The History of David Grieve Part 108

Mildmay about it. I don't think I shall. It'll go away. Oh! there they are.'

As she spoke, David and Sandy, who had been out for a Sunday walk together, appeared on the steps of the garden-door. David waved his hat to his wife, an example immediately followed by Sandy, who twisted his Scotch cap madly, and then set off running to her.

Lucy looked at them both with a sudden softening and brightening which gave her charm. David came up to her, ran his arm through hers, and began to give her a laughing account of Sandy's behaviour. The April wind had flushed him, tumbled his black hair, and called up spring lights in the eyes, which had been somewhat dimmed by overmuch sedentary work and a too small allowance of sleep. His plenitude of virile energy, the glow of health and power which hung round him this afternoon, did but make Lucy seem more languid and faded as she hung upon him, smiling at his stories of their walk and of Sandy's antics.

He broke off in the middle, and looked at her anxiously.

'She isn't the thing, is she, Dora? I believe she wants a change.'

'Oh! thank you!' cried Lucy, ironically--'with all Sandy's spring things and my own to look to, and some new s.h.i.+rts to get for you, and the spring cleaning to see to. Much obliged to you.'

'All those things, madam,' said David, patting her hand, 'wouldn't matter twopence, if it should please your lord and master to order you off. And if this fine weather goes on, you'll have to take advantage of it. By the way, I met Mildmay, and asked him to come in and see you.'

Lucy reddened.

'Why, there's nothing,' she said, pettishly. 'This'll go away directly.' Instinctively she put up her hand to her cheek.

'Oh! Mildmay won't worry you,' said David; 'he'll tell you what's wrong at once. You know you like him.'

'Well, I must go,' said Dora.

They understood that she had a mill-girls' Bible cla.s.s at half-past five, and an evening service an hour later, so they did not press her to stay. Lucy kissed her, and Sandy escorted her halfway to the garden-door, giving her a breathless and magniloquent account of the 'hy'nas and kangawoos' she might expect to find congregated in the Merton Road outside. Dora, who was somewhat distressed by his powers of imaginative fiction, would not 'play up' as his father did, and he left her half-way to run back to David, who was always ready to turn road and back garden into 'Africa country' at a moment's notice, and people it to order with savages, elephants, boomerangs, kangaroos, and all other possible or impossible things that Sandy might chance to want.

Dora, looking back from the garden, saw them all three in a group together--Sandy tugging at his mother's skirts, and shouting at the top of his voice; David's curly black head bent over his wife, who was gathering her brown shawl round her throat, as though the light wind chilled her. But there was no chill in her look. That, for the moment, as she swayed between husband and child, had in it the qualities of the April sun--a brightness and promise all the more radiant by comparison with the winter or the cloud from which it had emerged.

Dora went home as quickly as tramcar and fast walking could take her. She still lived in the same Ancoats rooms with her s.h.i.+rt-making friend, who had kept company, poor thing! for four years with a young man, and had then given him up with anguish because he was not 'the sort of man she'd been taking him for,'

though no one but Dora had ever known what qualities or practices, intolerable to a pure mind, the sad phrase covered. Dora might long ago have moved to more comfortable rooms and a better quarter of the town had she been so minded, for her wages as an admirable forewoman and an exceptionally skilled hand were high; but she pa.s.sionately preferred to be near St. Damian's and amongst her 'girls.' Also, there was the thought that by staying in the place whither she had originally moved she would be more easily discoverable if ever,--ay, if _ever_--Daddy should come back to her. She was certain that he was still alive; and great as the probabilities on the other side became with every pa.s.sing year, few people had the heart to insist upon them in the face of her sensitive faith, whereof the bravery was so close akin to tears.

Only once in all these years had there been a trace of Daddy.

Through a silk-merchant acquaintance of his, having relations with Lyons and other foreign centres, David had once come across a rumour which had seemed to promise a clue. He had himself gone across to Lyons at once, and had done all he could. But the clue broke in his hand, and the tanned, long-faced lunatic from Manchester, whereof report had spoken, could be only doubtfully identified with a man who bore no likeness at all to Daddy.

Dora's expectation and hope had been stirred to their depths, and she bore her disappointment hardly. But she did not therefore cease to hope. Instinctively on this Sunday night, when she reached home, she put Daddy's chair, which had been pushed aside, in its right place by the fire, and she tenderly propped up a stuffed bird, originally shot by Daddy in the Vosges, and now vilely overtaken by Manchester moths. Then she set round chairs and books for her girls.

Soon they came trooping up the stairs, in their neat Sunday dresses, so sharply distinguished from the mill-gear of the week, and she spent with them a moving and mystical hour. She was expounding to them a little handbook of 'The Blessed Sacrament,'

and her explanations wound up with a close appeal to each one of them to make more use of the means of grace, to surrender themselves more fully to the awful and unspeakable mystery by which the Lord gave them His very flesh to eat, His very blood to drink, so fas.h.i.+oning within them, Communion after Communion, the immortal and incorruptible body which should be theirs in the Resurrection.

She spoke in a low, vibrating voice, somewhat monotonous in tone; her eyes shone with strange light under her round, prominent brow; all that she said of the joys of frequent Communion, of the mortal perils of unworthy partic.i.p.ation, of treating the heavenly food lightly--coming to it, that is, unfasting and unprepared--of the need especially of Lenten self-denial, of giving up 'what each one of you likes best, so far as you can,' in preparation for the great Easter Eucharist--came evidently from the depths of her own intense conviction. Her girls listened to her with answering excitement and awe; one of them she had saved from drink, all of them had been her Sunday-school children for years, and many of them possessed, under the Lancas.h.i.+re exterior, the deep-lying poetry and emotion of the North.

When she dismissed them she hurried off to church, to sit once more dissolved in feeling, aspiration, penitence; to feel the thrill of the organ, the pathos of the bare altar, and the Lenten hymns.

After the service she had two or three things to settle with one of the curates and with some of her co-helpers in the good works of the congregation, so that when she reached home she was late and tired out. Her fellow-lodger was spending the Sunday with friends; there was no one to talk to her at her supper; and after supper she fell, sitting by the fire, into a mood of some flatness and reaction. She tried to read a religious book, but the religious nerve could respond no more, and other interests, save those of her daily occupations, she had none.

In Daddy's neighbourhood, what with his travels, his whims, and his quotations, there had been always something to stir the daughter's mind, even if it were only to reprobation. But since he had left her the circle of her thoughts had steadily and irrevocably narrowed. All secular knowledge, especially the reading of other than religious books, had become gradually and painfully identified, for her, with those sinister influences which made David Grieve an 'unbeliever,' and so many of the best Manchester workmen 'atheists.'

So now, in her physical and moral slackness, she sat and thought with some bitterness of a 'young woman' who had recently entered the shop which employed her, and, by dint of a clever tongue, was gaining the ear of the authorities, to the disturbance of some of Dora's cherished methods of distributing and organising the work.

They might have trusted her more after all these years; but n.o.body appreciated her; she counted for nothing.

Then her mind wandered on to the familiar grievances of Sandy's religious teaching and Lucy's gradual defection from St. Damian's.

She must make more efforts with Lucy, even if it angered David. She looked back on what she had done to bring about the marriage, and lashed herself into a morbid sense of responsibility.

But her missionary projects were no more cheering to her than her thoughts about the shop and her work, and she felt an intense sense of relief when she heard the step of her room-mate, Mary Styles, upon the stairs. She made Mary go into every little incident of her day; she was insatiable for gossip--a very rare mood for her--and could not be chattered to enough.

And all through she leant her head against her father's chair, recalling Lucy on her husband's arm, and the child at her skirts, with the pathetic inarticulate longing which makes the tragedy of the single life. She could have loved so well, and no one had ever wished to make her his wife; the wound of it bled sometimes in her inmost heart.

Meanwhile, on this same April Sunday, Lucy, after Sandy was safe in bed, brought down some needlework to do beside David while he read.

It was not very long since she had induced herself to make so great a breach in the Sunday habits of her youth. As soon as David's ideals began to tease her out of thought and sympathy, his freedoms also began to affect her. She was no longer so much chilled by his strictness, or so much shocked by his laxity.

David had spoken of a busy evening. In reality, a lazy fit overtook him. He sat smoking, and turning over the pages of Eckermann's 'Conversations with Goethe.'

'What are you reading?' said Lucy at last, struck by his face of enjoyment. 'Why do you like it so much?'

'Because there is no one else in the world who hits the right nail on the head so often as Goethe,' he said, throwing himself back with a stretch of pleasure. 'So wide a brain--so acute and sane a temper!'

Lucy looked a little lost, as she generally did when David made literary remarks to her. But she did not drop the subject.

'You said something to Professor Madgwick the other day about a line of Goethe you used to like so when you were a boy. What did it mean?'

She flushed, as though she were venturing on something which would make her ridiculous.

'A line of Goethe?' repeated David, pondering. 'Oh! I know. Yes, it was a line from Goethe's novel of "Werther." When I was young and foolish--when you and I were first acquainted, in fact, and you used to scold me for going to the Hall of Science!--I often said this line to myself over and over. I didn't know much German, but the swing of it carried me away.'

And, with a deep voice and rhythmic accent, he repeated:'

_Handwerker trugen ihn; kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet_.'

'What does it mean?' said Lucy.

'Well, it comes at the end of the story. The hero commits suicide for love, and Goethe says that at his burial, on the night after his death, "labouring men bore him; no priest went with him."'

He bent forward, clasping his hands tightly, with the half smiling, half dreamy look of one who recalls a bygone thrill of feeling, partly in sympathy, partly in irony.

'Then he wasn't a Christian?' said Lucy, wondering. 'Do you still hate priests so much, David?'

'It doesn't look like it, does it, madam,' he said, laughing, 'when you think of all my clergymen friends?'

And, in fact, as Lucy's mind pondered his answer, she easily remembered the readiness with which any of the clergy at St.

Damian's would ask his help in sending away a sick child, or giving a man a fresh start in life, or setting the necessary authorities to work in the case of some moral or sanitary scandal. She thought also of various Dissenting ministers who called on him and corresponded with him; of his reverent affection for Canon Aylwin, for Ancrum.

'Well, anyway, you care about the labouring men,' she went on persistently. 'I suppose you're what father used to call a "canting Socialist"?'

'No,' said David, quietly--'no, I'm not a Socialist, except'--and he smiled--'in the sense in which some one said the other day, "we are all Socialists now."'

'Well, what does it mean?' said Lucy, threading another needle, and feeling a certain excitement in this prolonged mental effort.

David tried to explain to her the common Socialist ideal in simple terms--the hope of a millennium, when all the instruments of production shall be owned by the State, and when the surplus profit produced by labour, over and above the maintenance of the worker and the general cost of production, will go, not to the capitalist, the individual rich man, but to the whole community of workers; when everybody will be made to work, and as little advantage as possible will be allowed to one worker above another.

'I think it's absurd!' said Lucy, up in arms at once for all the superiorities she loved. 'What nonsense! Why, they can't ever do it!'

'Well, it's about that!' said David, smiling at her. 'Still, no doubt it _could_ be done, if it ought to be done. But Socialism, as a system, seems to _me_, at any rate, to strike down and weaken the most precious thing in the world, that on which the whole of civilised life and progress rests--the spring of will and conscience in the individual. Socialism as a spirit, as an influence, is as old as organised thought--and from the beginning it has forced us to think of the many when otherwise we should be sunk in thinking of the one. But, as a modern dogmatism, it is like other dogmatisms. The new truth of the future will emerge from it as a bud from its sheath, taking here and leaving there.' He sat looking into the fire, forgetting his wife a little.