Chapter V: Book II (5)

Quinney refused to believe this; but ultimately conviction that he had been "had" once more was forced upon him.

"Bar none, it's the best copy I ever saw," remarked Tomlin.

Quinney accepted his old friend's chaff with some chucklings. Next day, he returned to the provincial town, and discovered the young cabinet-maker who had made the fake. He returned to Soho in triumph, bringing the cabinet-maker with him. His name was James Miggott, and he entered into a contract to serve Quinney for three years at a salary of two pounds a week.

"Seems a lot," said Susan.

"He was earning twenty-five bob. I shall turn him loose on those spinets."

Most people know something about Quinney's spinets transformed by the hand of the skilful James into writing-desks, sideboards, and dressing-tables. The spinets brought many customers to Soho Square.

"Stock booming?" said Tomlin.

"It is," said Quinney. He added reflectively: "I sold a spinet to-day, for which I gave fifteen shillings, for just the same number o' pounds. James put in just one week on it. That's all, by Gum!"

Some dealers maintain that Quinney made his reputation with spinets, inasmuch as he sold more of them for a couple of years than the trade put together. But he himself believes that his Waterford glass brought the right customers--the famous collectors who buy little, but talk and write much. They liked Quinney because he was so keen; and he never grudged the time spent in showing his wares to non-buyers.

"They tell others," he observed to Susan. "No 'ad.' can beat that."

He had other dodges to capture trade. It became known that he charged nothing for giving his opinion upon specimens submitted to him. And he had an endearing habit of writing to purchasers of the spinets within a few months or weeks of the deal, offering an advance on the price paid, a "nice little profit," invariably refused.

"Bless 'em! It warms their hearts to think they've made a sound investment."

"How surprised and disappointed you'd be, Joe, if they accepted your offer!"

"Right you are, Susie; but there's little fear of that, my girl."

When a new customer entered the shop, Quinney would adopt an air of guileless indifference, which was likely to provoke the remark:

"Where is Mr. Quinney?"

"I'm Quinney. Like to have a look round? You may see something you fancy."

"That's a nice pie-crust table."

"It's a gem. Cheap, too."

Then he would give a low whistle, a clear, flute-like note. James would appear from below.

"Where's the receipted bill for this table?"

The bill was produced and shown to the stranger.

"See? Paid four pounds seventeen for it, just five weeks ago. Look at the date. You shall have it for six pounds, and, by Gum! I'll make you this offer. You can return it to me any day you like within a year, and I'll give you five pound ten for it. How's that, as between man and man?"

These seemingly artless methods captivated the "think-it-overs" and the "rather-nicers," who frequent curiosity shops in ever-increasing numbers. Mothers brought daughters to Soho Square to acquire historical information. Quinney refused to sell a Jacobean armchair because it was so useful an object-lesson to young and inquiring minds.

"Look at that, madam," he would say. Perhaps the lady would murmur softly: "It is rather nice, isn't it?" And the flapper would exclaim enthusiastically: "Mumsie, it's perfectly lovely!"

"Much more than that!" Quinney would add, with mysterious chucklings. "See that rose? It's a Stuart rose. And that crown on the front splat is an emblem of loyalty to the Merry Monarch."

"Dear me! You hear that, Kitty!"

"Pay particular attention to the legs, ladies. Ball and paw, the lion's paw, with hair above them, indicatin' the strength of the Constitootion after the Restoration. Chapter of English history, that chair."

He could embellish such simple themes according to fancy, and with due regard for the patience of his listener. To Susan he spoke of these intellectual exercises as "my little song and dance."

*II*

Meanwhile, Posy was growing up, becoming a tall, slender, pretty girl. She attended a day-school in Orchard Street--a select seminary for young ladies. Susan accompanied her to and from Orchard Street. By this time she had accepted, with a serenity largely temperamental, the fate allotted to her. Once more Quinney was absorbed in his business. Adversity had brought husband and wife together, prosperity sundered them. Very rarely does it happen that a successful man can spare time to spend on his wife. The charming slackers make the most congenial mates. Compensation has thus ordained it, wherein lie tragedy and comedy. Many women, to the end of their lives, are incapable of realizing this elementary fact. They want their husbands to climb high--the higher the better; they understand, perhaps more clearly than men, what can be seen and enjoyed from the tops; they pluck, often as a matter of course, and gobble up the grapes of Eschol, but they refuse to accept the inevitable penalties of supreme endeavour. Their husbands return to them almost foundered, fit only to eat and sleep. In the strenuous competition of to-day what else is possible?

Susan did not complain, but then she belonged to the generation who accepted with pious resignation life as it is. Indeed, she accounted herself singularly fortunate, and whenever the present seemed dreary she fortified herself by thinking of a rosy past, or projected herself into an enchanted future, when he and she, Darby and Joan, would wander hand in hand to some garden of sleep, some drowsy country churchyard, where they would lie down together to await an ampler and happier intercourse in the life beyond.

Her interest in persons as opposed to things quickened with the growth of her child. Posy became to her what a Chelsea shepherdess modelled by Roubillac was to Quinney--a bit of wonderful porcelain to be enshrined, a museum piece! The maternal instincts budded and bloomed the more bravely because conjugal emotion was denied full expression. She faced unflinchingly the conviction that Posy must marry and leave her. By that time Joe might be more ready to enjoy the fruits of labour. For the moment, then, her husband was pigeon-holed. He remained at the back of her mind, at the bottom of her heart, masked by that sprightly creature, his daughter.

Posy accepted Susan's love as a matter of course.

*III*

For her years--she was just fifteen--the girl exhibited a precocious intelligence and an essentially masculine shrewdness which distinguished her sire. In the girl's presence Quinney observed no reticences. Invariably he discussed, with boyish zest and volubility, the day's trafficking. Posy was not allowed to potter about the shop, but she ran at will in and out of the sanctuary, and she knew the value of every "gem" in it, and its history. Susan dared not interfere, but she prayed that Joe's child might not be tempted to worship false gods. In an artless fashion she attempted to inculcate a taste for high romance. She read aloud _Ivanhoe_, and was much distressed by Posy's comments upon certain aspects of the tale.

"The men had a good time, but the women's lives must have been deadly. I'm jolly glad that I'm a twen-center!" She continued fluently: "You have a rotten time, mummie."

"My dear!"

"But you do. I couldn't stick your life!"

She used slang freely, protesting, when rebuked, that she picked it up from the lips of her chum, Ethel Honeybun, who was exalted as the daughter of a Member of Parliament. Susan's silence encouraged her to go on:

"I want all the fun I can get. What fun have you had? You sew a lot, you read aloud to me, you take me to school--although I'm quite able to go alone--you order the meals, you are father's slave."

"I won't have you say that!"

"But it's true."

"I love your father. I married for love. I am happy and contented in my own home. I have no patience with these new-fangled notions about women's rights and women's wrongs."

"Ethel says----"

"I don't wish to hear what Ethel says. Fun, indeed! Why, child, I've had you."

"Was that fun?" She spoke seriously, fixing her mother with a pair of clear, grey eyes. "Some girls love dolls. Dolls rather bored me. Is it fun to mess about with a baby, wash it and dress it, and take it out in a pram? I call hockey fun."

"You'll lose a front tooth some fine day. That will be great fun."

"Let's be perfectly calm. I love talking things out. You don't. I mean to say you try to hide your real self from me. Didn't you think and talk as I do when you were a girl?"

"Most certainly not!"

"You are an old-fashioned darling, and I love you for it! I shouldn't like you to talk as Mrs. Honeybun does. She says you and father spoil me. I wonder if that's true. She gives Ethel beans sometimes, and Ethel answers back as if they were equals. It would give Granny a fit to hear her!"

Twice a year Posy paid a ceremonial visit to Mrs. Biddlecombe. The old lady was very fond of her, although she sniffed at her upbringing. Posy, indeed, had won a moral victory during her first visit, shortly after the Quinneys moved to London. At the end of three days Mrs. Biddlecombe had said majestically to the child:

"I hope you're enjoying yourself, my dear!"

"I'm not," said Posy, with shocking candour.

"Why not?" demanded the astonished grandmother.

"Because you've been so wonnerful peevish."

"Bless my soul, what next! Well, well, you are a pert little maid, but I must try to be more agreeable."

Posy eyed her reflectively.

"I dare say," she murmured, "that I should be wonnerful peevish too, if I was very, very old."

Quinney, against Susan's wishes and protests, insisted that the child should be brought up "as a little princess." She was given many so-called advantages. She was taught to play the piano indifferently well; she danced beautifully; she could chatter French, and was now struggling with German.

"Spare no expense," said Quinney magnificently.

*IV*

His intimate relations with the growing girl remained constant. He would make the same remarks, pinch her blooming cheeks, pat her head, and kiss her smooth forehead.

"How's my pet this morning?"

"Quite all right, daddy, thank you."

"Gettin' on nicely with your lessons?"

"Oh yes."

Once, when she was five years old, he had soundly smacked her. The sprite had discovered the efficacy of tears as a solvent of difficulties. Whenever her little will was crossed she howled. She howled as if she enjoyed it, and her father was shrewd enough to know this. One morning he caught her up, laid her across his knee, and spanked her till his hand ached. Next day Posy smiled very sweetly at him, and said reproachfully:

"Daddy pank a Posy too hard."

But she stopped howling.

He was well pleased when she began to make friends with people like the Honeybuns. Honeybun was an ubiquitous Socialist who slept at Clapham. Like Quinney, he had soared. The two men had nothing in common except this, but it was a bond between them. Mrs. Honeybun had been a governess in the family of a nobleman. She, too, had soared into an empyrean of advanced thinkers and workers. Familiarity with the titled classes had bred contempt for them. In and out of season she denounced the luxury and indolence of an effete aristocracy. Her own household was managed abominably. She preached and practised the virtues of an Edenic diet. Butcher's meat was spoken of scathingly as the source of most physical and moral infirmities. Apart from this prejudice against flesh-pots and aristocrats, she was a kindly woman, over-zealous as a reformer, displaying a too tempestuous petticoat, but burning with ardour to ameliorate the condition of the poor and oppressed.

She exercised an enormous influence over Posy.

And it is not easy to analyse this influence, which, however well meant, was not entirely for good. Mrs. Honeybun was clever enough to admit that there can be no great gain without an appreciable loss. The only thing that mattered was the satisfaction of being able to affirm that the gain outweighed the loss. Her favourite hobby, which she rode mercilessly, was the necessity of Self-expression, the revealing of the Ego, the essential Spirit loosed from the bondage of the flesh.

Unhappily, to understand the Honeybun philosophy, a mosaic of all creeds, it became necessary to master the "patter." The word is perhaps offensive, but it describes exactly the amazing jargon habitually in the mouths of the exponents of the New Revelation. It is rather dangerous, for example, to tell a young girl adored by her parents that she must begin by loving Herself. Properly assimilated, the injunction is Socratic. Posy accepted it literally. Mrs. Honeybun, of course, explained what she meant, but at such length, with such divagations and irrelevancies, that Posy soon became bored. She told herself that Ethel's mother was a dear, an understanding person, tremendously clever and modern, a twen-center! She could obey this kind and fluent teacher with hearty goodwill. It was so delightfully easy to begin with loving one's Ego.

Susan, it may be imagined, heard too much and too often of the Honeybuns; and she smiled when she discovered that the meals were "skimpy." Posy had a healthy appetite not to be satisfied with nut cutlets or vegetable pie badly cooked and served at odd hours. No servant stayed long with the Honeybuns, because the remains of cold "vegy" pie were expected to be consumed at "elevenses." Susan commented slily on this.

"Your friend, Mrs. Honeybun, seemingly, manages everything and everybody except her own house and her own servants."

To this Posy fervently replied:

"The spiritual food in that house is simply wonderful!"

Before many weeks had passed Susan was given an opportunity of testing the truth of this statement. Mrs. Biddlecombe invited Posy to spend a fortnight in Melchester--a precious fortnight out of the mid-summer holidays. Ethel, some twenty-four hours later, entreated her friend to join the Honeybun family at Ramsgate. Much to Susan's dismay Posy announced her intention of going to Ramsgate.

"It's deadly dull at Melchester, mummie, and just think what a privilege it is, what an opportunity to spend a fortnight with Ethel's mother."

To her astonishment, Ethel's mother placed a different interpretation upon the opportunity.

"Of course, you will go to your grandmother, and I shall expect you to be charming to the old lady. In the nature of things, you can't pay her many more visits. Make this one a fragrant and imperishable memory. Express what is your true self by your devotion to an aged and apparently irritable grandmother."

Posy obeyed, with a result which had special bearing on events duly to be chronicled. Mrs. Biddlecombe, captivated by the sweetness and dutifulness of one whom she had hitherto regarded as a spoiled child, altered her will, leaving everything she possessed to Posy. Susan, she was aware, would be adequately provided for. Perhaps it tickled an elementary sense of humour to make Posy independent of a too autocratic father.

*CHAPTER XIII*

*RUCTIONS*

*I*

If this veracious chronicle were to be considered as a novel written for a purpose, or even what critics term "a serious contribution to contemporary literature," it might be necessary to write at greater length concerning the Honeybun philosophy. Enough, however, has been said to indicate the startling--startling, that is to say, to a young mind--contrast between the Quinney practices and the Honeybun precepts. Substantial meals, admirably cooked, were eaten at regular hours in Soho Square, and the table talk was as material as the roast and boiled. Quinney, before his young daughter, exulted honestly in his hard-won success. The gospel of work was preached in both houses--too insistently, perhaps--but an Atlantic roared between them.

For some months Posy was shrewd enough to digest the Honeybun teaching in silence. She prattled away to her mother, well aware that her girlish confidence would not be repeated to her father. Susan, indeed, served as a lay figure upon which she could drape new ideas and confections. Susan was a born listener. In Lavender Gardens the art of talking was practised by every member of the family simultaneously. Nobody listened, except Posy, who hoped that the day would soon come when she might be considered worthy to join the magnificent chorus. For the moment her mind was expanding. Under her father's tutelage, she was acquiring a knowledge of beautiful things, masterpieces of handicraft; in Lavender Gardens, where no lavender grew, beautiful ideas, Utopian schemes for the regeneration of all woman-kind, were poured unstintingly into her brain-cells.

So far, so good!

Those of us who clamour for results, who yearn to tabulate and classify inevitable consequences, will have prepared themselves for ructions. Quinney was a fighter, a fighter for his own hand. The Honeybuns fought quite as aggressively on behalf of others. It is a nice point for moralists to consider whether or not a woman like Mrs. Honeybun is justified in filling the mind of a young girl with more or less disturbing theories, thinly disguised as cardinal principles, which must sooner or later clash seriously with home teaching. Mrs. Honeybun had no qualms on the subject, being too ardent a propagandist to consider effects when causes were so dear to her. In her small hall, thick with dust from the feet of many pilgrims, hung a brilliantly illuminated text, purple and gold upon vellum:

"LET THERE BE LIGHT!"

She appropriated enthusiastically any text out of the New Testament which could serve her purpose. Texts from the same source, which might be used against that purpose, were triumphantly capped by convincing quotations from the Veda, or the Koran, or the writings of Confucius. The accomplished lady was armed _cap-a-pie_ with the coagulated wisdom of the ages.

Posy's first encounter with her father took place, by the luck of things, at a moment when the little man had just concluded a more than usually successful deal with a millionaire who collected things he did not understand. All big dealers have exceptional days and weeks when Fortune comes to them with both hands full. A clean sweep of many "gems" had been accomplished--what Quinney called a "mop up." His mind naturally was concentrated upon filling the gaps in the sanctuary with other gems of even purer ray serene. Posy confided to Ethel that at such moments her daddy "swanked." The temptation to make a swanker "sit up" under the process described in Lavender Gardens as "seeing things in their true proportion" was irresistible to a young and ardent acolyte. Posy conceived it to be her duty, her mission, to lead her parents to the light. Admittedly, they wallowed in outer darkness.

She tackled her father at breakfast, which, as a rule, he gobbled up in silence, thinking of the day's work ahead. A wiser than she would have selected the postprandial hour, when Nicotina clouds the air of controversy with beneficent and soothing vapours. Quinney had mentioned curtly that he was going to attend a sale at Christopher's. Whereupon Posy threw this bomb:

"Daddy, dear, when are you going to retire from active business?"

Quinney stared at his daughter. Her intelligent eyes were sparkling; in her delicately-cut nostrils titillated the dust of battle.

"Retire from--business?"

"Haven't you made enough?"

Susan looked frightened, but she had anticipated a conflict between two strong wills, and was acutely sensible of her own impotence to prevent it.

"Ho! Now, what do you call enough, my girl?"

Posy was prepared to answer this. She riposted swiftly:

"Haven't we enough to live on decently, and something to spare for others?"

"We?" His voice took a sharper inflection. "How much have you laid by, missie?"

The sharpness and veiled impatience of her tone matched his as she answered:

"You know what I mean."

"I don't. What I've made is mine--my very own. I can do what I like with it."

"Oh, father!"

"Oh, father!" He mimicked her cleverly. "Do you have the sauce to sit there and tell me, your father, that what I've made isn't mine?"

Posy quoted Mrs. Honeybun with overwhelming effect.

"You are a trustee for what you hold, accountable for every penny."

"Accountable--to you?"

He leaned forward, forgetting his bacon, which he liked frizzlingly hot.

"Accountable to Society and God."

"Ho! Then suppose you leave me, my young chick, to account in my own way to Society and God?"

Posy blushed. Let us not label her rashly as a prig. The nymph Echo must have repeated silly remarks in her time. Posy said slowly, speaking with conviction:

"I am part of Society, and I am part of what we call, for want of a better word, God."

Susan murmured warningly:

"That will do, Posy."

"No, it won't!" shouted Quinney. "We'll have this out here and now. What d'ye mean? What the devil d'ye mean? Are you dotty? Why do you spring this on me? What's the game? 'Ave you been a-listening to blasphemous agitators a-spoutin' rubbish in 'Yde Park?"

"No."

"Then where does she get it from?" He appealed to Susan with frantic gestures. "You hear her, mother. Where does she get this from? Answer me!"

"Such talk is in the air, Joe," Susan replied feebly. Explosions lacerated her ears. She had come to place an inordinate value upon peace and quiet.

"In the air! By Gum! she's been breathing the wrong air." Inspiration gripped and shook him. "Gosh! You got this from that dirty Socialist, Honeybun. Don't deny it! These are his notions. But I never thought he'd poison your young mind with 'em."

Posy said with dignity:

"Mr. Honeybun is the best man I know. He practises what he preaches; he lives in and for others. He uses his talents, regardless of his own comfort and worldly prosperity, to ameliorate the lot of the poor and oppressed."

Echo again.

"Poor and oppressed! Ameliorate! What a talker! Now, look ye here, young Posy, I'm going to deal squarely by you. I'm square to the four winds of Heaven, I am! You and I have got to understand each other--see? You're as green as the grass, but you do 'ave some of my brains. I ain't a-goin' to argue with you for one minute. Don't think it! I've forgotten more than you ever knew. Talk is the cheapest thing in London, but knaves like Honeybun buy fools with it. Don't you toss your head! You've made your pore dear mother cry, and you've taken away father's appetite. A nice morning's work. Now, listen! No more Honeybunning! You hear me?"

"Everybody in the house can hear you."

"More sauce! You stand up, miss!"

They rose together, confronting each other. Quinney's scrubby red hair was on end with rage; Posy's small bosom heaved tumultuously. Of late the girl had taken to the wearing of cheap beads and blouses cut low in the neck. Ethel had lamentable taste, but, according to her mother, it was expedient that maidens should work out their own salvation in such matters without parental interference. Quinney scowled at the beads and the white, rounded neck.

"Take off that rubbish!"

"Ethel gave them to me."

"Take 'em off quick! Mother, you see to it that she wears respectable collars!"

Posy removed two strings of large amethystine beads. Quinney took them and hurled them into the fireplace. Tears rolled down Posy's blooming cheeks. She was unaccustomed to violence--a primitive weapon not to be despised by modern man.

"Them beads," said Quinney, who reverted to the diction of his youth when excited, "is beastly--sinfully beastly! They stand for all that I despise; they stand for the cheap, trashy talk which you've been defilin' your mind with. What you need is a good spankin'. Now, mother, I leave Miss Impudence with you. Mark well what I say. No more Honeybunning!"

*II*

It is significant that Quinney neglected his business that memorable morning in the interests of a child who was beginning to believe that she occupied a back seat in her father's mind. After leaving the dining-room, he clapped on his hat, and betook himself straightway to St. James's Square. There was only one man in all London to whom he could go for honest advice, and fortunately he happened to be in town for the season.

Lord Mel received him graciously.

Quinney stated his case quietly. During the course of the narrative Lord Mel smiled more than once, but his sympathies were entirely with the father, for he had endured, not too patiently, somewhat similar scenes with his own daughters. Moreover, he hated Honeybun, whom he had denounced in the Upper Chamber as a mischievous and unscrupulous demagogue.

Quinney ended upon a high note of interrogation:

"What shall I do with her, my lord?"

Lord Mel considered the question, trying to stand upright in the shoes of his former tenant. It is a hopeful sign of the times that such magnates do descend from their pedestals, and attempt, with a certain measure of success, to see eye to eye with the groundlings.

"I prescribe a change of diet, my dear fellow. We must both face the disconcerting fact that girls to-day need special treatment. Mrs. Honeybun is one of the Shrieking Sisterhood. I have heard her shriek--she does it effectively. Noise appeals to the very young. I suggest removing Posy from Orchard Street, and sending her to a carefully conducted boarding school, where plenty of fresh air and exercise will soon blow these ideas out of her pretty head. There are dozens of such schools scattered along our south coast."

"Send her away from me and her mother?"

"Drastic, I admit, but you have put it admirably. 'No more Honeybunning!' Keep her in London, and she may Honeybun on the sly. Will you entrust this little matter of finding a suitable school to me?"

"Your lordship is a real friend."

"I will speak to my lady."

"Expense don't matter," said Quinney earnestly. "I want my daughter to have the best, because, my lord, as a young feller, I had the worst. No education at all! Posy's a wonderful talker! She'd have downed me this morning if I'd let her. She talks like--like----"

"Like Honeybun, eh?"

"If I wasn't sittin' in your lordship's library, I should damn that dirty dog!"

"Such fellows thrive on abuse. That is their weapon. We must use others--ridicule, for example. How old is your girl?"

"Nearly sixteen."

"Good! You have nipped a cankered bud in time. You shall hear from me within twenty-four hours, Let me show you an interesting bit of Crown Derby _bisque_." He paused, and added derisively: "You know, Quinney, there are moments when my things appeal to me tremendously. Persons are disappointing, but every day I discover fresh beauties in my china cabinets."

"Same here," said Quinney, with enthusiasm.

*III*

Accordingly, Posy was dispatched to a boarding school at Bexhill-on-Sea, kept by two gentlewomen of the right sort, sensible, up-to-date, highly-trained teachers, who ruled well and wisely over some twenty girls, the daughters, for the most part, of hard-working, professional men. Here we will leave Posy in good company. She was feeling sore and humiliated after an unconditional surrender; but her sense of impotence soon passed away. She loved her whimsical father and desired to please him, although she writhed--as he had writhed--under the heel of parental discipline. She began to study with assiduity, and was highly commended.

*IV*

Meanwhile, Susan and Quinney were left alone for the first time since Posy's birth. Susan rejoiced in secret. She had her Joe to herself. Posy was in the habit of dusting the more valuable bits of china in the sanctuary, and cleaning the old glass. Susan undertook these small duties, and pottered in and out of the sanctuary at all hours. Quinney threw crumbs of talk to her, but he refused emphatically her timid request to serve him once more as a saleswoman. At his wish, she rarely entered the shop below. James Miggott was in charge of that. Quinney was engrossed with the buying and selling of "stuff"; he attended to an immense correspondence, writing all his letters in the sanctuary, where he could pause from his labours to suck fresh energy from the contemplation of his treasures. The prices he paid for some of them terrified Susan, although she knew that he made few mistakes and immense profits. She remarked that his reluctance to part with the finest specimens had become almost a monomania. There was a lacquer cabinet; in particular, standing upon a richly gilded Charles the Second stand. Quinney had paid eight hundred pounds for it, and he had been offered a thousand guineas within six months. He confessed to Susan that he couldn't live without it. The cabinet was flanked by an incised lacquer screen, a miracle of Chinese workmanship. He refused a handsome profit on that. Susan asked herself:

"Does he worship these false gods? Would he miss that cabinet more than he would miss me?"

She noticed, too, that he was overworked. During his many absences from home letters would accumulate. To answer them he rose earlier and went to bed later, deaf to her remonstrance. He promised to engage a typist and stenographer--some day.

Nevertheless, this was a pleasant time, but it lasted only a few months. Mrs. Biddlecombe took to her bed again. Susan was summoned to Melchester. The old lady was really dying, but she took her time about it. Susan ministered to her till the end.

After the funeral, when she returned to Soho Square, a surprise awaited her. Quinney had fulfilled his promise. In the sanctuary, at a beautiful Carlton desk, sat Miss Mabel Dredge, a young and attractive woman, the typist and stenographer. Poor Susan experienced tearing pangs of jealousy when she beheld her, but Quinney's treatment of the stranger was reassuring. Obviously, he regarded Miss Dredge as a machine.

And his unaffected delight over Susan's return home was positively rejuvenating.

*CHAPTER XIV*

*JAMES MIGGOTT*

*I*

In common with other great men who have achieved success, Quinney was endowed with a Napoleonic faculty of picking the right men to serve him. Having done so, he treated them generously, so that they remained in his service, loath to risk a change for the worse. He paid good wages, and was complaisant in the matter of holidays.

James Miggott had been his most fortunate discovery. James was "brainy" (we quote Quinney), ambitious, healthy, and an artist in his line: the repairing of valuable old furniture. Also he was good-looking, which counted with his employer. A few weeks after joining the establishment it had been arranged that he should sleep in a comfortable room in the basement, and take his meals at a restaurant in Old Compton Street. During his provincial circuits Quinney liked to know that a man was in charge of the house at night. James's habits, apparently, were as regular as his features.

By this time he had come to be regarded as foreman. Bit by bit he had won Quinney's entire confidence. The master talked to the man more freely than he talked to Susan about everything connected with his business. James listened attentively, made occasionally some happy suggestion, and betrayed no signs of a swollen head. A natural inflation might have been expected. Quinney's eyes failed to detect it. Moreover, Susan liked him, and respected him. He attended Divine service on Sundays; he ate and drank in moderation; he was scrupulously neat in appearance; he had received a sound education, and expressed himself well in good English. Truly a paragon!

Quinney had secured Miss Mabel Dredge after his own fashion. Hitherto his typewriting had been done by a firm which employed a score of typists. The head of that firm happened to be a lady of great intelligence and energy, the widow of a stockbroker who had died bankrupt. Quinney knew about her, liked and admired her, and told her so in his whimsical way. She liked and respected Quinney. Also, by an odd coincidence, Mrs. Frankland had begun her struggle for existence in London at the time when Quinney left Melchester. They had compared notes; each had undergone thwackings. When Mrs. Frankland began to make money she spent most of it at Quinneys'. Amongst other bits, she had bought a spinet--cheap. Accordingly, when Quinney entreated her to find a competent young woman, she generously offered him the pick of her establishment.

Mabel Dredge went with alacrity, glad to escape from a small table in a large room, not too well ventilated. She intended, from the first, to give satisfaction, to "hold down" the new job. She was tall and dark, with a clear, colourless skin, and a rather full-lipped mouth, which indicated appreciation of the good things in life. Mrs. Frankland had said to her:

"You will earn a bigger salary, Mabel, and Mr. Quinney won't make love to you."

Mabel Dredge smiled pensively. She could take care of herself, and she had no reason to suppose that she was susceptible. Men had made love to her, but they were the wrong men. She had refused kind invitations to lunch or dine at smart restaurants. When she walked home after the day's work she encountered smiles upon the faces of well-dressed loafers. No answering smile on her lips encouraged these dear-stalkers to address her. But, deep down in her heart, was a joyous and thrilling conviction that she was desirable. The male passers-by who did not smile aroused unhappy qualms. Was she losing her looks? Was she growing old? Could it be possible that she might die an old maid?

Upon the morning when she appeared in Soho Square Quinney sent for James. He said abruptly:

"James Miggott will show you round. If you want to know anything, go to him. Don't ask me foolish questions, because that makes me lose my hair; and I ain't got any to lose that way. See?"

"Certainly, sir."

"Dessay he'll tell you where you can get a plate of roast beef in the middle of the day, between one and two. You have an hour off then. What did Mrs. Frankland allow you?"

"Forty minutes."

"Just so. You'll find me easy to get along with, if you do your duty. James will tell you that I'm a remarkable man. I call him James, and I shall call you Mabel. It saves time, and time's money. You can scoot off with James."

The pair disappeared. Quinney's eyes twinkled. He was thinking of Susan, and recalling that memorable afternoon when he kissed her for the first time behind the parlour-door in Laburnum Row.

*II*

We have mentioned James Miggott's almost magical powers of transforming eighteenth-century spinets into desks and dressing-tables. These useful and ornamental pieces of furniture were sold as converted spinets, and they commanded a handsome price because the transformation was achieved with such consummate art. Even experts were at a loss to point out the difference between what was originally old and what had been added. James had access to Quinney's collection of mahogany--the broken chairs, tables, beds, doors, and bureaux which the little man had bought for a song of sixpence before mahogany leapt again into fashion. The collection had begun in Melchester, and Quinney was always adding to it. In it might be found exquisitely carved splats and rails and ball-and-claw legs, many of them by the hand of the great craftsmen--Chippendale, Sheraton, Hepplewhite, and Adam. One cellar and two attics were full of these interesting relics.

Shortly after James's appearance in Soho Square Quinney succumbed to the temptation of doctoring "cripples," which besets most honest dealers in antique furniture. He had, as we know, pledged himself not to sell faked specimens of china or faked old oak, except as such. And he had stuck to the strict letter of this promise, thereby securing many customers, and winning their confidence. It had paid him to be honest. With sorrowful reluctance we must give some account of his divagations from the straight and narrow way.

The temptation assailed Quinney with especial virulence, because "cripples" of high degree appealed to him quite as strongly as, let us say, a desperately injured sprig of nobility, battered to bits in a motor accident, may appeal to the skill and patience of a famous surgeon. When Quinney found a genuine Chippendale chair _in articulo mortis_, he could sit down and weep beside it. To restore it to health and beauty became a labour of love, almost a duty. He had not, of course, the technical skill for such work; and he had not found any cabinet-maker who was absolutely the equal of the Minihy man till he discovered James Miggott. The first important task assigned to James was the mending of an elaborately carved Chippendale settee, a museum piece. James threw his heart and his head into the job; and, within the year, that settee was sold at Christopher's, after examination by experts, as an untouched and perfect specimen. Quinney was no party to this fraud, for the settee had never belonged to him, but it opened his eyes to the possibilities of patching "cripples." And every week he was being offered these "cripples." The finest specimens, by the best craftsmen, are rare; the full sets of eight incomparable chairs, for instance, come but seldom into the open market. But the "cripples" may be found in any cottage in the kingdom, fallen from the high estate of some stately saloon to the attic of a servant.

Tom Tomlin was one of the very few who saw the Chippendale settee after James had restored it. Within a few days he attempted to lure the young man from Soho Square, but James refused an offer of a larger salary, and elected to stay with Quinney. Possibly he mistrusted Tomlin, whose general appearance was far from prepossessing. Tomlin, however, was not easily baffled. He seized an early opportunity of speaking privately to Quinney.

"Joe," he said, "this young feller is the goods. He can do the trick."

"Do what trick?"

Tomlin winked.

"Any trick, I take it, known to our trade. The very finest faker of old furniture I ever came across. Now, as between man and man, are you going to make a right and proper use of him?"

"What d'ye mean, Tom?"

"Tchah! You know well enough what I mean. Why beat about the bush with an old friend? Are you going to turn this young man loose amongst that old stuff you've collected?"

Quinney laughed, shaking his head.

"Am I going to let James Miggott fake up all that old stuff? No, by Gum! No!"

"But, damn it! Why not?"

"Several reasons. One'll do. I've sworn solemn not to sell fakes unless they're labelled as such."

"Of all the silly rot----"

"There it is."

Tomlin went away, but he returned next day, and asked for a glass of brown sherry. Quinney had one, too.

"I've a proposition to make," said Tomlin. "You've got a small gold mine in this Miggott, but you don't mean to work him properly. Well, let me do it."

"How?"

"Suppose I send you 'cripples' to be mended. Any objections to that?"

"None."

"This young Miggott mends 'em, and puts in his best licks on 'em too. Then you send 'em back to me."

"That all?"

Tomlin winked.

"Do you want to know any more? Is it your business to inquire what becomes of the stuff after you've doctored it? And, mind you, I shall pay high for the doctorin'. You leave that to me. You won't be disappointed with my cheques."

Let it be remembered, although we hold no brief for Quinney, that this subtle temptation assailed him shortly after his bludgeonings, when he was tingling with impatience to "get even" with the Londoners who had "downed" him.

In fine, he accepted Tomlin's offer.

Quinney has since confessed that at first he was very uneasy, honesty having become a pleasant and profitable habit. There were moments when he envied moral idiots like Tomlin, stout, smiling, red-faced sinners, who positively wallowed and gloried in sinfulness. Tomlin pursued pleasure upon any and every path. He went racing, attended football matches, was a patron of the Drama and the Ring, ate and drank immoderately, made no pretence of being faithful to Mrs. Tomlin, or honest with the majority of his customers. His amazing knowledge of Oriental porcelain had given him an international reputation. He never attempted to deceive the experts, and, in consequence, was quoted as a high authority in such papers as _The Collector_ and _Curios_. He knew exactly what his customers needed, and was the cleverest salesman in the kingdom. Less successful dealers affirmed that the devil took especial care of Tom Tomlin.

*III*

Quinney had no reason to complain of Tomlin's cheques. He knew that his old friend was being scrupulously square, and sharing big profits with him. Tomlin had customers from the Argentine, from the Brazils, from all parts of the earth where fortunes are made and spent swiftly. The "cripples" disappeared mysteriously, and were never heard of again. By this time Tomlin had moved to his famous premises in Bond Street. He had not achieved the position of Mr. Lark, because he lacked that great man's education and polish, but he was quite the equal of Mr. Bundy.

It is important to mention that Tomlin sent very few cripples to Soho Square. Nor were they delivered by his vans. They arrived unexpectedly from provincial towns; they were invariably authentic specimens, the finest "stuff." No understrapper beheld them. James carried them tenderly to his operating theatre, whence they emerged pale of complexion, but sound in limb. Daily massage followed, innumerable rubbings. Then Tomlin would drop in, and nudge Quinney, and chuckle. The two dealers would pull out their glasses and examine the patient with meticulous zeal. James would watch them with a slightly derisive smile upon his handsome face. At the end of his three years' engagement Quinney raised his salary to three pounds a week. The little man expected an extravagant expression of gratitude, but he didn't get it. At times James's smile puzzled him.

*IV*

Posy remained at Bexhill-on-Sea till she was eighteen. Her friendship for the Honeybuns had been slowly extinguished. Mrs. Honeybun, who mortified everything in her thin body except pride, refused peremptorily to see Posy against the expressed wish of her father. Posy wrote to Ethel long screeds answered with enthusiasm at first and then perfunctorily. At the end of the year the girls drifted apart.

Posy, however, made other friends. When she came home for her first holidays, Quinney and Susan conspired together to make things pleasant for her. She had plenty of pocket money. Susan and she went to many plays, many concerts, all the good shows. Quinney rubbed his hands and chuckled, but he declined to accompany them.

The two years of school passed with astonishing swiftness; and the improvement to Posy quickened a lively gratitude in Quinney to Lord Mel. She developed into a charming young woman, irresponsible as yet, but a joyous creature, easy to please and be pleased. Quinney was delighted with her. He told her solemnly:

"My poppet, you're a perfect lady; yes, you are."

Posy went into peals of laughter.

"Daddy, how funny you are!"

This talk took place upon the day that Posy said good-bye to her school-fellows, and returned home as a more or less finished product of the boarding-school system.

"Funny? Me? I don't feel funny, my pretty, when I look at you. I feel proud. One way and t'other I suppose you've cost me nigh upon four thousand pounds!"

"Daddy, dear! Not as much as that, surely?"

Quinney cocked his head at a sharp angle, while he computed certain sums.

"I figure it out in this way," he said slowly. "In hard cash you stand me in about fifteen hundred spread over the last ten years. Now, if I'd stuffed that amount into Waterford glass, I could have cleaned up five thousand at least. See?"

"I see," said Posy, and laughed again.

"The question now is," continued Quinney, absorbed in admiration of her delicate colouring, "what the 'ell am I going to do with such a fancy piece?"

"Father!" exclaimed Susan. "Do please try to remember that you're not talking to Mr. Tomlin."

"When I feel strongly," replied Quinney simply, "I just have to use strong language. Posy has come home to what?"

"She's come home, Joe. That's enough. Why bother about anything else?"

"Because I'm the bothering sort, old dear--that's why. I look ahead. I count my chickens before they're hatched."

Susan said slily:

"Yes, you made sure that this chicken was going to be hatched a boy."

The three laughed. It was a pleasant moment of compensation for long years of anxiety and toil. Each had worked for it. Posy had submitted, not without kickings and prickings, to strict discipline; Quinney, from the child's birth, had determined that the stream must rise higher than its source; Susan, serenely hopeful about the future, had worried unceasingly over the present, concerned about petty ailments, the putting on and off of suitable under-linen, and so forth.

"Don't bother about me, daddy; I'm all right."

"By Gum, you are! That's why I bother. In my experience it's the right bits that get smashed!"

*V*

Perhaps nobody was more surprised at the change in Posy than James Miggott. Hitherto the young lady, home for the holidays, had ignored him, not purposely--she was too kindhearted for that--but with a genuine unconsciousness of giving offence. He was part and parcel of what she least liked in her father's house, the shop. Not for an instant was she ashamed of being the daughter of a dealer in antiques, who owned a shop; what exasperated her was the conviction that the shop owned him, that he had become the slave of his business. The Honeybuns had rubbed into her plastic mind that the unpardonable sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost, the root-cause of ruin to nations and individuals, began and ended with the lust of accumulating material things. Nothing moved Mrs. Honeybun to more fervent and eloquent speech than the text: "Lay not up treasures upon earth!" At Bexhill-on-Sea Posy had heard this same injunction upon the lips of a local Chrysostom, to whom she listened enthusiastically every Sunday morning. The text had a personal application, because she never heard it, or a variant on it, without thinking of the sanctuary and her father's "gems," apostrophized by Susan as "sticks and stones." Posy admired beautiful things, but if they were very costly she seemed to have a curious fear of them. Before she was born, Susan had experienced strongly the same fear of her Joe's idols.

She was, however, discreet enough to conceal this from her father. He took her to Christopher's, where a miraculous piece of reticulated K'ang He was on exhibition, prior to sale. It was an incense-box decorated with figures of the eight Immortals in brilliant enamels. Metaphorically, Quinney went down on his knees before it. Next day he told Posy that it had fetched seven thousand guineas! He stared at her sharply, because she showed no enthusiasm.

James Miggott beheld her as Aphrodite fresh from the sea. Poor Mabel Dredge appeared sallow beside her, tired and spent after a hot July. Posy glowed. She was not insensible to the homage of admiring glances, and James, by the luck of things, happened to be the first good-looking man with whom she was thrown into intimate contact. Propinquity! What follies are committed in thy company!

She wondered why James's handsome face and manly figure had never impressed her before. She spoke to Susan about him with nonchalant vivacity:

"James is a power in this house."

"Yes, dear; your father thinks the world of him. He is a very good young man."

"Good? Now what do you mean by that?"

"Gracious! I hope you haven't inherited father's trick of asking questions."

"Is James pious?"

"Pious? He goes to church; he does his duty; he is to be trusted; he's a hard worker, and from what your father tells me, a real artist."

"An artist? Does he work for the love of his work?"

"I think he does."

Then and there Posy decided to cultivate James Miggott. He had excited the curiosity of an intelligent maiden. She found herself wondering what he did with himself when his work was done. Did he read? Had he any real friends? Was Miss Dredge a friend of his? What were his ambitions? The more she thought of him, the sorrier she became for him. Possibly he perceived this. Upon the rare occasions when they met, he was careful to assume a captivating air of melancholy, preserving conscientiously the right distance between them, scrupulously polite but somewhat indifferent to her advances, thereby piquing her to bolder efforts to bridge the distance. A woman of experience might have been justified in assuming that a man who could play so careful a game was no tyro at it.

This preliminary sparring lasted nearly two months.

*CHAPTER XV*

*AT WEYMOUTH*

*I*

Only lookers-on at the human comedy can be consistently philosophical. The drama is too exciting, too distracting to the players. When a man is chasing his hat along a gusty thoroughfare, he takes little heed of the headgear of others. Till now Posy's outlook had been girlishly critical. Her ideas and ideals were coloured or discoloured by the persons with whom she came in contact, but she was modest and sensible enough to realize that her experience of the big things of life was negligible. She had never suffered sharp pain either of mind or body. The death of her grandmother affected her subjectively. A familiar figure had been removed from her small circle. A landmark had vanished for ever. It was awful to reflect that her own mother might have been taken. She remembered an incident at school, the summoning of a girl about her own age, a chum, to the presence of the headmistress. The girl, to the wonder of all, had not returned to the class-room, but Posy saw her an hour later putting her things together for a long journey. The girl's face had changed terribly. In answer to the first eager question, she had said, drearily: "My mother is dead."

Posy burst into tears; the girl's eyes were dry. Then Posy stammered out: "Did you love her very much?" and the other laughed, actually laughed, as she replied: "Love her? She was all I had in the world!" This glimpse of a grief beyond tears was a unique experience, something which transcended imagination, and something, therefore, not fully absorbed. For many nights Posy was haunted by the vision of that white, drawn face, with its hungry, despairing expression; then it slowly faded away. By this time, also, she had almost forgotten the Honeybun stories of the submerged tenth. Bexhill breezes had blown them out of her mind. Somewhere in festering slums and alleys, men and women and children were fighting desperately against disease, poverty, and vice. Teachers had pointed out, with kindly common sense, that it would be morbid and futile to allow the mind to dwell upon conditions which, for the moment, a schoolgirl was powerless to ameliorate. With relief, Posy had purged her thoughts of such horrors.

And now her father raised the question--What was to be done with this fancy piece?

Posy answered that question after her own fashion. The Chrysostom aforesaid--excellent, practical parson!--had indicated a task. Under his teaching and preaching Posy had returned gladly enough to the fold of the Church of England. She no longer thought of Omnipotence as a vague essence permeating the universe. The Deity had become personal. Chrysostom, however, was too sensible a man to fill the minds of schoolgirls with doctrinal problems. He preached practical Christianity with sincerity and eloquence. The nail he hammered home into youthful pates was this: "Make the world a pleasanter place for others, and you will find it more pleasant for yourselves." The girls at Posy's school indulged in mild chaff over this dictum. Sweet seventeen admonished blushing sixteen to "Be a sunbeam!" Another catchword in frequent use was: "Save a smile for mother!"

Fired by the conviction that the sunbeam business paid handsome dividends, Posy returned to Soho Square. She intended to brighten the lives of everybody in the house, including the tweenie. That, for the moment, was to be her "job." She described the process as "binging 'em up."

And the member of her father's household who seemed to be most in need of "binging" happened to be James Miggott.

*II*

In August--she had left school for good at the end of the summer term--Posy and her mother went to Weymouth. Quinney did not accompany them. He said, jocularly, that he got all the change he needed travelling about the kingdom in search of "stuff." Business being at a low ebb in August, he selected that month for a general stocktaking, balancing of accounts, and the planning of an active autumn campaign. Mabel Dredge remained with him, a most capable assistant; James Miggott was told that he might spend three weeks wherever he pleased.