Chapter 19. Rachel And Mr. Horrocleave

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_ CHAPTER XIX. RACHEL AND MR. HORROCLEAVE

I

The next morning, Sunday, Rachel had a fancy to superintend in person the boiling of Louis' breakfast egg. For a week past Louis had not been having his usual breakfast, but on this morning the ideal life was recommencing in loveliest perfection for Rachel. The usual breakfast was to be resumed; and she remembered that in the past the sacred egg had seldom, if ever, been done to a turn by Mrs. Tams. Mrs. Tams, indeed, could not divide a minute into halves, and was apt to regard a preference for a certain consistency in a boiled egg as merely finicking and negligible. To Mrs. Tams a fresh egg was a fresh egg, and there was no more to be said.

Rachel entered the kitchen like a radiance. She was dressed with special care, rather too obviously so, in order that she might be worthy to walk by Louis' side to church. She was going with him to church gladly, because he had rented the pew and she desired to please him by an alert gladness in subscribing to his wishes; it was not enough for her just to do what he wanted. Her eyes glittered above the darkened lower lids; her gaze was self-conscious and yet bold; a faint languor showed beneath her happy energy. But there was no sign that on the previous evening she had been indisposed.

Mrs. Tams was respectfully maternal, but preoccupied. She fetched the egg for Rachel, and Rachel, having deposited it in a cooking-spoon, held it over the small black saucepan of incontestably boiling water until the hand of the clock precisely covered a minute mark, whereupon she deftly slipped the egg into the saucepan; the water ceased to boil for a few seconds and then bubbled up again. And amid the heavenly frizzling of bacon and the odour of her own special coffee Rachel stood sternly watching the clock while Mrs. Tams rattled plates and did the last deeds before serving the meal. Then Mrs. Tarns paused and said--

"I don't hardly like to tell ye, ma'm--I didn't hardly like to tell ye last night when ye were worried like--no, and I dunna like now like, but its like as if what must be--I must give ye notice to leave. I canna stop here no longer."

Rachel turned to her, protesting--

"Now, Mrs. Tams, what _are_ you talking about? I thought you were perfectly happy here."

"So I am, mum. Nobody could wish for a better place. I'm sure I've no fault to find. But it's like as if what must be."

"But what's the matter?"

"Well, ma'am, it's Emmy." (Emmy was Mrs. Tams's daughter and the mother of her favourite grandchild.) "Emmy and all on' em seem to think it'll be better all round if I don't take a regular situation, so as I can be more free for 'em, and they'll all look after me i' my old age. I s'll get my old house back, and be among 'em all. There's so many on 'em."

Every sentence contained a lie. And the aged creature went on lying to the same pattern until she had created quite a web of convincing detail--more than enough to persuade her mistress that she was in earnest, foolishly in earnest, that she didn't know on which side her bread was buttered, and that the poorer classes in general had no common sense.

"You're all alike," said the wise Rachel.

"I'm very sorry, ma'm."

"And what am I to do? It's very annoying for me, you know. I thought you were a permanency."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I should like to give your daughters and daughters-in-law a piece of my mind.... Good heavens! Give me that cooking-spoon, quick!"

She nipped the egg out of the saucepan; it was already several seconds overdone.

"It isn't as if I could keep you on as a charwoman," said Rachel. "I must have some one all the time, and I couldn't do with a charwoman as well."

"No, ma'am! It's like as if what must be."

"Well, I hope you'll think it over. I must say I didn't expect this from you, Mrs. Tams."

Mrs. Tams put her lips together and bent obstinately over a tray.

Rachel said to herself: "Oh, she really means to leave! I can see that. She's made up her mind.... I shall never trust any servant again--never!"

She was perhaps a little hurt (for she considered that she had much benefited Mrs. Tams), and a little perturbed for the future. But in her heart she did not care. She would not have cared if the house had fallen in, or if her native land had been invaded and enslaved by a foreign army. She was at peace with Louis. He was hers. She felt that her lien on him was strengthened.

II

The breakfast steaming and odorous on the table, and Rachel all tingling in front of her tray, awaited the descent of the master of the house. The Sunday morning post, placed in its proper position by Mrs. Tams, consisted of a letter and a post-card. Rachel stretched her arm across the table to examine them. The former had a legal aspect. It was a foolscap envelope addressed to Mrs. Maldon. Rachel opened it. A typewritten circular within respectfully pointed out to Mrs. Maldon that if she had only followed the writers' advice, given gratis a few weeks earlier, she would have made one hundred and twenty-five pounds net profit by spending thirty-five pounds in the purchase of an option on Canadian Pacific Railway shares. The statement was supported by the official figures of the Stock Exchange, which none could question. "Can you afford to neglect such advice in future?" the writers asked Mrs. Maldon, and went on to suggest that she should send them forty-five pounds to buy an option on "Shells," which were guaranteed to rise nine points in less than a month.

Mystified, half sceptical, and half credulous, Rachel reflected casually that the world was full of strange phenomena. She wondered what "Shells" were, and why the writers should keep on writing to a woman who had been dead for ages. She carefully burnt both the circular and the envelope.

And then she looked at the post-card, which was addressed to "Louis Fores, Esq." As it was a post-card, she was entitled to read it. She read: "Shall expect you at the works in the morning at ten. Jas. Horrocleave." She thought it rather harsh and oppressive on the part of Mr. Horrocleave to expect Louis to attend at the works on Bank Holiday--and so soon after his illness, too! How did Mr. Horrocleave know that Louis was sufficiently recovered to be able to go to the works at all?

Louis came, rubbing his hands, which for an instant he warmed at the fire. He was elegantly dressed. The mere sight of him somehow thrilled Rachel. His deportment, his politeness, his charming good-nature were as striking as ever. The one or two stripes (flesh-coloured now, not whitish) on his face were not too obvious, and, indeed, rather increased the interest of his features. The horrible week was forgotten, erased from history, though Rachel would recollect that even at the worst crisis of it Louis had scarcely once failed in politeness of speech. It was she who had been impolite--not once, but often. Louis had never raged. She was contrite, and her penitence intensified her desire to please, to solace, to obey. When she realized that it was she who had burnt that enormous sum in bank-notes, she went cold in the spine.

Not that she cared twopence for the enormous sum, really, now that concord was established! No, her little flutters of honest remorse were constantly disappearing in the immense exultant joy of being alive and of contemplating her idol. Louis sat down. She smiled at him. He smiled back. But in his exquisite demeanour there was a faint reserve of melancholy which persisted. She had not yet that morning been able to put it to flight; she counted, however, on doing so very soon, and in the meantime it did not daunt her. After all, was it not natural?

She began--

"I say, what do you think? Mrs. Tams has given me notice."

She pretended to be aggrieved and to be worried, but essential joy shone through these absurd masks. Moreover, she found a certain naive satisfaction in being a mistress with cares, a mistress to whom "notice" had to be given, and who would have to make serious inquiry into the character of future candidates for her employment.

Louis raised his eyebrows.

"Don't you think it's a shame?"

"Oh," said he cautiously, "you'll get somebody else as good, _and_ better. What's she leaving for?"

Rachel repeated Mrs. Tams's rigmarole.

"Ah!" murmured Louis.

He was rather sorry for Mrs. Tams. His good-nature was active enough this morning. But he was glad that she had taken the initiative. And he was content that she should go. After the scene of the previous night, their relations could not again have been exactly what the relations between master and servant ought to be. And further, "you never knew what women wouldn't tell one another," even mistress and maid, maid and mistress. Yes, he preferred that she should leave. He admired her and regretted the hardship on the old woman--and that was an end of it! What could he do to ease her? The only thing to do would be to tell her privately that so far as he was concerned she might stay. But he had no intention of doing aught so foolish. It was strange, but he was entirely unconscious of any obligation to her for the immense service she had rendered him. His conclusion was that some people have to be martyrs. And in this he was deeply right.

Rachel, misreading his expression, thought that he did not wish to be bothered with household details. She recalled some gratuitous advice half humorously offered to her by a middle-aged lady at her reception, "Never talk servants to your men." She had thought, at the time, "I shall talk everything with _my_ husband." But she considered that she was wiser now.

"By the way," she said in a new tone, "there's a post-card for you. I've read it. Couldn't help."

Louis read the post-card. He paled, and Rachel noticed his pallor. The fact was that in his mind he had simply shelved, and shelved again, the threat of James Horrocleave. He had sincerely desired to tell a large portion of the truth to Rachel, taking advantage of her soft mood; but he could not; he could not force his mouth to open on the subject. In some hours he had quite forgotten the danger--he was capable of such feats--then it reasserted itself and he gazed on it fascinated and helpless. When Rachel, to please him and prove her subjugation, had suggested that they should go to church--"for the Easter morning service"--he had concurred, knowing, nevertheless, that he dared not fail to meet Horrocleave at the works. On the whole, though it gave him a shock, he was relieved that Horrocleave had sent the post-card and that Rachel had seen it. But he still was quite unable to decide what to do.

"It's a nice thing, him asking you to go to the works on a Bank Holiday like that!" Rachel remarked.

Louis answered: "It's not to-morrow he wants me. It's to-day."

"Sunday!" she exclaimed.

"Yes. I met him for a second yesterday afternoon, and he told me then. This was just a reminder. He must have sent it off last night. A good thing he did send it, though. I'd quite forgotten."

"But what is it? What does he want you to go on Sunday for?"

Louis shrugged his shoulders, as if to intimate that nothing that Horrocleave did ought to surprise anybody.

"Then what about church?"

Louis replied on the spur of the moment--

"You go there by yourself. I'll meet you there. I can easily be there by eleven."

"But I don't know the pew."

"They'll show you your pew all right, never fear."

"I shall wait for you in the churchyard."

"Very well. So long as it isn't raining."

She kissed him fervently when he departed.

Long before it was time to leave for church she had a practical and beautiful idea--one of those ideas that occur to young women in love. Instead of waiting for Louis in the churchyard she would call for him at the works, which was not fifty yards off the direct route to St. Luke's. By this means she would save herself from the possibility of inconvenience within the precincts of the church, and she would also prevent the conscienceless Mr. Horrocleave from keeping Louis in the office all the morning. She wondered that the idea had not occurred to Louis, who was very gifted in such matters as the arrangement of rendezvous.

She started in good time because she wanted to walk without hurry, and to ponder. The morning, though imperfect and sunless, had in it some quality of the spring, which the buoyant youth of Rachel instantly discovered and tasted in triumph. Moreover, the spirit of a festival was abroad, and visible in the costume and faces of passers-by; and it was the first festival of the year. Rachel responded to it eagerly, mingling her happiness with the general exultation. She was intensely, unreasonably happy. She knew that she was unreasonably happy; and she did not mind.

When she turned into Friendly Street the big black double gates of the works were shut, but in one of them a little door stood ajar. She pushed it, stooped, and entered the twilight of the archway. The office door was shut. She walked uncertain up the archway into the yard, and through a dirty window on her left she could dimly discern a man gesticulating. She decided that he must be Horrocleave. She hesitated, and then, slightly confused, thought, "Perhaps I'd better go back to the archway and knock at the office door."

III

In the inner office, among art-lustre ware, ink-stained wood, dusty papers, and dirt, Jim Horrocleave banged down a petty-cash book on to Louis' desk. His hat was at the back of his head, and his eyes blazed at Louis, who stood somewhat limply, with a hesitant, foolish, faint smile on his face.

"That's enough!" said Horrocleave fiercely. "I haven't had patience to go all through it. But that's enough. I needn't tell ye I suspected ye last year, but ye put me off. And I was too busy to take the trouble to go into it. However, I've had a fair chance while you've been away." He gave a sneering laugh. "I'll tell ye what put me on to ye again, if you've a mind to know. The weekly expenses went down as soon as ye thought I had suspicions. Ye weren't clever enough to keep 'em up. Well, what have ye got to say for yeself, seeing ye are on yer way to America?"

"I never meant to go to America," said Louis. "Why should I go to America?"

"Ask me another. Then ye confess?"

"I don't," said Louis.

"Oh! Ye don't!" Horrocleave sat down and put his hands on his outstretched knees.

"There may be mistakes in the petty-cash book. I don't say there aren't. Any one who keeps a petty-cash book stands to lose. If he's too busy at the moment to enter up a payment, he may forget it--and there you are! He's out of pocket. Of course," Louis added, with a certain loftiness, "as you're making a fuss about it I'll pay up for anything that's wrong ... whatever the sum is. If you make it out to be a hundred pounds I'll pay up."

Horrocleave growled: "Oh, so ye'll pay up, will ye? And suppose I won't let ye pay up? What shall ye do then?"

Louis, now quite convinced that Horrocleave was only bullying retorted, calmly:

"It's I that ought to ask you that question."

The accuser was exasperated.

"A couple o' years in quod will be about your mark, I'm thinking," he said.

Whereupon Louis was suddenly inspired to answer:

"Yes. And supposing I was to begin to talk about illicit commissions?"

Horrocleave jumped up with such ferocious violence that Louis drew back, startled. The recent Act of Parliament, making a crime of secret commissions to customers' employees, had been a blow to the trade in art-lustre ware, and it was no secret in the inner office that Horrocleave, resenting its interference with the natural course of business, had more than once discreetly flouted it, and thus technically transgressed the criminal law. Horrocleave used to defend and justify himself by the use of that word "technical." Louis' polite and unpremeditated threat enraged him to an extreme degree. He was the savage infuriate. He cared for no consequences, even consequences to himself. He hated Louis because Louis was spick and span, and quiet, and because Louis had been palmed off on him by Louis' unscrupulous respectable relatives as an honest man.

"Now thou'st done for thyself!" he cried, in the dialect. "Thou'st done for thyself! And I'll have thee by the heels for embezzlement, and blackmail as well." He waved his arms. "May God strike me if I give thee any quarter after that! I'll--"

He stopped with open mouth, disturbed by the perception of a highly strange phenomenon beyond the window. He looked and saw Rachel in the yard. For a moment he thought that Louis had planned to use his wife as a shield in the affair if the worst should come to the worst. But Rachel's appearance simultaneously showed him that he was wrong. She was the very mirror of happy confidence. And she seemed so young, and so obviously just married; and so girlish and so womanish at the same time; and her frock was so fresh, and her hat so pert against the heavy disorder of the yard, and her eyes were unconsciously so wistful--that Horrocleave caught his breath. He contrasted Rachel with Mrs. Horrocleave, her complete antithesis, and at once felt very sorry for himself and very scornful of Mrs. Horrocleave, and melting with worshipful sympathy for Rachel.

"Yer wife's in the yard," he whispered in a different tone.

"My wife!" Louis was gravely alarmed; all his manner altered.

"Hast told her anything of this?"

"I should think I hadn't."

"Ye must pay me, and I'll give ye notice to leave," said Horrocleave, quickly, in a queer, quiet voice. The wrath was driven out of him. The mere apparition of Rachel had saved her husband.

A silence.

Rachel had disappeared. Then there was a distant tapping. Neither of the men spoke nor moved. They could hear the outer door open and light footfalls in the outer office.

"Anybody here?" It was Rachel's voice, timid.

"Come in, come in!" Horrocleave roared.

She entered, blushing, excusing herself, glancing from one to the other, and by her spotless Easter finery emphasizing the squalor of the den.

In a few minutes Horrocleave was saying to Rachel, rather apologetically--

"Louis and I are going to part company, Mrs. Fores. I can't keep him on. His wages are too high for me. It won't run to it. Th' truth is, I'm going to chuck this art business. It doesn't pay. Art, as they call it, 's no good in th' pottery trade."

Rachel said, "So that's what you wanted to see him about on a Sunday morning, is it, Mr. Horrocleave?"

She was a little hurt at the slight on her husband, but the wife in her was persuaded that the loss would be Mr. Horrocleave's. She foresaw that Louis would now want to use his capital in some commercial undertaking of his own; and she was afraid of the prospect. Still, it had to be faced, and she would face it. He would probably do well as his own master. During a whole horrible week her judgment on him had been unjustly severe, and she did not mean to fall into the same sin again. She thought with respect of his artistic gifts, which she was too inartistic to appreciate. Yes, the chances were that he would succeed admirably.

She walked him off to church, giving Horrocleave a perfunctory good-bye. And as, shoulder to shoulder, they descended towards St. Luke's, she looked sideways at Louis and fed her passion stealthily with the sight. True, even in those moments, she had heart enough left to think of others besides.

She hoped that John's Ernest would find a suitable mate. She remembered that she had Julian's curtains to attend to. She continued to think kindly of Thomas Batchgrew, and she chid herself for having thought of him in her distant inexperienced youth, of six months earlier, as _that man_. And, regretting that Mrs. Tams--at her age, too!--could be so foolish, she determined to look after Mrs. Tams also, if need should arise. But these solicitudes were mere downy trifles floating on the surface of her profound absorption in Louis. And in the depths of that absorption she felt secure, and her courage laughed at the menace of life (though the notion of braving a church full of people did intimidate the bride). Yet she judged Louis realistically and not sentimentally. She was not conspicuously blind to any aspect of his character; nor had the tremendous revulsion of the previous night transformed him into another and a more heavenly being for her. She admitted frankly to herself that he was not blameless in the dark affair of the bank-notes. She would not deny that in some ways he was untrustworthy, and might be capable of acts of which the consequences were usually terrible. His irresponsibility was notorious. And, being impulsive herself, she had no mercy for his impulsiveness. As for his commonsense, was not her burning of the circular addressed to Mrs. Maldon a sufficient commentary on it?

She was well aware that Louis' sins of omission and commission might violently shock people of a certain temperament--people of her own temperament in particular. These people, however, would fail to see the other side of Louis. If she herself had merely heard of Louis, instead of knowing him, she would probably have set him down as undesirable. But she knew him. His good qualities seemed to her to overwhelm the others. His charm, his elegance, his affectionateness, his nice speech, his courtesy, his quick wit, his worldliness--she really considered it extraordinary that a plain, blunt girl, such as she, should have had the luck to please him. It was indeed almost miraculous.

If he had faults--and he had--she preferred them (proudly and passionately) to the faults of scores of other women's husbands. He was not a brute, nor even a boor nor a savage--thousands of savages ranged free and terror-striking in the Five Towns. Even when vexed and furious he could control himself. It was possible to share his daily life and see him in all his social moods without being humiliated. He was not a clodhopper; watch him from the bow-window of a morning as he walked down the street! He did not drink; he was not a beast. He was not mean. He might scatter money, but he was not mean. In fact, except that one sinister streak in his nature, she could detect no fault. There was danger in that streak.... Well, there was danger in every man. She would accept it; she would watch it. Had she not long since reconciled herself to the prospect of an everlasting vigil?

She did not care what any one said, and she did not care! He was the man she wanted; the whole rest of the world was nothing in comparison to him. He was irresistible. She had wanted him, and she would always want him, as he was. She had won him and she would keep him, as he was, whatever the future might hold. The past was the past; the opening chapter of her marriage was definitely finished and its drama done. She was ready for the future. One tragedy alone could overthrow her--Louis' death. She simply could not and would not conceive existence without him. She would face anything but that.... Besides, he was not _really_ untrustworthy--only weak! She faltered and recovered. "He's mine and I wouldn't have him altered for the world. I don't want him perfect. If anything goes wrong, well, let it go wrong! I'm his wife. I'm his!" And as, slightly raising her confident chin in the street, she thus undertook to pay the price of love, there was something divine about Rachel's face.

[THE END]
Arnold Bennett's Novel: Price of Love

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