Would you like me to ask the doctor to call in?’

‘No, no,’ was the somewhat testy reply. ‘I see him often enough, without you asking him to come.’

‘Michael is sure to look in on his way home, but I shall most likely be back by then.—Now, Otho, if you’re ready.’

As they stepped out of the house, they became aware that a change had fallen over the weather, which had been cold. The sky was full of rack, driven rapidly across it by a strong yet soft south-west wind. The moon gleamed fitfully through the clouds, and a gush of rain was blown against their faces.

‘Halloa! Raining!’ exclaimed Gilbert. ‘Do you mind a drop of rain?’ he added, ‘or will you ride home?’

‘Oh, I’m not afraid of a little weather,’ replied Otho. ‘Where do you want to go?’

‘Where you have never been yet,’ said his companion. ‘Down to the Townend, as they call it. Come along. It isn’t much out of our way to Thorsgarth.’

Otho followed in a docile manner. Now that he had got what he seemed to have been aiming at, his tête-à-tête with Gilbert, all traces of sullenness and impatience had vanished. Bulldogs, surly to all the world beside, are tame and obedient to their masters; and there was a good deal of the bulldog in the way in which Otho followed Gilbert about.

When they had got through the busiest and most inhabited part of the town, they found themselves almost alone in a steep street, descending rapidly towards the river. As they got farther down it, the houses gradually became more bare and rough-looking; and, some of them, more and more ancient in appearance. Looking down the hill, it appeared as if the street ended in a cul de sac, as if there were no egress that way from Bradstane town. And the wall which appeared to shut the place in, and block up the road at that side, consisted of the frontage of two high factories. There was in reality a narrow passage between them, through which access was obtained to the river, and by means of which one arrived at an iron footbridge, ugly, but useful. This could not be perceived at the distance they now were from the mills.

‘What on earth do you want down here?’ growled Otho, between two puffs at his pipe.

‘We possess a bit of property down there,’ Gilbert answered him. ‘It is perfectly meaningless and perfectly useless to us. It cumbers the ground, and has swallowed up a pot of money which we ought to be enjoying the benefit of now. I sometimes walk down to it, to look at it, and think what a folly it was. “Langstroth’s Folly,” it ought to be called. Townend Mills is the name it actually bears. There it is!’ as the moon shone out brightly for a few minutes, and showed the dark mass of the factories rising almost directly in front of them.

‘You’re a queer one!’ said Otho, not without a kind of admiration in his tones. ‘Where’s the sense of fretting yourself by coming and looking at it? It’s like trying to heal a raw by scraping.’

‘Your simile would be just, if I did irritate myself,’ replied Gilbert, gently. ‘My dear Otho’—he spoke impressively, and laid his hand for a moment on the other’s arm—‘I never let anything irritate me. I make it a rule——’

‘Never—I never say never,’ said Otho. ‘No saying what will turn up. Leave it to chance. That’s the best way. Besides, Mag—some one was saying to me, only the other day, that it’s only very young people who never do what they oughtn’t.’

It was on the tip of Gilbert’s tongue to say, ‘I know I am young, but, then, I have taken care to be very wise, too,’ because we are apt to blurt out the thoughts nearest our hearts. But he said quietly—

‘Yes, I know I am young, but I have had a good deal to do that generally falls to older people. With Michael choosing to leave us and take his own way, I have had a good deal to think about, and a good deal of help to give to my poor governor in his business affairs; and I soon found that, if you want to get on at all in business, you must keep your temper, especially when you are a poor man, with fallen fortunes, against the world——’

‘Be hanged if I could ever keep my temper about business, or anything else that went wrong with me!’

‘Ah, you can afford to lose your temper,’ said Gilbert, in a cold voice, which caused Otho hastily to say that he had meant no offence; and Gilbert proceeded—

‘So, as I say, I don’t let the Townend Mills irritate me, though one might get irritated enough about them if one would; but I come and smoke my pipe, and walk round them now and again, and think quietly. I feel as if I might, some time or other, have a good idea on the subject, you know—an idea that might be worked into something. Don’t you trouble yourself about them. I won’t detain you long. Here we are!’

They had entered the long, narrow passage between the mills. It was now late, getting near ten o’clock, for they had not left the Red Gables till after nine. The clouded sky made the night darker—a darkness which was deepened, if anything, by the occasional gleams of moonlight when the rack parted. At the end of the passage there was visible a kind of gray shimmer, and in the intervals between the gusts of wind they could hear the rush of the river.

‘Wherever one goes, one comes upon that river,’ exclaimed Otho, not as if he were much delighted with the fact.

‘Yes. Tees keeps us pretty well aware of his presence. It’s as twisted and crooked a stream as any in England, I should imagine. There are the mills, Askam. Now, I’ll tell you my object in life, if you like.’

‘What is it?’ asked Otho, with deep and unfeigned interest.

‘I wish—at least, I intend to overcome the obstacle raised in my way by the idiot who built these mills. I like overcoming obstacles. I intend, some day, either to have them sold, and the price of them in my pocket, or else to see them filled with machinery, and working again at a profit.’

‘But you don’t understand how to manage mills,’ said Otho diffidently.

‘No, but I understand how to manage men. And I know a fellow who understands how to manage mills—Roger Camm. Do you remember Roger Camm? He used to be a playfellow of ours—the curate’s son.’

‘A swarthy fellow, very big and strong, who always looked rather hungry, and yet always said he wasn’t when we used to go in to tea?’tea?’

‘The same. I see you have an accurate memory. I guess he was hungry too, poor beggar. He was over here, a year or two ago, stopping with Michael; they are great chums. And he told me all about himself. He cut the Church. He said his governor never got anything out of it but water-porridge and civil contempt from people who weren’t as good as himself. He was rather bitter about it. Anyhow, he cut it, as I say, and took to the intelligent working-man line. He is foreman in a Manchester factory now, and he knows something about it all, I can tell you. I made him promise that when I sent for him he’d come and take the management of this concern—“run it” for me, as they say in America.’

‘Ah, and when will that be?’

‘When I find my purchaser or tenant,’ said Gilbert, as suavely as ever. ‘He told me all the reasons why these would never succeed as cotton factories—they are the only mills in the place; the station is a mile and a half away, and there is a steep hill, nearly half a mile long, from here to the top of the town. Oh, I’ve mastered the subject. Jute—that is what I shall do with them—spin jute, and get women and girls out of Bridge Street for hands.’

‘Yes?’ said Otho, tentatively, really interested, and ardently wishing that he understood a little more about it. ‘And your father and—brother?’ Michael’s name seemed rather to stick in his throat.

‘My father says he only wishes I could. Michael is dead against it. Michael would like to pull the whole place down.’

‘What for?’ asked Otho, sharply.

‘Because he’s a fool,’ was Gilbert’s reply. The intimacy between him and Otho had, it would seem, progressed quickly.

‘Because he’s a fool,’ repeated young Askam, leaning his elbows on the balustrade of the bridge, to which they had now advanced, and staring down into the rushing brown river. The expression on the face, which the darkness concealed, was not a pleasant one. ‘Curse him!’ he muttered to himself, so low that even Gilbert did not hear him; but the river carried the sound, along with all the other messages with which it was laden, towards the sea.

‘Come along!’ said Gilbert, after a brief, silent pause. ‘There’s no use staying here any longer.’

Otho raised himself from the bridge, and they retraced their way through the silent passage, up the steep street, and to where a road to the right led in the direction of Thorsgarth. They had not spoken a word since leaving the mills.

‘I think it’s rather late for me to be going with you,’ said Gilbert, hesitating at the corner.

‘Not a bit! What’s ten o’clock? You’ve got a key, I suppose? You said you would come,’ said Otho, rapidly, and almost savagely. ‘And I want to speak to you.’

‘Oh, I am willing, and—well, Michael will see my father again before he goes to bed—sure to. He will be leaving Balder Hall by now, I daresay. They keep early hours there.’

‘Where there’s an old woman like that precious Aunt Martha, they must,’ said Otho. ‘Look here, Gilbert, how did your brother Michael get Magdalen Wynter to accept him?’

‘By being the only man in the world who proposed to her, or was likely to do so,’ said Gilbert, cynically.

‘I don’t see that. She is the handsomest woman I ever saw.’

‘She hasn’t a penny, and won’t have. She isn’t popular—but the reverse, and no man, except Michael, ever penetrates within those walls—oh, and you,’ he added, with a laugh, as he turned to Otho.

‘You haven’t accounted for it yet,’ said the latter, sullenly.

‘Well, say she was in love with him.’

‘In love with my eye!’

Gilbert laughed again. ‘I give it up,’ said he. ‘It’s a conundrum I have often set myself, to no purpose. Michael is ten thousand times too good for her; but that’s nothing to the point. I don’t know why she took him.’

‘She ordered me off this afternoon, because he was coming to dinner,’ Otho said, in a voice of choking anger. ‘She told me my whole body wasn’t worth his little finger. She——’

‘You might be in love with her yourself,’ suggested Gilbert; and, indeed, a less astute observer might have been struck with the same idea.

‘I’ll be hanged if I am—insolent minx!’ retorted Otho, savagely. ‘No girl shall behave to me as she has done, with impunity. She shall pay for it. But, tell me, how long were they in making it up?’

‘Oh, not long; about six weeks. He was home for his holidays one summer, and we were talking together in front of the house. Miss Strangforth’s carriage, with her and Magdalen in it, drove by. The old lady saw us bowing, and stopped. I introduced Michael; he fell in love on the spot, then and there, over head and ears. Martha asked him to drive with them, and he drove. Drove deeper and deeper into love, I suppose; and—yes, it was just six weeks later, they were together at a picnic to Cauldron, and they returned engaged. My father has never got over it.’

‘How?’ asked Otho, in the same strangled voice.

‘He thought it so idiotic and imprudent. And so it was, and is. But Michael had become a man over the doing of it. They stuck to it, and they have stuck to it ever since. Some day, I suppose they will be married; but I don’t know when.’

Otho made absolutely no reply to this prophecy. They turned in at the Thorsgarth gates, and the subject was dropped. But Gilbert knew now why Otho had given them his company at dinner, and why he himself had been so earnestly pressed to go back to Thorsgarth after their walk.