Helen with the High Hand Part 16

CHAPTER XV

THE GIFT

After that night great-stepuncle James became more than a celebrity--he became a notoriety in Bursley. Had it not been for the personal influence of Mrs. Prockter with the editor of the _Signal_, James's exploits upon the concertina under weeping willows at midnight would have received facetious comment in the weekly column of gossip that appears in the great daily organ of the Five Towns on Sat.u.r.days. James, aided by nothing but a gla.s.s or two of champagne, had suddenly stepped into the forefront of the town's life. He was a card. He rather liked being a card.

But within his own heart the triumph and glory of James Ollerenshaw were less splendid than outside it. Helen, apparently ashamed of having wept into his waistcoat, kept him off with a kind of a rod of stiff politeness. He could not get near her, and for at least two reasons he was anxious to get near her. He wanted to have that frank, confidential talk with her about the general imbecility of her adorer, Emanuel Prockter--that talk which he had failed to begin on the morning when she had been so sympathetic concerning his difficulties in collecting a large income. Her movements from day to day were mysterious. Facts pointed to the probability that she and Emanuel were seeing each other with no undue publicity. And yet, despite facts, despite her behaviour at the party, he could scarcely believe that shrewd Helen had not pierced the skin of Emanuel and perceived the emptiness therein. At any rate, Emanuel had not repeated his visit to the house. The only visitors had been Sarah Swetnam and her sister Lilian, the fiancee of Andrew Dean. The chatter of the three girls had struck James as being almost hysterically gay. But in the evening Helen was very gloomy, and he fancied a certain redness in her eyes. Though Helen was a.s.suredly the last woman in the world to cry, she had, beyond doubt, cried once, and he now suspected her of another weeping.

Even more detrimental to his triumph in his own heart was the affair of the ten-pound note, which she had stolen (or abstracted if you will) and then restored to him with such dramatic haughtiness. That ten pounds was an awful trial to him. It rankled, not only with him, but (he felt sure) with her. Still, if she had her pride, he also had his. He reckoned that she had not rightly behaved in taking the note without his permission, and that in returning the full sum, and pretending that he had made it necessary for her to run the house on her own money, she had treated him meanly. The truth was, she had wounded him--again. Instincts of astounding generosity were budding in him, but he was determined to await an advance from her. He gave her money for housekeeping, within moderation, and nothing more.

Then one evening she announced that the morrow would be her birthday.

James felt uneasy. He had never given birthday presents, but he well knew that presents were the correct things on birthdays. He went to bed in a state of the most absurd and causeless mental disturbance. He did not know what to do. Whereas it was enormously obvious what to do.

He woke up about one o'clock, and reflected, with an air of discovery: "Her tone was extremely friendly when she told me it was her birthday to-morrow. She meant it as an advance. I shall take it as an advance."

About half-past one he said to himself: "I'll give her a guinea to spend as she likes." It did genuinely seem to him a vast sum. A guinea to fritter away!

However, towards three o'clock its vastness had shrunk.

"Dashed if I don't give the wench a fiver!" he exclaimed. It was madness, but he had an obscure feeling that he might have had more amus.e.m.e.nt if he had begun being mad rather earlier in life.

Upon this he slept soundly till six o'clock.

His mind then unfortunately got entangled in the painful episode of the ten-pound note. He and Helen had the same blood in their veins. They were alike in some essential traits. He knew that neither of them could ever persuade himself, or herself, to mention that miserable ten-pound note again.

"If I gave her a tenner," he said, "that would make her see as I'd settled to forget that business, and let bygones _be_ bygones. I'll give her a tenner."

It was preposterous. She could not, of course, spend it. She would put it away. So it would not be wasted.

Upon this he rose.

Poor simpleton! Ever since the commencement of his relations with Helen, surprise had followed surprise for him. And the series was not ended.

The idea of giving a gift made him quite nervous. He fumbled in his cashbox for quite a long time, and then he called, nervously:

"Helen!"

She came out of the kitchen into the front room. (Dress: White muslin--unspeakable extravagance in a town of s.m.u.ts.)

"It's thy birthday, la.s.s?"

She nodded, smiling.

"Well, tak' this."

He handed her a ten-pound note.

"Oh, thank you, uncle!" she cried, just on the calm side of effusiveness.

At this point the surprise occurred.

There was another ten-pound note in the cashbox. His fingers went for a stroll on their own account and returned with that note.

"Hold on!" he admonished her for jumping to conclusions. "And this!" And he gave her a second note. He was much more startled than she was.

"Oh, _thank_ you, uncle!" And then, laughing: "Why, it's nearly a sovereign for every year of my life!"

"How old art?"

"Twenty-six."

"I'm gone dotty!" he said to his soul. "I'm gone dotty!" And his eyes watched his fingers take six sovereigns out of the box, and count them into her small white hand. And his cheek felt her kiss.

She went off with twenty-six pounds--twenty-six pounds! The episode was entirely incredible.

Breakfast was a most pleasing meal. Though acknowledging himself an imbecile, he was obliged to acknowledge also that a certain pleasure springs from a certain sort of imbecility. Helen was adorable.

Now that same morning he had received from Mrs. Prockter a flattering note, asking him, if he could spare the time, to go up to Hillport and examine Wilbraham Hall with her, and give her his expert advice as to its value, etc. He informed Helen of the plan.

"I'll go with you," she said at once.

"What's in the wind?" he asked himself. He saw in the suggestion a device for seeing Emanuel.

"The fact is," she added, "I want to show you a house up at Hillport that might do for us."

He winced. She had said nothing about a removal for quite some time. He hated the notion of removal. ("Flitting," he called it.) It would mean extra expense, too. As for Hillport, he was sure that nothing, except cottages, could be got in Hillport for less than fifty pounds a year. If she thought he was going to increase his rent by thirty-two pounds a year, besides rates, she was in error. The breakfast finished in a slight mist. He hardened. The idea of her indicating houses to him! The idea of her a.s.suming that----Well, no use in meeting trouble half-way!

CHAPTER XVI

THE HALL AND ITS RESULT

"Yes," said Mrs. Prockter, gazing about her, to James Ollerenshaw, "it certainly is rather s.p.a.cious."

"Rather s.p.a.cious!" James repeated in the secret hollows of his mind. It was not s.p.a.cious; it was simply fantastic. They stood, those two--Mrs.

Prockter in her usual flowered silk, and James in his usual hard, rent-collecting clothes--at the foot of the double staircase, which sprang with the light of elegance of wings from the floor of the entrance-hall of Wilbraham Hall. In front of them, over the great door, was a musicians' gallery, and over that a huge window. On either side of the great door were narrow windows which looked over stretches of green country far away from the Five Towns. For Wilbraham Hall was on the supreme ridge of Hillport, and presented only its back yard, so to speak, to the Five Towns. And though the carpets were rolled up and tied with strings, and though there were dark rectangular s.p.a.ces on the walls showing where pictures had been, the effect of the hall was quite a furnished effect. Polished oak and ta.s.selled hangings, and monstrous vases and couches and chairs preserved in it the appearance of a home, if a home of giants.

Decidedly it was worthy of the mighty reputations of the extinct Wilbrahams. The Wilbrahams had gradually risen in North Staffordshire for two centuries. About the Sunday of the Battle of Waterloo they were at their apogee. Then for a century they had gradually fallen. And at last they had extinguished themselves in the person of a young-old fool who was in prison for having cheated a p.a.w.nbroker. This young-old fool had nothing but the name of Wilbraham to his back. The wealth of the Wilbrahams, or what remained of it after eight decades of declension, had, during the course of a famous twenty years' law-suit between the father of the said young-old fool and a farming cousin in California, slowly settled like golden dust in the offices of lawyers in Carey-street, London. And the house, grounds, lake, and furniture (save certain portraits) were now on sale by order of the distant winner of the law-suit. And both Mrs. Prockter and James could remember the time when the twin-horsed equipage of the Wilbrahams used to dash about the Five Towns like the chariot of the sun. The recollection made Mrs.

Prockter sad, but in James it produced no such feeling. To Mrs.

Prockter, Wilbraham Hall was the last of the stylish port-wine estates that in old days dotted the heights around the Five Towns. To her it was the symbol of the death of tone and the triumph of industrialism.

Whereas James merely saw it as so much building land upon which streets of profitable and inexpensive semi-detached villas would one day rise at the wand's touch of the man who had sufficient audacity for a prodigious speculation.

"It 'ud be like living in th' covered market, living here," James observed.

The St. Luke's Market is the largest roof in Bursley. And old inhabitants, incapable of recovering from the surprise of marketing under cover instead of in an open square, still, after thirty years, refer to it as the covered market.