Chapter I

It was a summer evening of the early eighties, and market-day in the ancient manufacturing town of Huddersfield, in the West Riding. The town is called a manufacturing town in the geographies, and its name may be found therein among the leading centres of the great cloth industry. As a matter of fact, though, to be sure, there are still some few mills in the lower quarters and outskirts of the town, and hard by the inky river that runs through it, the cloth for which Huddersfield is noted is manufactured for the most part in the adjacent villages, and the town itself is its central mart. On market-days the manufacturers of the rural districts, if rural is a term to be applied with any propriety to clusters of mills situate on lofty steeps, betake themselves to the town, attend the Cloth Market, or may be seen in their town warehouses or at the corners of the streets converging on the Cloth Hall, dine heavily at the market ordinary of their favourite hostelry, see their bankers and their lawyers, and not uncommonly, in the late afternoon, join their buxom wives or comely daughters at an accustomed rendezvous, assist in the weekly household shopping of their frugal dames, and by them are driven home in that outward and visible sign of commercial prosperity and social respectability, the family gig or trap. By the time the worthy owner of mill and loom is seated at his ample board, surrounded by his Lares and Penates, consuming the home-fed ham and domestic muffin, and quaffing his fragrant Souchong, his mill hands, male and female, donned in their second-best, have in their turn betaken themselves townwards to see the sights, and indulge the mild dissipation of strolling the streets, gazing in the shop-windows, making a modest purchase—it is then that the Phyllis of the loom buys for Corydon the meerschaum pipe he is afraid to smoke except on Sundays, and that Corydon wastes his substance on sweet-meats for the ripe lips of his charmer. Or maybe Phyllis and Corydon, amorously-linked, seek the pit-door of the town theatre to suck oranges and furtive peppermints, whilst the buskined villain struts upon the none too ample stage and declaims his stilted speech.

It was, then, about eight of the evening of a certain Summer market-day when two young men, arm in arm, lounged leisurely past the Market Place, and stopped for no other reason than to see why others had stopped, for a small and shifting crowd had gathered round the base of the Market Cross, and were giving, some a rapt and sustained attention, others but the brief hearing of a soon-sated curiosity to a speaker standing upon the Cross’s pedestal. The audience were, for the most part, of young and little heedful holiday-makers, who took the speaking as part of their outing, and one of the many wonderful things to be heard of market-days, and to be mused upon at leisure, amid the clack of the loom and the hum of the revolving wheels, or discussed in the interchange of feminine experiences for which the all too brief dinner-hour avails.

There was, however, a fringe of the more serious-minded, who listened to the speaker with solemn attention, and regarded her with respectful appreciation. These, one may surmise, were in their several homes Sunday-school teachers or chapel members themselves, with some experience of spiritual exhorting, and feeling under some compulsion to lend their countenance, if only, by the way, even to an unauthorised Evangelist. Nearer to the speaker stood a body of men and women, some with cymbals or other instruments of music or of noise, wearing the scarlet tunic and German-band cap, or the close-fitting serge costume and coal-scuttle bonnet by which the gentler soldiers of the Salvation Army seek to conceal what fairness of feature it has pleased the good God to give them.

These militant believers served not only as a body-guard of the central figure of the gathering, but as a chorus; a stalwart, rugged-featured soldier, whose secular calling was the ungentle craft of a butcher, evoking an occasional subdued note from the drum he beat o’ nights to the praise and glory of God; whilst a neat and modest maiden, once the slattern scullery-maid of the Red Lion, gently tinkled a tambourine, that served also as a collection-box for stray coppers earnestly entreated; and their brethren of both sexes punctuated the address of their leader by fervent “Amens,” “Glorys,” and “Hallelujahs,” ejaculated at frequent intervals and interspersed with as little regard to their appropriateness to the spoken word as a ’prentice compositor displays in the sprinkling of his commas in the printed line.

The speaker, to whom all faces were turned, was young and of a rare beauty. Her features were of Grecian cast, her eye of a soft, dark violet hue, her lips of that Cupid arch so seldom seen, her complexion pure, and suffused now with the glow of health or excitement, and her wealth of rippling hair was of dark chestnut hue, just touched by the parting rays of the westerning sun as it declined behind the roofs of the Bank on the opposite side of New Street, off which the Market Place stood. Her dress was of blue serge, fitting closely to a form of just proportions and unrelieved by any kind of ornament, unless a small cross of chased silver suspended round the neck might deserve the term. The hand, which was occasionally moved to emphasise a sentence or point a remark, was white and soft and well-formed. The voice in which she spoke was soft, sweet, pure, musical, almost caressing; her diction the chaste speech of education and refinement.

_“Que diable, fait-elle dans cette galère?”_ muttered Edward Beaumont to his companion, as the two young men above-mentioned lingered on the fringe of the crowd.

“Oh! it’s one of that Salvation Army lot,” replied his friend, Sam Storth. “Come along, Beaumont. The usual thing, you know: hell and brimstone, blood and fire, and a collection.”

“Poachers on the preserves of the Church, eh, Sam? Well, you’ll admit the saint is pretty enough for a sinner. Let us listen.”

Sam Storth shrugged his shoulders, stretched his little legs apart, thrust his hands into his trousers’ pockets, yawned drearily, and fixed his big and bulging eyes upon the speaker, eyeing her beauty with the calmly critical survey he was wont to bestow upon the Coryphées of the local ballet. Edward Beaumont, whom two or three of the more respectably clad of the audience recognised and saluted, turned to the speaker with respectful and serious attention, already repenting of his jesting allusion to her good looks.

“Dear friends,” the girl was saying, as Beaumont and Storth joined the crowd, “believe me, we plead with you for your good. I cannot think it right so many of you should lead the lives you do. Some of you, I fear, live very far apart from Christ, living only, as it were, that you may continue to live. All your efforts, all your anxieties, are summed up in that—to continue to live. If you can live honestly you are the more content, because you do not like the risks of dishonesty. If you are unhappily compelled to live meanly, meagrely, you put up with it as best you may, hoping, for a turn of your luck. If you are not so compelled how do you show your gratitude to the Almighty giver and disposer? By faring sumptuously every day, caring only for raiment and fine linen, for dainty dishes, good cheer, soft living. Perhaps you are of the foolish ones that cannot be quite happy without the envy of your neighbours. Then you spend your money upon vanities that give you no real pleasure, except the poor delight of making someone jealous of your good fortune. You work very hard to get more money than you have any need for to buy luxuries that are hurtful to you body and soul. You are really very foolish so to waste this precious life in vain strivings. How much of the misery and poverty of this world are caused because one man conceives he cannot be happy till he has amassed a large fortune. It does not seem to matter to him that the price of his wealth is the abject misery of many whom in church on Sundays he calls his brothers. So have I seen a greedy pig snouting in the trough long after he has eaten his fill, and pushing aside some half-starved weakling of the same litter. The vaunted brotherhood of man is like that. Do you think that you have solved all problems when you have spoken glibly of supply and demand, or this new doctrine of the survival of the fittest? Methinks I see one of your sleek manufacturers, an alderman, maybe, perhaps a magistrate. He is well clad, housed sumptuously; he has money always at command, enough and to spare. I can fancy how sweet to him must be that smooth saying, ‘the survival of the fittest.’ Pshaw! The man mistakes a letter. He means the survival of the fattest. Do you think Jesus Christ died for the survival of the fittest, for the sacred law of supply and demand? It seems to me that the fittest do not survive. They are _too_ fit, and the world crucifies them. That is the world’s way of dealing with the fittest. No! Jesus taught a very different doctrine, and His teaching will square with that of neither your Huxleys nor your Spencers, and still less will it square with your consecrated supply and demand. You have tried to carry on the world with theories of men’s devising. Are you satisfied with the result? Does Dives enjoy his dinner the more because he has perforce heard the moans of Lazarus at his gate? Is anybody who has a head to think and eyes to see and a heart to feel content with things as they now are? Oh, no! They tell me you people in Huddersfield are great Radicals and are going to set everything right by Act of Parliament. Well, you have tried Parliament tinkering a many centuries. Is the world so very much better for your Acts of Parliament? Don’t you think it is time to try a little of Christ’s doctrine? And Christ’s doctrine means what? In a word, Christ’s doctrine is Christ living. But you profess Christ on Sunday. Where do you put Him on Monday? On the shelf with the Family Bible. He is too sacred a Being, you think, perhaps, for the mill, the warehouse, the shop.

“Christ, I think, meant that the lives of the people should be more joyous, more free from carking care, from grinding poverty. I cannot think Christ meant the world should always have its Dives and always its Lazarus. Surely there is a happy board of solid comfort midway between the insolent ostentation and sinful waste of the rich man’s table, and the floor on which the dogs fight for the fallen crumbs. Let us find that happy mean, and there will be more of the brotherhood of man and more kinship with Christ.

“But you tell me that a working-man has only one use for good wages—to spend his superfluity in drink. I know full well how prone so many are to besot themselves with drink. But you—” and here the speaker looked full at Beaumont and the other well-dressed men, now not a few, who stood on the skirts of the growing gathering, “you who have never known want can scarcely credit me if I tell you that the most part of the fearful, sickening drunkenness of the people comes not from too much money, but from too little. When people are stupefied by drink they forget for a time their hunger, their rags, their mean, despicable condition, their empty, dirty homes, their squalid courts, their unkempt children, their slattern wives, in a word, they lose their real selves and become for an hour or two _your_ equals. A drunken man is only dreaming with his eyes open, and when the waking life is so cold, so bare, so unlovely, do you wonder that men love to dream?

“Do I then excuse drunkenness? God forbid. Nay, rather do I plead with all that they should quit the accursed thing and not purchase for themselves that Fool’s Paradise, so costly, and from which they awake to find the world still harder. But I am here to-night to plead with all who may hear me, rich or poor, high or low, master or man, to try to live in all things the Christ-life. There are miserable sinners enough besides the poor drunkard. I daresay some of you have stopped to listen just on purpose to hear the faults and vices of the very poor and very lost denounced. It is soothing, no doubt, to see other people soundly trounced, to hear vices _we_ haven’t got, and imagine we are never likely to have, scathingly lashed. But I think we’ll let the _poor_ sinner have a rest to-night. There are sins in high as well as in low places, and first and foremost I count the sin and folly of setting all your heart and all your mind on the mad haste to be rich, caring to stand well with the world, to have the seat of honour at the feast, to surround yourself with all the garb and trappings of wealth—in a word, to get on. It is a mean and paltry ambition. Who are you that you should want to thrust yourself head and shoulders above your fellows? When the final judgment comes, what will it avail you to have piled up riches and be driven to church in a carriage and pair.

“I tell you, there are a few other matters that will have to be inquired into there—”

“Oh! come along, Beaumont,” said Storth, “we’ve had about enough of this bally rot. Canting humbug, I call it. Chuck the girl a bob, and let’s slide,” and he flung the silver coin towards the tambourine of Happy Sal and moved away. Beaumont flung no coin, but, raising his hat, followed his companion.

“I’d have liked to hear the end of it, Storth,” he said. “The young lady, for she’s that you can see with half an eye, has tackled a big subject. I fancy that’s not the usual kind of Salvation Army harangue. If it is, I think I must hunt up their barracks.”

“A lot of blooming nonsense, I call it. That is so far as I could understand what the dickens the girl was driving at. But I say, though, if she’s a fair sample of Salvation Army lasses, I think I’ll put in an hour or two at the Barracks myself. Face like a Mary Magdalene, hasn’t she? ’Spose that’s about the time of day with her, eh, Beaumont?”

“You’ll have to read faces better than that, Sam, or you’ll never be any good in Court,” said Beaumont. “Do you believe in anything or anybody? Is there no good thing under the sun?”

“Believe in anything or anybody? Rather. Not many bodies, but a good many things. I believe in Sam Storth. I’ve a very great respect for him too, and mean to do him well. I believe in a good dinner, and if somebody else is fool enough to pay for it, that won’t spoil my appetite, you bet. I believe in good wine, and it won’t break my heart if it comes out of your or any other fellow’s cellar, and if I can’t get good wine at your expense, I’ll be thankful for good beer at my own. There’s a very good tap of it at the Royal, let me tell you. And I believe in good clothes, and I’d rather drive than walk. Third-class riding’s better than first-class walking, let me tell you. And I like a good play, not Shakespeare, you know, nor anything classic, but something you can take easy, with plenty of leg in it, don’t you know! And I like a pretty girl, too, but not enough to chuck myself away on one, and I like a coin or two in an old stocking, for I’ve an eye for a rainy day, and don’t mean to be out in the wet when it comes. There, that’s about my _credo_, Beaumont, and if I can only get a fair share of what I want, there isn’t a heartier singer of the doxology in church than yours truly.”

“You’re a Sybarite, Sam, a frankly brutal sensualist. Well, I give you credit for making no pretences. You aren’t a hypocrite anyway.”

“It isn’t worth while with you, Beaumont. There’s nothing to be got out of you by make-believe. But I can pull a long face and snivel and turn up the whites of my eyes and groan on occasion. It’s in the family, you know. But I’m not paid for doing it. My uncle is. That’s all the difference. But here we are at the club. Don’t think I’ll go in just yet. I’ll do a half-time at the theatre. So long.”

Beaumont entered the reading-room of the club. There was no library in this feeble imitation of a London club. He took up the current number of the “Nineteenth Century Review.” He had to cut its leaves. The members of the club, manufacturers, merchants, and the larger shopkeepers preferred to have their monthlies boiled down for them by Mr. Stead in the “Review of Reviews.” But Edward could not concentrate his mind on the weighty problems discussed by the sages of the century. His thoughts wandered to the scene in the Market Place.

“Which is right,” he mused, “that girl or Sam? The girl, of course. But am I any better, _au fond_, than Storth, the epicurean little beast? Is there any difference between us, except that he is honest with himself? I spend my leisure in political agitation, and rather plume myself on being a Town Councillor and Vice-President of the Liberal Two Hundred at twenty-four, and would rather any day wag my tongue on a public platform for nothing than earn a couple of guineas by exercising the same useful member in the County Court or Police Court. But do I really care for the political reforms for which I agitate, and am I really indignant at the wrongs about which I wax eloquent? How much of my wrath against the House of Lords, I wonder, arises from the fact that I am not myself the ‘tenth transmitter of a foolish face?’ When I thunder against the iniquity of a restricted franchise, is it not, perhaps, mainly because it tickles my ears to hear the answering plaudits of the great unfranchised? Sam Storth likes soft living, and says so, and in that he is honest. I like _monstrari digito et diceri hic Niger est_. But I call my liking public spirit, intelligent Liberalism, and look to be, and indeed am, patted on the back for it by others and myself. His liking I call sensuality and scorn. But aren’t his ways and my ways equally a self-gratification in different forms? Now, that girl does really seem to care for people. I’ll be bound she feels like a sister to the poor wretches of the slums. There’s a screw loose with you somewhere, Edward, my boy. What’s the matter with you? That girl’s got religion. She believes in Christ. Curious; but I’ll bet she does. What a facility women have for accepting myths for facts. The clear, cold light of science is a grand thing, but I sometimes feel inclined to say, ‘Hang the clear, cold light of science.’ Heigho! the ‘Nineteenth’s’ deadly dull, and the ‘Contemporary’ attain a deeper depth of Bœotian opacity. I wonder if I can cut in at a rubber.” And Beaumont threw his magazine aside and ascended to the higher regions of the Club, where two or three rooms were set aside for the devotees of whist, nap and poker.

Edward Beaumont and Sam Storth, though both solicitors, and partners in the practice of a much and perhaps undeservedly abused profession, were in almost every particular in which men may be compared or contrasted as dissimilar as two men may well be. Beaumont was a native of Huddersfield, and his family connections with the town and district were numerous and intricate. The Beaumonts of that vicinity are a numerous progeny, and may be found in every calling, in every trade and every craft. The Squire of White Meadows is a Beaumont, and traces an unbroken line of descent from one of the most intrepid of the Crusaders, whose effigy may be seen to this day in the small, time-worn church on the ancestral domain. The Beaumonts, or de Bellomontes, were, aforetime, lords of the manor of Huddersfield itself, but that position passed from them many centuries ago. Whether or no our Edward Beaumont was of the Beaumonts of White Meadows is a matter which Edward himself affected to regard as of absolutely no importance. His father had been, like himself, a solicitor, and had founded the present firm of Beaumont and Storth. His grandfather had been a cloth manufacturer, and as to his great grandfather, Edward declared that he, too, had been either a cloth manufacturer of the smallest, or, more likely, a handloom weaver of a saving disposition. As in Huddersfield it is quite exceptional for anyone to be able to refer to a grandfather at all, Edward could very well afford to affect indifference on the score of his great grand-sire’s status.

If looks go for anything Beaumont might certainly have pretended to aristocratic lineage. He was tall above the ordinary, and well proportioned, his frame well-knit and active, his features regular, his hair abundant, of the hue of the raven, and with the natural sheen of perfect health. His eyes, well shaped, were dark and full of fire and expression. He had a well-formed mouth, mobile lips, of that fullness that may betoken either the orator, the poet, or the sensualist, a rounded, dimpled chin, the long White hand commonly supposed to be indicative of gentle birth. But the tips of the fingers were square rather than finely pointed, a trait which a palmist had assured him indicated stubborness of character or resoluteness of will, but which Edward asserted more probably suggested that one of his female ancestors had been engaged in the manual exercise of “twisting,” one of the many processes of cloth manufacture, and one eminently calculated to stub the fingers of the artist.

Edward Beaumont had been carefully educated, and had taken to books like a duck to water. His natural aptitude and facility of apprehension made his studies easy to him, and though no one who knows what is properly implied in the term scholarship, would have called him a scholar, he had taken a fair degree at his University, at that time a somewhat uncommon attainment in the lower branch of the legal profession, and could no doubt hold his own indifferent will among other educated gentlemen. He was reputed to be a sound and careful lawyer, when he could be induced to take the necessary trouble, but none questioned that he was always a ready one, and it is not, therefore, surprising that he preferred the change and excitement and rivalry of the Courts to the more prosaic and monotonous and retired, if also more profitable, exercise of the dreary art of conveyancing. The same alertness of mind and nimbleness of speech that served him well in the forum inclined him to the political platform, and already he was a warm favourite of the working-classes at the meetings under the auspices of the Liberal Party with which the adults of the West Riding beguile the tedium of the winter months. Edward was wont to declare that he had imbibed Radicalism with his mother’s milk, and certain it is he could point with equal truth and pride to more than one of his relations who had suffered in the popular cause. His partner Sam Storth, used to complain that Edward’s political engagements took him a great deal away from the office, and if Edward laughingly pleaded that his public appearances were a capital advertisement of the firm, his more sagacious partner retorted that Edward’s “clap-trap clientèle,” as he was pleased to stigmatise it, wasn’t worth half the time it took to attend to it, and that for every decent client Beaumont’s Radicalism attracted it frightened a dozen better ones away.

“Depend upon it, Beaumont,” he said one day, “Leatham’s is the right tip.”

Now, Mr. Leatham was the respected member for Huddersfield, and sat, of course, in the Liberal interest.

“Expound, most sapient Sam,” said Edward.

“Why, somebody said to him the other day, ‘How is it you never take your seat on the Borough Bench when you’re in town?’ _‘Pas si bete,’_ replied Leatham; ‘every time I fine a man or send one down I make at least one enemy, and they count at elections.’ So it is with your informal spouting, Beaumont. You make a lot of admirers, perhaps, among a lot of greasy, dirty, unwashed mill-hands, who shout themselves hoarse about a policy they don’t understand, and they bring you a dirty, greasy guinea or so if they get into trouble with an equally dirty, greasy mill-girl. But who prepares the conveyances and mortgages and settlements for the big-pots? We don’t, anyhow. Why! Leatham himself takes his work to that sheaf of parchment skins, old Heatherington, who has consistently voted against him ever since he first contested the borough. Politics don’t pay, Beaumont, at least, not your sort.”

“Ah! well, Sam, suppose we say I like ’em. I think they’re my only serious dissipation. You know I don’t go in much for beer and skittles, and am bored at a ballet. Supposing we call politics my little vice. You don’t want them all yourself, Sam.”

Certainly no one could with justice accuse Sam Storth of having any enthusiasms political or otherwise. He called himself a Conservative, and plumed himself on his gentility, and had undoubtedly an uncle in holy orders, to whom, on occasion, he would casually allude. He chose his associates, so far as he could, among the _jeunesse doree_ of the wealthy manufacturers and merchants of the town, who patronised a Bond Street tailor—“can’t get a decent cut in the country, don’t you know,”—were much concerned about the fit of their boots and the colour of their ties and gloves; affected a languid drawl, crawled on the sunny side of New Street of a Saturday morning, found life a “doosid bore,” avoided a reference to the paternal mill or counting-house themselves, and thought any such reference by others uncommon bad form; held commissions in the Yeomanry or Volunteers and were rigorous in the use of their pseudo… military titles in season and out of season; had a club of their own, from which the retailer of the goods their fathers manufactured were jealously excluded; and, in a word, were as innocent a set of sucking young snobs, without knowing it, as one could well wish to encounter. As Storth had lived much in London before condescending upon Huddersfield, he was rather a favourite at this club, though he had to surmount a certain amount of prejudice arising from his connection with that low Radical chap, Beaumont.

In person, the junior partner of the firm of Beaumont and Storth was small, stout and stodgy, with a broad, flat nose, and eyes that a disparaging critic had likened to boiled onions. In address he was suavely deferential to the verge of obsequiousness to the local magnates, who liked the implied homage of his voice and look, and voted him a sensible young fellow who knew his place. In revenge for his own lackeydom he bullied and swore at his clerks and the waiters and the billiard-markers who ministered to his needs, and they, too, no doubt, had their opinion of Mr. Sam Storth. He was careful in his dress, without being an exquisite, took in the “Daily Telegraph” and “Bell’s Life,” affected a patriotic interest in the national sport, and played a very judicious hand at whist and other games, as the young nabobs of the club knew to their cost. He had the reputation, in a darkly, mysterious way, of being somewhat of a Lothario among the women, and it was known that he had access to the green-room of the local theatre. But if, indeed, Sam were a sad dog, of which this veracious history alleges nothing, he was a very discreet sad dog, and never imperilled his reputation by any open indiscretion. He was careful, too, to attend church every Sunday morning, and uttered the responses with that modulated fervour that is the hall-mark of good breeding, having neither the perfunctoriness of custom or inattention nor the warmth of spiritual exaltation.

How two men so diverse as Edward Beaumont and Sam Storth came to be partners in the same business had puzzled many, but the explanation was simple enough. Beaumont had been in want of a managing clerk, and a mutual acquaintance had recommended Storth as a safe chamber-man, and a safe chamber-man or desk-lawyer Storth proved himself to be. He made no pretence of knowing more law than had sufficed to satisfy the not very exacting examiners of Carey Street; but he had a very considerable endowment of the not very common faculty called common-sense.

“Law, sir,” was Storth’s favourite axiom, delivered oracularly, “law is the embodiment of common-sense,” and though the reader can scarcely be expected to believe it, Common law is largely common-sense. At all events with common-sense and a tincture of technicalities and a very considerable knowledge of the shady side of human nature, and a very small opinion of that nature in the general. Storth’s did very well the kind of work that Beaumont wanted him for, and left that somewhat fastidious young gentleman free to lift his voice in the courts without being harassed by the petty details of a lawyer’s practice. Beaumont thought Sam a soulless little animal, but shrewd and steady; Storth thought Beaumont a stuck-up enthusiast with a bee in his bonnet, but a good hand with a brief, and as they saw very little of each other except business hours, there was little friction in the busy office of the well-established and prosperous firm of Beaumont and Storth.

But if there was no friction there was no cordiality between the partners. Beaumont’s attitude to Storth was almost of good-humoured contempt. Storth retaliated with undisguised scorn for his partner’s unpracticability and want of worldly wisdom.

“What do you want sitting in the Town Council?” he grumbled at times. “There’s no honour in it. Why, hang it, the barber fellow that shaves me sits on the Town Council.”

“And a very good councillor he makes, too. Why not? Does he shave you any the worse for being on the Council. I’m sure his opinion on matters municipal is none the worse for his being a barber. Shaving is really, if you think of the matter dispassionately, a most reputable occupation. The profession of a barber, you cannot call it a trade, is an ancient and an honourable one. It was formerly, as you know connected with the profession of a surgeon. Probably the barbers cut the surgeons, and that led to a split. But if you reflect you will see that most exceptional qualities are required by a good barber. Sobriety is indispensable cleanliness, which everyone knows to be nearer to godliness than many people attain, some degree of polish and a pleasing loquacity and an intelligent acquaintance with the topics of the day. People trust their barber more than their lawyer, for would you offer your bared throat to anyone armed with a deadly weapon, unless you had the supremest confidence in him? Surely we can confide the gas-pipes and water-pipes of a town to a man to whom we entrust our own wind-pipes. I protest your barber is a most inestimable profession brother.”

“Oh! dry up,” said Storth, “you aren’t in court now. Beaumont, I say again, you get neither profit nor _kudos_ from being in the Council, and it takes up a lot of your time. But that’s a small matter. Do you think, now, it will add to your professional or social status or do you or the office a blessed scintilla of good, to take the chair for that fellow Bradlaugh, as I see you are advertised to do?”

“That fellow Bradlaugh, as you are pleased to call him, is worth half-a-dozen such respectabilities as either you or I, Sam. In mere ability as a lawyer he is worth a round dozen of us lumped together. But he is more than that, he is a very fair scholar, though entirely self-educated. He has done more for his brains and with his brains than many do who have had hundreds of pounds spent upon their education by fond parents. He has not only brains but a conscience; he might have earned a fat living as a lawyer or a parson. He has not only a conscience but a character, and a good one, too, and besides all that, he’s the elected member for Northampton, has as much right legally to sit for that borough as Churchill has for Woodstock, and a great deal better right morally.”

“The man’s an atheist,” said Storth.

“I don’t know that he is; but even so, that’s his concern and Northampton’s. What are you, Sam? What, indeed, is anyone of us that we should throw stones at such a man as Bradlaugh?”

“Well, I call myself a Christian and I rather flatter myself I am one, at least, an indifferent one,” replied Sam. “I don’t set up for a saint, of course.”

“I should think not, indeed.” replied Beaumont, smiling, as he recalled certain gossip that had floated from the _coulisses_ of the theatre to the club. “I Suppose you fancy yourself what we may call a so-so Christian. So are we all, so-so Christians. Why, man alive, I’d guarantee to empty any church in Christendom simply by preaching Christianity in it. I mean the pure, unadulterated article, as Jesus of Nazareth is reported to have preached it, not as it is watered down to suit the weak stomachs of your latter-day saints, or more likely to square with our conceptions of social necessity.”

“Look here, Beaumont;” Storth said, stretching his arms lazily and yawning long and loud, “I’m not going to be drawn into an argument on theology with you. I’d almost said another member of our illustrious family attends to that department. But I don’t think you’d catch the Rev. Jacob arguing about it, either. He’s far too downy for that. It pays better to treat matters you’re paid to believe as beyond question, and a man who questions them as a moral leper. Now, I don’t say you’re a moral leper any more than I say I’m a saint. But I do say that, from a business point of view, it’s just as bad to be thought one as to be one; worse, in fact, for you get damned as a sinner without the fun of the sin.”

“Oh, Sam, you’re just incorrigible. I’ve said in my haste you believe in nothing. But you do believe in Mrs. Grundy.”

“I do,” said Storth, devoutly. “Great is the Grundy of the British Philistine.”

“Hang the fellow, with his affectation of being so superior to another fellow,” he added to himself. “Mind you don’t carry your head so high in the clouds, Master Edward, that you trip and fall over a very little obstacle, and if that obstacle’s Sam Storth thank your own infernal folly. I’ll back common-sense against ideals any day, and if you’ll allow me the one. You’re welcome to my share of the other.”