Probation

The brother and sister walked together down the sloping street already mentioned, and which was, as usual at that time, full of work-people, streaming out of the numberless factories which formed the staple of Thanshope buildings. Arms were swinging, and clogs were clattering; tongues were wagging furiously in the reaction of the release from work, and the inhalation of the air, which, though close and thunderous, was yet fresher than that in the great hot factories.

Thanshope was built on a situation with considerable claims to natural beauty, and there were days, even now, when it looked beautiful. Its streets all climbed up and down steep hills. Whenever the day or the smoke was clear enough, hills might be seen surrounding it on all sides in the distance, except to the south, where Manchester lay.

There was a river—the river Thanse—running through the town, which unfortunate stream formed a fertile source of bickering and heart-burning amongst the members of the town-council, the medical men, and the people who write to the newspapers: one party of them contended that there was nothing the matter with the river Thanse, it was a good and wholesome stream, which purified the town; while the other party said that it and its unspeakable uncleanness were at the root of all the ills that Thanshope flesh suffered from.

Altogether, the verdict of a stranger would most likely have been that Thanshope was a dim, unlovely, smoky place, in which no one would choose to live whose business did not oblige him to do so—a place where substantial dirt was the co-operator of substantial prosperity, where grime and plenty went hand in hand.

Yet there were people who loved this dirty town, and who lived contented lives in it—people not belonging to the great swarm of workers who were obliged to live there, and who, perhaps, thought more about the rate of wages than about the æsthetic condition of their surroundings.

Myles and Mary Heywood, having come to the end of the sloping street, turned a corner to the left, and soon found themselves in another street, quieter, wider, with terraces of small houses on either side, whose monotony was diversified by various chapels, meeting-houses, and schools. Uphill for a short distance, till the street grew wider and the houses better, and Myles and Mary, turning down a side street to the right, emerged upon one side of a wide, open, square space, called Townfield, or the Townfield, and elevated so high that the rest of the town lay below them as in a basin. All along that side of the Townfield where they stood was a row of neat, small houses, each exactly like all the others; the only room for the individuality of the owners making itself apparent being in the arrangement of the little strip of garden spreading before each.

Half the Townfield had been cut off, a couple of years ago, to furnish a small park or pleasure-ground; but looking across the open space to the north-west, they could see the old part of the town in its hollow; the old church of the parish on ground almost as high as the Townfield itself; the gilded spire of the town-hall rising ambitiously from the hollow (it chimed a quarter after six with mellow tone as they stood there), and all the other churches and chapels and public buildings strewn here and there about the town. A great cloud of smoke came up and dimmed the air; on every side was a fringe of long chimneys; different big factories were familiar features in the landscape, and formed landmarks to Mary and her brother—had formed landmarks to them from infancy.

Away to the north-west were undulating lines of blue, lofty moors. They were part of Blackrigg—that mighty joint of England’s irregular spine. It was not exactly an enlivening prospect, but it had certain beauties of its own; and at least this town, full of rough, busy toilers, had a fitting and harmonious frame in that semicircle of bleak and treeless moors.

Mary and Myles went up one of the strips of garden about the middle of the terrace, and opened the door of the house.

‘Pah! how hot and close it feels!’ said Myles, as they closed themselves in. ‘Now I wonder how that lad is!’

They went along a little passage, to the left of which was the ‘parlour,’ arranged in the approved style of such parlours, with a brilliant, large-patterned carpet in red, yellow, and blue; bright green merino curtains, a ‘drawing-room suite’ in rosewood and crimson rep, a pink cloth upon the centre table, upon which were negligently arranged albums, Sunday books, paper mats, and a glass shade, under which reposed waxen apples and grapes of a corpulent description. On the mantelpiece, two green glass vases, and a china greyhound of an unknown variety, more frilled paper mats, and little piles of spar and crystal. On the walls, photographs and a rich collection of framed funeral cards, together with the chef-d’œuvre of the whole establishment—a work of art which Mary regarded with feelings little short of veneration—‘Joseph sold by his Brethren,’ executed in Berlin wools, the merchants all squinting frightfully, and Joseph with a salmon-coloured back and a decidedly ruddy countenance, though one not of such remarkable beauty as quite to account for his subsequent adventures.

Past the door leading into this epitome of art and beauty went these young people, into the kitchen, which was, of course, the general living-room of the family. Upon a couch beneath the window, with the crinkling of the cinders and the ticking of the clock for his only companions, lay the failure of his family—a cripple lad of eighteen.

‘Well, Ned, lad, how dost find thyself?’ asked Myles, going in.

‘I find myself as usual—wishing I was dead,’ was the encouraging reply, as the lad turned a pale and sallow face, not without considerable beauty of feature, but stamped with a look of ill-health, pain, and something deeper and more sorrowful than either, towards the strong, handsome brother who stooped over him.

‘Nay, come! Not quite so bad as that,’ said Myles, smoothing Edmund’s hair from his hot forehead, and seating himself beside the couch. He looked into his cripple brother’s eyes with a glance so full of life, and hope, and strong, protecting kindness, and withal so contagious a smile, that an answering, if a reluctant one, was wrung from the lad’s dull eyes and down-drawn mouth.

‘I’m that thirsty!’ he said. ‘Molly, do get the tea ready.’

‘I’m shappin’’ (shaping) ‘to’t now, lad,’ she returned, hanging up her cotton kerchief and poking the fire to settle the kettle upon it.

‘And you read a bit, Myles, wilta?’ pursued Edmund. ‘Mother won’t be home for half an hour, and I could like to know how yon Lady Angiolina got on at the castle.’

Myles took up a book from a table and began to read aloud:

‘“As the groom of the chambers announced the Lady Angiolina Fitzmaurice, every eye turned towards her. She advanced with the step of a queen. Her trailing robe of black velvet set off her superb beauty to the utmost advantage,”’ and so forth.

Edmund listened with face intent and a pleased half-smile upon his lips. Mary moved noiselessly about, getting the tea-cups out of the cupboard and setting them on the tray with gingerly hand, so as not to disturb the literary party in the window.

The reading was continued only for the space of some quarter of an hour. The story was a novel of ‘high life.’ No agent in it was of lower rank than a baronet; no menial less distinguished than a groom of the chambers or a majordomo was permitted to appear in its truly select and exclusive pages; the action took place in Mayfair, in Belgravia, and in the ancestral halls of dukes and earls. Manchester was alluded to by the refined author much as if it had been of about equal importance with Timbuctoo; the whole a very tawdry tinsel, pasted together in a very poor, second-rate manner.

Myles read on and Edmund listened. Perhaps he was aware that the story was rubbish, but it took him into a world which by contrast with his own was beautiful: it spoke of something else than the Townfield as a pleasure-ground, grey factories, smoke and chimneys by way of a prospect. It pointed out another sort of existence than that led by him and his.

Edmund had an intensely poetic temperament. Poetry of some sort, in real life or in books, he must have or die. It was not forthcoming in real life: Myles never read novels for his own pleasure, therefore Edmund had no beneficent hand to point out to him the shining treasures of real poetry with which our English literature abounds, so he had to rely on the titles in the catalogue of the Thanshope Free Library, and often received a stone instead of bread, in the shape of such jingling nonsense as he was greedily listening to just now.

Myles was a great reader of politics and science. The romantic and poetic side of his nature had been left to itself; the soil, whether sterile or fruitful, had never received the least touch of cultivation—yet. He had some strong convictions on the subject of ethics, which will be best left undescribed, to display their results in his actions as circumstances put his theories to the test.

There was something striking and uncommon in the appearance of all three of this group of brothers and sister. Mary was comely—a tall, well-formed, well-grown young woman, with the pale but clear and healthy complexion, dark eyes and hair of her elder brother—a calm, sensible face, not destitute of a certain still, regular beauty, but lacking the impetuousness and intensity of Myles’s expression. She sat knitting a long grey woollen stocking, and looked with a large steady gaze now at Myles, now at Edmund, whose face was equally sharp cut as his brother’s, but worn and drawn with pain and ill-health.

Edmund was nineteen; Mary, two-and-twenty; Myles, six-and-twenty; another, born between them, had died an infant.

At this juncture the back door was heard to open. Some one entered, and in the pause made by Myles in his reading there was distinctly audible a heavy sigh—almost a groan. Glances were exchanged between Myles and Mary; both looked as if they braced themselves to meet some ordeal. Edmund’s face darkened visibly.

‘Is that you, mother?’ called out Mary cheerfully.

‘Ay, it’s me!’ replied a rather grating voice—a voice high, though not loud, and complaining in the midst of an ostentatious resignation.

‘Go on, Myles!’ said Edmund, in an undertone.

‘Can’t, my lad. You know mother can’t abide it.’

‘Why am I never to have a bit o’ pleasure? It’s precious little as I get,’ grumbled the lad, as he turned away, and lay with his face concealed.

‘See, lad! Tak’ the book, and read for thysel’,’ said Myles, who indulged in a tolerably broad dialect when in the bosom of his family.

Edmund shrugged his shoulders irritably and made a gesture of aversion. Myles closed the book, rising from the side of the couch and going to the table, as a woman came in from the back kitchen—a small, sharp-featured woman, comely yet, with a bright cheek and a dark eye. She was the mother of all those tall children, though she was only five-and-forty, having been married, as too many of her class do marry, at eighteen. The great wonder was that she had remained a widow so long, for in addition to good looks, clever fingers, and a stirring disposition, she possessed property to the extent of thirty pounds per annum left by a rich relation to her years ago.

An ignorant observer, looking at the family party just now, would have said what a good-looking, prosperous, well-to-do party they were. But Mrs. Heywood had scarcely spoken yet.

‘Evenin’, mother,’ said her eldest son, civilly, but, it must be owned, hardly cordially.

‘Good evenin’,’ she returned, in her high-pitched, dubious voice. ‘What! you’ve managed to get th’ tea ready, lass? But I know what that means. Just twice as much tea in the pot as we’ve any need for, or as I should ‘a put in mysel’. Waste, waste, on every side!’

As this was Mrs. Heywood’s invariable remark when she came in from her occasional day’s sewing at one of the large houses of the neighbourhood and found the tea prepared, it excited neither comment nor indignation, and the excellent woman, seating herself, cast a sharp, discontented look around, as if wishing that some one would give her an opportunity of saying something disagreeable.

‘Eh, bi’ the mass! It is some and hot! If some folks had to walk as far as me, mayhap they’d understand what I feel at this moment.’

Again no answer. Myles was buttering a piece of bread. His eyebrows were contracted again. The serpent in that Eden was the contentious woman. Myles never answered her complaints, on principle, for fear of saying something outrageous and unbecoming, but it was often with a sore struggle that he abstained: he did not want to become a household bully, or he knew—he had found it out by accident one day—that a certain look and tone of his could quell Mrs. Heywood’s temper in one minute. He was very much afraid of using it too frequently, though often sorely provoked. ‘Such people as Sebastian Mallory,’ he reflected (whose mother was said to live for him and his happiness), ‘were not obliged to stay in one room, listening to maddening complaints, like the continual dropping of a rainy day, with no alternative but solitude, silence, or the taproom.’

Edmund’s shoulders were drawn up to his ears, and his back expressed distinctly that he felt himself jarred and grated in every fibre of his being.

‘Now, then, Edmund,’ said his mother, in her thin, penetrating voice; ‘art comin’ to the table, or mun thou have thy tea carried to thee, to drink on th’ sofa, like a lady, eh?’

Answering to this appeal, he raised himself, his face darkened, his lips quivering with anger.

‘That’s right!’ said he, bitterly. ‘Do insult me a little more! It’s so nice to be ill, and so pleasant to spend your days by yourself upon a sofa in a kitchen. I’m likely to keep it up as long as ever I can. So would you if once you knew how agreeable it was.’

He had supported himself by means of a stick to the table; and as he limped along to the chair which Mary had placed for him, one could see how much deformed he was, and how clumsily he moved. No look of pity warmed the woman’s face as she saw him. He was not, like many a weakly or deformed child, the object of the mother’s divinest love and tenderest care. He had been born three months after his father’s sudden death. Mrs. Heywood had never been noted for enthusiastic devotion to any of her children, or to her husband, or, indeed, to any one but herself and her own interest. Myles could influence her; but she seemed to have a positive aversion to Edmund, who used to say that his real mother was Mary.

When the meal was over, there was a little movement. Edmund looked wistfully towards Myles and the book; but Myles did not offer to resume it. He had begun to think over that conversation in the office before pay-time, and was wondering whether it could be really true that Sebastian Mallory meant to return.

Sebastian Mallory was, and had been for years, his bete noire. He had seen him once, ten years ago, a handsome, fair-faced, ‘yellow-haired laddie’ of sixteen, who had come to look round his own works, with a somewhat listless gaze. Myles’s vigorous soul had been filled with contempt for him at that moment, and he had never seen fit to alter that feeling. All he heard of Sebastian Mallory was exactly contrary to his ideas of what a man—unless the man were some irresponsible person, with neither business nor estate in the background—ought to be and do. He had a very strong sense of duty himself, and never, so far as he knew, left a duty unperformed. He struggled hard, according to his light, to do what was right; consequently he felt himself in a position to be somewhat censorious upon those who, he considered, obviously did not fulfil their duties—duties to their property, their dependents, their privileges, to him—such persons as this very Sebastian Mallory. Therefore he smiled somewhat grimly to himself as he imagined that lily-handed, yellow-haired, delicate-looking young man coming to take his place at the head of affairs at such a crisis as was striding towards Lancashire—a storm which it would take the keenest heads, the strongest hands, the most practised eyes of the wariest business men who should succeed in weathering it. Probably Mr. Sebastian Mallory, if he did come, would cut a sorry spectacle, and would soon be glad to retire again to more congenial scenes abroad.

He did not feel it his duty to excite Mrs. Heywood’s disagreeable remarks by reading aloud what he justly considered ‘balderdash’ to Edmund; he therefore suggested that they should go and take a turn on the Townfield.

Edmund, who for some reason was in a more unhappy temper than usual, shrugged his shoulders, and said he did not feel inclined to go out.

‘No? Then I must go by myself, I suppose,’ said Myles.

But he made no immediate effort to leave the house. He seated himself at the table with a book, and might possibly have remained in the house, but for his mother, who having ascertained that his book was entitled ‘The History of Rationalism,’ announced that the bitterest grief of her declining years consisted in having to see a son of hers growing up an infidel, or worse. She hunted under the Family Bible, and produced a tract, which she offered him in lieu of the work he was reading. It bore the alluring title, ‘Thou also, Worm!’ And on his refusing this tit-bit of religious badinage, she put it aside with a bitter smile, and an audibly expressed hope that it might not in the future go too hardly with those who had spurned the means of grace proffered by a mother’s hand.

Myles endured these, and a succession of similar remarks, for some little time, while he appeared to go on with his book without heeding them; but, as none knew better than she who made them, the contracted eyebrows and the impatient twisting of his moustache covered considerable inward irritation. He at last abruptly rose, and took his cap from the nail on which it hung.

‘Out again!’ said Mrs. Heywood, in the same maddening voice; ‘and if a mother may ask, what pothouse are you going to now?’

‘No thanks to you, mother, that I’ve not taken to the pothouse long ago,’ replied the young man curtly, slapping his hat upon his head and leaving the room.

‘If he doesn’t break that door off its hinges some fine day, in one of his tempers, my name’s not Sarah Ann Heywood,’ remarked his mother. ‘It’s a grievous thing to have an ungovernable temper. His Bible, if he ever read it, would tell him that the tongue is a little member, but a consuming fire.’

‘The Bible never said a truer word,’ retorted Edmund, witheringly; and Mrs. Heywood, returning to her knitting, with the pleasant sense of having driven out the strongest, sank into silence.