Chapter VII

On the day before her birthday, Nan reminded her father of that anniversary.

“It’s to-morrow,” she said; “have you forgotten?”

“No,” he answered, “nor have you. What do you want? Since you have not spoken before, I suppose it is nothing I have to buy: something in the house, is it?”

She shook her head, and he seemed pleased.

“That’s as well; I’d been ashamed of your taste if you had asked for that iron chest.”

And he would too, though he would have given it, if she had asked for it. As it was, he was so pleased she had not chosen it that he was ready to grant a large demand, should she make one. For a moment she hesitated. She had never come to him with any such request as she had to make this year, and she did not know how to sum it in one word.

“I want you to give me Michael Annarly,” she said at length.

“What!” he exclaimed. “What on earth do you mean?”

“I’ll try to explain. You know I told you he had got into difficulties with the people he worked with?”

He did: he probably knew quite as much about that as his brother-in-law at Hurstbury; possibly more, for Nan had told him, and she knew better how to convey things to her father than Michael did to his. He nodded now.

“What’s that got to do with it?” he asked.

“I’ll tell you. It’s like this, Michael cannot get any sort of post at present——”

“Naturally not; shouldn’t think he’d ever get one in his own line again, not one worth having, and I don’t suppose he’s much good for anything else. Go on.”

“That is where the present comes in,” Nan explained. “He can make drawings. I suppose it is mostly machine-drawings and things like that which he has done heretofore, but he could do details of furniture to scale and all that extremely well. I don’t mean he would be worth anything much to you on that account; but he could do it, and he could write letters and do some of what Josiah now does, and so leave him freer for other things, as you have often said lately you wished. What I want, is that you will let Michael have this work, and that you will let him live here to do it. That is what I want you to give me this birthday.”

“Oh?” said Barmister. “Oh, indeed, is it?”

It was an unexpected request, as unexpected as the one which had inaugurated the birthday custom, the desire of a child for a perfect specimen of old French cabinet work. He received it in much the same way that he had received the one of long ago, principally by looking sharply at the maker to gauge, if possible, what, consciously and unconsciously, prompted the asking. For a moment he sat thoughtful: not refusing, as a good business man should; nor conceding, as an indulgent father might. Now, as long ago, he paid his daughter the compliment of doing neither hastily; not regarding her choice as a passing whim. If he gave, or if he refused, he would do it with reason, or, at least, because he saw she had what she deemed reason for her request.

“Is this your idea, or his?” he asked at length.

“Mine; he knows nothing about it. I do not even know if he will agree to it.”

“H’m.” Barmister bit his finger thoughtfully. “Where does it lead to, and what is it for?” he asked.

“It will give him an opportunity of getting and doing other work after a time,” she said: “draughtsman’s work, the only thing allied to his original profession, there is a chance of his getting at present. He couldn’t get enough of that to live on for some while; but he could get some and do it out of work-hours if he had something to do to keep going on meanwhile. From that, other things would arise and develop in time.”

“I see,” Barmister said, and sat thoughtful again.

After a time he looked up. “Where do you come in?” he asked abruptly.

“I want it,” she answered: “I want that—what I have indicated—to happen.”

“Why? It’s no concern of yours.”

She was obliged to admit that, though it seemed a new idea to her. “I suppose it isn’t,” she said slowly; “but it somehow seems as if it were. You see, I happened to be the person there at the moment, that rainy afternoon when I first brought him here. I happened to be there when someone was wanted, as one might happen to be the person at hand in an accident. When that occurs, it seems as if the job were one’s own, don’t you think? It really is, too. Anyhow, I feel as if this were mine, and I were concerned in it.”

“H’m,” he said again, and no more.

For some time he sat considering, turning the matter in his mind. At length he spoke. “You can have it, if you like. Mind you, that’s not saying I think it sensible, or that what you’ve asked for is going to get you what you want, if that’s the reinstating of Michael Annarly. I have my doubts if anything would do that, after what has happened. I should say he has about done for his career. He’s been a fool, and if there’s one thing Nature abhors more than a vacuum, it’s a fool: Nature and Fate and everything else have a deal more use for knaves than fools, and let them off a deal cheaper. It’ll take a better man than you, or me, or him either to get over that business. Still, that’s neither here nor there: you aren’t asking me to make a job of Michael Annarly for a birthday present, and you aren’t asking me to think what you have asked for worth the having.”

“No,” Nan agreed, “I’m asking you to let Michael come here to work for a while, and to live with us while he does it.”

“You shall have it. On the understanding that I can take it back again if I want to, and when I want to, if I think it’s interfering with business—that’s to be understood.”

She said it was, and thanked him, and he dismissed her, saying he would to-morrow give her a letter to Michael offering him such a situation as she had described—unless he saw reason to change his mind during the night.

He did not change his mind. The next morning at breakfast she found the letter lying on her plate. It was a brief, businesslike letter, offering the specified employment on the condition that the recipient lived in the house so as to be there to do extra work at extra times when necessary. The terms were fair, but not liberal; and the method of expression formal. The offer was business, not philanthropy. But Nan was satisfied when she read it; it was what she wanted. During the morning she wrote to Michael, and enclosed the letter with her own. He might refuse or accept without damage to his self-respect, and without having to consider any damage to hers or her feelings. She was merely the medium in the matter. He could judge of the offer on its own merits, and see it fairly, and without any personal bias or glossing.

Seen so it must have shown extraordinarily bare to one who had done some of the finest work on one of the most complex subjects known to man; one who had been a recognised authority to be consulted and respected by persons of position and intelligence; one who, in spite of many jars and difficulties, had been considered and courted, as are few of his age, by important men, and still more by their subordinates. One, too, who, though always convinced of poverty, had come to look upon many luxuries as necessaries, and as such had them; and who, though not quite at one with it, had mixed as equal and as welcome guest in a well-bred society that accepted him as it found him. The offer was only to be inferior clerk and handy-man to a dealer in second-hand furniture; with the ultimate hope, by using all spare time, and, if Fate proved kind, of becoming a draughtsman, and doing the worst drudgery of the profession in which former pre-eminence had been won. The pay was small, the work was worth no more, and the society was _nil_: there was none in the old house in Soho. All these things must have been plain to Michael: he must have seen what was offered quite as it was. Yet he accepted it. The Monday after Nan’s twenty-sixth birthday found him in Soho.

Robert Barmister was not the easiest man to work for; he cared for nothing but work, and he dealt much with Jews, who also exalted it to the same place: his standards and demands on others, consequently, were high and exacting. Theoretically, he expected little of Michael, seeing the circumstances in which he employed him: practically, though he was not aware of it himself, he expected a great deal more than most would have expected of other and more qualified persons. He was a man of few words; he spared little speech to make his instructions clear; he had that impatience of ignorance which will not waste time explaining, and so demands unusual intelligence when comprehension is desirable. This did not matter with Josiah who had worked with him so long and so closely as to be almost a second, and gentler, self. But it did not make things easy for Michael, although, it must be owned, he himself used to evince some of the same unconscious intolerance in dealing with others. At Galhardy’s it had been to a good many people’s interest to understand what Michael Annarly meant, and to carry out his lightly indicated instructions—or to get someone more initiated to interpret them without disturbing him for explanation. Here the positions were reversed, and, in spite of the help of Josiah and Nan, he was often humiliatingly at sea until such time as native intelligence enabled him to understand the trivial but unfamiliar details.

In the main the work he had to do was trivial and mechanical; so narrow in circumstance, and so totally unsuited to him as might seem a lamentable waste of time and ability. He did not think of it that way: he did not think of it at all; he simply did what was before him without looking before or after. At least, it was much better than doing nothing at Hurstbury; and he could do it, which was something—there were moments when he doubted if he could do anything else, if he could ever do anything at all again. So he plodded with the unfamiliar tasks, giving exact attention to the careful drawing of chair-backs and kindred things, and learning what Robert Barmister’s brief orders and instructions meant in the course of the monotonous days. Once or twice he went to museums to make drawings of some specimen of furniture or detail of ornament which was to be reproduced. Once or twice he went to the warehouse of a fat Jew dealer for some similar purpose. The last was unpleasant: he was not used to being treated as an inferior by men of the Jew’s stamp, and every nerve in his body resented it; even while he was forced to admit himself inferior, not only in present position, but also in the special knowledge which alone was valued here. In the main, however, he had nothing acutely distasteful to do; there was nothing acute in any way.

Only once was he told to do that from which he shrank as impossible. It was on a Saturday afternoon. Nan had gone with him to one of the warehouse rooms to help him look for a Florentine mirror, concerning which her father had given instructions too slight for him to recognise it. She found the mirror, and observed, just below it, the iron chest she had bought the day she met him.

“It’s not sold yet, I see,” she said.

“What is not?” he asked.

She pointed it out to him; he had not seen it before.

“Why!” he exclaimed, “it’s like one the Carsons have.”

He had spoken before he was aware: had he been aware he would hardly have said it; he had a distaste for even so much as in any way referring to the past in these days. But the sight of the chest unexpectedly recalled the facsimile in the hall at Redstoke. He moved a little nearer as if to examine it, but really to recover himself. He was much more plainly seeing the other chest and the room; half hall, half billiard-room, where it stood—where he had told Lady Sibyl of his achievement that last night.

“They thought theirs the only one in England,” he said for the sake of saying something, and to cover, even from himself, how much the memory hurt. “They wanted another, but they have never been able to get one.”

“Who wants?” Barmister’s voice asked quickly. He was at the far end of the room, and had not been noticed by the other two; had hardly noticed them either until Michael’s words touched the mainspring of his interest. “Who is it wants a chest? Write and tell ’em I’ve got one. Write to-night to them, whoever they are.”

He moved away without waiting for an answer, which was perhaps as well, as Michael did not speak. The thing was impossible: he could not write to Lady Sibyl!

“I will write that letter,” Nan said quietly.

For a moment he felt relieved; next minute, however, he said, “Why should you? It’s good of you to bother, but it doesn’t matter; I am what I am, I should do the work of it. It is of no consequence really that it should happen to be these people, I have done with them—with all that. I shall never come across them again.”

“It matters in that it would make it more difficult for them to deal about the chest,” Nan answered. “Many people find it difficult to buy or sell when a friend or acquaintance is concerned in it. I bought the chest; I would like it sold well, and I think that is more probable if the writing of the letter was not recognised. Make a drawing, and I will write the letter.”

And she did, though whether her motive was the business one she alleged is open to doubt: this, at least, is certain, a service is often doubled by not seeming to be one.

So the letter was written; and, as a consequence, the chest was eventually dispatched to Redstoke. And Nan wrote the address-label for the packing-case, and the letter of advice of its dispatch, and everything else in connection with it. And in spite of what he had said, it did matter to Michael; for days after the chance recall of Lady Sibyl and the past there was an additional greyness in the world, an additional bitterness in failure and in Fate. But he lived it down; gradually it died again to apathy and patient acquiescence; but he avoided all mention of the Carsons’ name, all reference to the chest, and the price (a high one) for which it was sold.

The price for which Barmister sold things was always high; his profits may not have been quick, but they were usually large; he seldom made a mistake in what he bought, and never in what he sold. He was clearsighted and careful; in some respects careful to meanness; he never used a penny stamp where a halfpenny would do, or a whole sheet of paper where a half would serve. He had a way of trimming off the edges, a hole-and-corner manner of conducting his business very much at variance with the polished mahogany and plate-glass methods which obtained in all with which Michael had been concerned heretofore. In curious contrast too with the large, almost daring quality which characterised his dealing in some other ways. Probably, like his choice of living over his work, it was a survival from older times, when merchants wrote out their own bills, saved wax and firing, and ventured their thousands in hazards which would make their descendants tremble.

In several respects the life in the old house was related to that past time; dinner was at two there on Saturdays and Sundays, at half-past one, the nearest the exigencies of modern working hours would allow, on other days. There was cold supper late in the evening, often set at one end of a table—of great beauty—so as not to interrupt what might be doing at the other end. There was usually something doing, the polite art of doing nothing was unknown to the father and daughter, and they had practically no visitors to help them to it. Sometimes Barmister was busy with books or papers, or examining recently purchased treasures; sometimes he was at work downstairs in the room with the dolphin mantelpiece. Usually Nan sewed of an evening, not fancy work with clicking of pins or twitchings of silks and examining stitches, but plain sewing; a continuous, complete sort of occupation which yet allowed of talk when talk was pleasing, very tranquil.

Once only in the time before Christmas did an interruption occur to the daily order of things, and that was not unexpected, for it was a yearly happening. Every year on the 5th December, the anniversary of the day that Josiah first entered the business, the father and daughter went to spend the evening at the Foregoods. The custom had been begun long ago, in the time of the young wife, when the means of all were so straitened that a supper out was a real economy to the guests, and the getting of anything adequate to their hospitable instincts a real problem to the host and hostess.

This year Michael was invited to be of the party, and he accepted, though he did not want to. The last time he had been out by invitation was when he dined at Redstoke. If no recollection of that had occurred to incline him against this he would still have had a distaste for it; he shrank from meeting his fellow-creatures in any but business relations. He felt at first that he could not go. But he did, for Josiah asked him personally, and so tentatively that he did not know how to refuse without hurting. So he accepted, and Josiah’s simple and evident satisfaction made him feel a little ashamed.

“My brother, George, will be with us,” Josiah told him. “He’s a clever man, my brother, but I’m afraid you won’t quite like him.”

“Why not?” Michael asked. “I expect I shall.”

“I don’t think you will. He’s raspy, that is what he is; he has had a lot of trouble, and it has soured him. I dare say it would have soured me, if I had had it, I expect it would, it certainly has him.”

“Yes?” Michael said.

He did not feel particularly interested to hear of what sort the trouble was till Josiah said, “He’s a failure, you see.”

At that his attention was caught.

“I dare say I should have been a failure too,” Josiah went on. “I am sure I should if it had not been for Mr. Barmister; the males in our family are that kind, they haven’t much gumption, Janet says, and I think she’s right. I haven’t much, I know; and I don’t think George can have, though he has grit, plenty of grit, but he’s cantankerous with it. That is how the trouble began years ago; he fell out with his employers.”

“What was he by profession?” Michael asked.

“He was at some dye works originally,” his brother answered; “he was foreman-mechanic—he’s clever in a way—very clever. We both of us had rather a taste for machinery when we were boys: mine was nothing, only an interest in wheels and so on; it all went off in clocks.” His eyes wandered to the works of an old French clock which lay near him; clocks were his hobby. What he did not know of horology, ancient and modern, was little worth knowing; he fingered the French clock tenderly now. “George was not like me,” he said; “much cleverer. He had, I believe he still has, real ability. He invented an apparatus for ‘dyeing in the sliver,’ I think they call it, which was a very good thing; a lot of money has been made out of it.”

“Not by him, I suppose,” Michael said.

“No, that is what he quarrelled with his employers over. They gave him a five-pound note for his invention. Of course, they weren’t bound to give him anything, since he was their man, and the thing was done in their time, but it was likely to be worth a great deal to them, so he naturally expected something. Five pounds wasn’t much, certainly; still, I think myself George did the wrong thing about it. He tore it in half and threw it in the senior partner’s face, telling him what he thought of him. George uses rather strong language sometimes.”

“That must have been a surprise for the senior partner,” Michael observed. “What did he do?”

“Dismissed George on the spot,” Josiah answered, and probably would have gone on to give some further details of the inventor’s history had not an interruption occurred here.

On the 5th December, Michael had the opportunity of seeing the man himself. On that evening he and Nan and her father went to Bayswater. Nan wore her Sunday dress, a dark-coloured stuff dress, inconspicuous as usual—one never noticed what she wore or thought about her appearance at all. It was as well, perhaps, that her clothes were not fragile on this occasion, for it rained when they left the station, and Barmister did not take a cab. He never thought of indulging in such luxuries, and Nan accepted the doing without as a matter of course, nothing else had ever come her way.

The Foregoods’ house was very small, and always seemed smaller on these annual occasions, because the hall was so narrow that when Nan and her father were both in it there was little room for Josiah, who opened the door and had to squeeze himself behind it. This evening, Michael, being an extra person, had to stand on the doorstep until Nan had gone part of the way upstairs in answer to Miss Janet’s beckoning.

Miss Janet wore a dark green _moiré_ dress, which had graced many similar occasions, and was brought up to the requirements of a figure bigger than the one from whom it was inherited by inlets, in unexpected places, of a younger silk of a different shade. Not that anyone of taste would have quarrelled with the costume, it was so essentially suited to the wearer. Certainly, no one would have quarrelled with her as a hostess; she had the hospitality which is the prerogative of the good housewife, proudly giving of her best, and conscious that of its kind it is excellent. Excellent it certainly was: a simple supper, but in its way perfect, each article personally selected by one who thoroughly understood the subject and personally prepared with the same understanding. Miss Janet was frankly proud of it, although, as she herself was aware, the present company were not gourmets enough to appreciate it at its true worth.

“I don’t suppose you can tell me what we had this time last year,” she said; “not Mr. Barmister, nor Nan, nor Josiah, any more than Mr. Annarly and George, who weren’t here—though they wouldn’t know any better if they had been.”

Nobody could tell her, and Michael said, “I’m afraid I should only have remembered that it was very good; when things are that one does not recollect anything else, unless one is the maker and has been through the details and difficulties of manufacture—outsiders only enjoy and forget, which seems unfair.”

“If there wasn’t anything unfairer than that in the world, there wouldn’t be much to complain of,” George said gruffly, and without raising his fierce eyes. They were fierce eyes, and distrustful too; those of one foredoomed by Nature to fight on the losing side, but a person most would not seek to fight or contradict unnecessarily. Miss Janet had no such scruples: the man was yet to be found concerning whom she did have them, if she thought the occasion demanded contradiction or correction.

“Don’t be grumpy, George,” she said. “It isn’t unfairness people complain of principally; that’s not at the bottom of most people’s grumbling, though they may think it is, it’s their own temper and stupidity generally. Half the time when one’s food disagrees with one, it’s because one brings a sour stomach and a grievance to table.”

Having announced which, she returned to her original subject, and recalled other celebrations of the anniversary; not omitting the first of all, at which Nan, being too small, had not been present.

“I was left at home in charge of the landlady’s daughter,” Nan explained to Michael. “I remember she put me to bed, and I think she must have put me wrong, for I woke up after a little while and was frightened because I thought I heard someone scream downstairs. I screamed then in good earnest, and she had to leave her friend, the policeman, to come up and comfort me.”

“Serve her right,” was Miss Janet’s comment. “I have no doubt it was her giggling and squealing with him that woke you, poor child.”

“Maybe,” Nan said, “but I don’t think she wasted much time; I can remember being down in the kitchen after that, so I suppose she took me there. I wonder if I was much in the way of the courtship?”

“Not a bit,” said Miss Janet decidedly; “why, you wouldn’t be in the way now! In a very little you’d find them going on just as if you weren’t there.”

This may have been true, though perhaps not altogether flattering. Nan did not contradict it, and conversation went other ways, only returning to the subject of the anniversary when supper was over and a bottle of choice wine was put on the table. It was the annual custom to drink to the success of the business in the best that Josiah’s resources could afford; better than he could afford without deprivation in the early days. This year it was a port worth mention, and the toast was drunk with a very real meaning on the part of most. Afterwards, George Foregood, who had made no pretence of sharing the sentiment, proposed an addition.

“Better drink success to me too,” he said, “and damnation to Blackwell and Blackwell.”

Josiah lowered the glass he had raised. “Success, if you like,” he said, “not damnation.”

“Same thing,” his brother returned; “their damnation is my success: there isn’t another I care for.”

Josiah shook his head. “Pity,” he said. “It’s a pity. There isn’t much good trying to get even with people; it’s ‘spending your substance for nought, and your money for that which profiteth not.’ Besides, you never succeed in doing it really.”

“Depends on who you are,” George said shortly, and Nan pondered the subject.

“Perhaps a little on how much you are prepared to pay?” she suggested. “It might be like Samson and the Philistines: he pulled the house down on them, certainly, but on himself too. I suppose it was worth while to him?”

Josiah looked doubtful. “Perhaps so,” he said, “perhaps so. You always do have to pull down to get even with people; them down and often yourself down to the same level of dirty tricks, or injustice, or bad feeling, or something: it hardly seems worth it. You vindicate yourself that way, certainly, or you may—but it doesn’t seem much—just be able to stick out your chest and say, ‘You see, I’m right after all.’”

George did not agree, and said so emphatically. Barmister, who had been talking to Miss Janet, turned to give his curt, and a trifle contemptuous, opinion of those who ever allowed a score to accumulate to need avenging. Miss Janet and Nan left him doing so when they retired to the other room, where the re-covered chairs stood in a row, and the clocks of Josiah’s collecting ticked softly from brackets and shelves.

Nothing more was heard of George’s enterprise that night, though it was obvious, from what he had said, that he had an ambition set before himself which he hoped soon to accomplish. Michael rather wondered what it was: for the first time since the happenings at Galhardy’s he felt some small interest in a fellow-creature. On the next day, a Sunday, when he was out with Nan, he asked her about the man.

“George Foregood?” she said. “He hopes to ruin or, at all events, seriously damage the trade of his old employers. He has invented another apparatus, or else much improved the one he invented before, and it is so much better than the first that he believes the dyers who have it will easily get all the trade of those using the first. He has been years perfecting it. All the spare money he had has gone that way, and some of Josiah’s too, and what little he got with his wife. She is dead now, which is perhaps as well. I believe she was an unsatisfactory wife, and I’m sure he must have been a still more unsatisfactory husband.”

It was easy to believe this, Michael said; then asked, “Has he really perfected his invention now?”

“He thinks so,” Nan answered; “and done it with his own time and own money, so there can be no dispute about ownership. Now he is looking out for someone who will float it for him. He wants to make money out of it; but he is set, above all things, on his old employers suffering through it.”

“One can understand that,” Michael said.

Nan agreed, but added: “I’m not sure it’s wise. I don’t believe it’s really the best thing: rather grasping the shadow, don’t you think?”

She stopped by a stile as she spoke, and turned to him, though she was questioning herself more than him. They had taken the train a little way out of London, and were spending the short day in walking out into the country. They sometimes made such excursions on a Sunday. Rather bare excursions, perhaps; they had never enough money for any but third-class travelling, and never lunch at country inns, only sandwiches provided from home, and eaten under a southern hedge, or among trees; any shelter from the weather which could be found. But there was something in the expeditions: something akin to the quiet brown land and low sky, in a way tranquil and apart from ordinary life.

The landscape that day was soft-toned. Nan, leaning against the stile, looked out across bare fields, green and brown with a film of mist on them. Even the sun was meek, only a white shining in the higher haze. “I wonder,” she speculated, her eyes on a little copse, where some belated leaves still lingered—“I wonder if George will find it worth while?”

“To wipe off his score with those people?” Michael said. “I suppose so.”

“He will have given a good deal for it,” she said: “all his life; not only work, and time, and money, but most other things too. I doubt if it is worth it.”

“Nothing is,” Michael said wearily. “I sometimes doubt if anything is worth while.”

He offered a hand to help her over the stile as he spoke, and they went on together in silence.

It was one of her distinctive characteristics, her capacity for companionable silence: Michael came to value it a good deal on those Sunday excursions. There was usually an excursion on a Sunday. When, as sometimes, they could not afford the railway to the country, they went somewhere in town. Nan knew the City and its purlieus as few Londoners did, and they wandered down the deserted streets and into old forgotten corners, finding places little known and beauties not often recognised. Attending quiet City churches: old churches with their glories half obscured in the dim light of leaded windows and overshadowing buildings. Places where worshippers were few, and that few half lost in high, dark pews; and the clergy and sweet-voiced choir held the service, as of old, more for the glory of God than the edification of man. Strange, peaceful places, where a man may seek and, perhaps, find for himself something of the Mystery which lies behind the Universe.