Inheritance

by Phyllis Bentley

  “Mr. Mellor is a weaver, Brigg,” explained Janie presently in a soothing tone.

  “Indeed,” said Brigg, not looking at the objectionable Mellor. This was worse and worse; fancy expecting him to sit talking to a man who might easily have been one of his own workpeople! Janie would have to drop all that sort of nonsense when she was married to him.

  At his brief speech Janien’s face suddenly became glowing red; the vein down the centre of her forehead swelled to a blue ridge, and her eyes flashed fire. She turned to Mellor. “Charley,” she said in a loud eager tone; and began to discuss with him some details of Mechanics’ Institute classes which apparently they both found very absorbing. Brigg, listening, perforce, with a bad grace, found that Mellor was not now a night school pupil but a teacher. “Do you teach in Annotsfield or Marthwaite?” he asked, cool and condescending. Janie turned, gave him a look like a dagger, and turned to Mellor again.

  Meanwhile Mellor had replied: “Both, Mester Oldroyd,” in a quick hostile tone.

  Just then the door opened and Henry came in. “Hullo, Charley!” he exclaimed.

  The contrast between his friendly tone and Brigg’s insolence was so striking that for a moment Janie was quite overwhelmed by it. Then she exclaimed sharply: “Brigg is just going, Henry!”

  “Ah, sorry,” drawled Henry, swinging the door open again. “Recovered from last night’s festivities, Brigg?”

  Brigg perforce had to rise and go. He carried off his exit as well as he could, and thanks to his anger succeeded not too badly. In the hall his spirits were suddenly raised by finding that Janie had followed him. Without speaking she strode past him and violently threw open the front door.

  “I want to say something to you, Janie,” pleaded Brigg in a wooing tone, in doubt as to her mood.

  “Indeed?” said Janie, holding wide the door and mimicking the tone in which Brigg had said this cold little word.

  Brigg, perceiving that something was wrong and that it was no use attempting to strike the tender note, said lightly: “When shall I see you again, Cousin Janie?”

  “Never, Cousin Brigg!” cried the furious Janie, throwing up her head and glaring at him like an insulted goddess: “Unless you can learn how to behave properly to my uncle’s guests.”

  Brigg, astonished, crimsoned and stammered.

  “Charley Mellor has been a devoted friend of Uncle Jonathan’s for nearly fifteen years,” Janie told him in a torrent of passionate speech. “His father was brought up in the Marthwaite poorhouse and hired out to a Bradford manufacturer, and so he never saw his family again. And Charley came back here in the hope of finding them, but he can’t find them, and he came to the Mechanics’ Institute lonely and miserable and wild, and Uncle has made him into a teetotaller and a self-respecting working man, and now he teaches others. And you, you——”

  “And incidentally an admirer of the Bamforth family, I suppose?” interrupted Brigg, who was beside himself with rage, jealousy and disappointment.

  “And now you sneer at my uncle!” cried Janie.

  “No—no, Janie!” exclaimed Brigg, horrified at this termination to what he had meant to be a tender interview.

  “Please go,” panted Janie, with a gesture towards the open door.

  She looked superb standing there, the Oldroyd frown on her white brow, her blue eyes flashing, her bosom heaving, her nostrils dilated.

  “Janie!” said Brigg impetuously. “I love you!”

  “I hate you, Cousin Brigg!” cried Janie wildly. Suddenly she burst into tears, relinquished the door handle, flew past Brigg and rushed up the stairs.

  “Janie! Janie!” called Brigg imploringly from the lowest step, not daring to go further. There was a faint rustle above, and a door closed. “Janie!” repeated Brigg. “Janie!” He listened intently. “Janie!” he whispered. “Darling!”

  There was no reply. Brigg came to his senses and found himself clutching his uncle’s banisters; the door stood open, letting in great waves of cold air. Grinding his teeth in impotent rage, Brigg seized his hat and coat and fled; his solid hands positively trembled with the desire to slam the door, but he restrained himself; it might lose him Janie for ever, and he did not mean to lose her. No!

  2

  During the next few days Brigg conducted a very serious argument with himself.

  He did not regard his own home as a particularly happy one. It was not unhappy; nobody in it drank to excess or lied extravagantly, or had unbearable vices or insufferable tempers. His father was kind, if rough and autocratic; his mother, if secret and a little jeering, was also kind. They were both honest and decent souls. But there was something missing in their relationship to each other, and also in their relationship to Brigg. Never once did Brigg hear them address each other or their son with that poetic tenderness which made his pulses leap when the Bamforths spoke to Janie. Brigg had a general feeling that something at some time or other had gone wrong with his father’s life, and never been put right again; and he was deeply determined that his own life should be different, should be on an altogether higher plane. The most poetic moment of his life before he met Janie was, strangely enough, one day in his early childhood when he fell and cut his lip on the kitchen fender. The cut bled and he cried, and his grandmother—or rather, his grandfather’s widow, old Mrs. Oldroyd—who was then failing in health and sat in her chair by the hearth all day, had picked him up and rocked him in her arms and crooned over him; and an ineffaceable impression of her loving eyes and compassionate hands was left upon his childish mind. His grandmother had died before he was five, so it was a very early memory indeed, but still there it was; an experience of altogether different quality from any other in his life. That quality was the quality Brigg wanted in his love, in his married life; he had sometimes thought he found it in Charlotte Stancliffe, whose straightfoward briskness was honest and bracing; but when he saw Janie, heard her voice, he knew that life with her would have just the quality he desired. It was something—Brigg did not quite know what, but something noble, something lovely, something which made people sweet and fine; he did not forget that Janie was dear old Mrs. Oldroyd’s grandchild. And now it seemed to him—for Brigg was far from stupid—that there were fundamental differences between Janie’s way of looking at life and his own. If he was to win her in marriage, if their relationhsip was to be kept fine and true, he must change at any rate part of his way of thought. And therefore he now debated within himself: was Janie worth this sacrifice? Seriously and soberly he went out to Irebridge House to see if he could find the answer there; and in fact he did find it there, for Charlotte Stancliffe’s candid tomboy youth—she was fair and snub-nosed, with fresh cheeks and frank grey eyes and a straight sturdy body—did not say to him what Janie’s brilliant yet tender beauty said. He returned home with his mind made up, decided his proper course during the night, and next morning said to his father as they drove down to Syke Mill together:

  “I think I’ve found a new foreman for you, father.”

  “Do you?” said his father eagerly. “What like of a man, eh?”

  “He’s about thirty-two or three, I should say,” began Brigg, and described Mellor.

  “Is he one of your Uncle Joth’s pets?” demanded his father roughly. Brigg nodded. His father wrinkled his nose and made a sound expressive of derision.

  “It doesn’t do a man any harm to have studied at a night school,” said Brigg calmly. “That sort of thing is coming in more and more. After all, Annotsfield is putting up a Technical College. We don’t want another old-fashioned man like grandfather; we want a young fellow who’s eager to try new ideas.”

  His father looked at him with some respect; fancy the lad beginning to talk like that! It was how Will had talked, too; the Oldroyds were a fine stock, no doubt of it. He asked a few questions about Mellor’s present situation and past experience. “Oh, he’s with Armitage. Is he an Annotsfield man?” he asked.

  “Bradford, I think,” replied Brigg. “But his family ca
me from Marthwaite.”

  “Aye! Mellor’s an Ire Valley name; there’s plenty of Mellors in Marthwaite,” mused his father. He gave a sarcastic sniff to conceal his surrender, and said quickly: “Well, tell him to call and see me. I shan’t have him if I don’t think he suits,” he added warningly as their neat brougham rolled under the archway into the fine paved yard of New Syke Mill.

  “It is for you to decide, of course, father,” said Brigg quietly, descending.

  As he went into the mill he had a sensation of sober power and skill such as he had never experienced before. He knew how to manage his father, he had found a foreman for the mill—for he was convinced that Mellor was just the sort of sharp, bustling, energetic fellow they required—and he thought he saw a way to win his Janie. His life stretched before him good and fair, sweet and honourable, and Brigg rejoiced.

  Within a month old Thorpe, grumbling and weeping, was retired with a pension, and Mellor became the Oldroyds’ foreman. Brigg, who had not been to Eastgate House since his stormy interview in the hall with Janie, thought it beneath him to ingratiate himself with her by informing her of Mellor’s new post in person, but waited hopefully till she should hear of it from Mellor. This in the natural course of events occurred soon, for to be foreman at Oldroyds’ was regarded as a plum by the Annotsfield textile workers, and Mellor hastened to tell his good friends and benefactors, the Bamforths, of his luck.

  The reception of the news was all that Brigg could have wished. It is true that Jonathan started a little, for he had a suspicion that Mellor might easily be the grandson of William Oldroyd’s murderer. The widow of George Mellor the murderer had died in the pangs of childbirth, in York, after her husband’s execution, and her orphan children had been sent to Annotsfield poorhouse—so much Jonathan knew of old, from old Ackroyd at the Moorcock, who constantly informed him that but for his, Ackroyd’s, kindness, that would have been the fate of Jonathan and Mary. Now Charley Mellor’s father, as a child, had been hired out, apprenticed, said Charley, by the Annotsfield Poor Law Overseers, to a Bradford master in need of child labour. That these two events might have the murder of William Oldroyd as a link was a contingency which had been present to Jonathan’s mind ever since he heard Charley’s history; but to tell a man that he was a murderer’s grandson was not the best way to make him into a useful member of society, and accordingly Jonathan’s secret suspicion remained as secret as the grave—he mentioned it to no living soul, not even to Helena. There were many other secrets in the lives of the young fellows he taught, which were equally safe with him; his fine eyes would have flashed with scorn at the mere thought of betraying them. So, though he started a little now, he said nothing, but permitted himself to muse, after the manner of his century and temperament, on the weaving of the shuttle of God. Jonathan sometimes allowed himself to wonder, too, whether that Bradford Charley who had told him of the short cut and hung up a rope torch for him to find it by, outside York after Oastler’s meeting all those years ago, were not the hanged George Mellor’s son and this Charley Mellor’s father—of course it could never be proved, but to think it was agreeable; he should like to think he had done something for that Bradford Charley’s son; Jonathan mused again on the inscrutable ways of Providence.

  “I own he put me against him, that day I saw him here,” Mellor was explaining rapidly, referring to Brigg: “But I take it all back now; it was he got me the place, and it was good of him, and that’s a fact. I must be off now,” he added, rising and fidgeting uncomfortably with his cap—it was the dinner hour. “Good-day to you, Mester Bamforth. Good-day, Miss Janie.”

  “Brigg Oldroyd has more in him than I thought,” said Helena with her lofty air when he had gone.

  “It’s a generous action on his part, and I honour him for it,” drawled Henry emphatically, who saw further into Brigg’s motives than his mother did. To himself he thought: “Janie is lost to me. Well! If he’s going to deserve her I mustn’t grumble.” He did not look at Janie because he knew without looking that tears of joy stood in her lovely eyes, her beautiful face was flushed and she was slightly panting; he did not want to see her looking thus for Brigg. Later in the day as he chanced to be moving about the house he met Janie at a corner of the landing; she was looking just as he knew she would, and a pang went through his heart.

  “Henry,” she began, hesitating.

  “I thought of asking Brigg to come to the penny reading with us on Saturday,” said Henry hastily, looking away from her. “Do you think he would care to come?”

  Janie gave a confused “Yes,” and ran away; Henry had divined her wish to see Brigg, yet not to take steps herself to that end, exactly.

  Accordingly Brigg was delighted, though not too surprised, to receive a frank and pleasant note from Henry, saying that the Bamforths were sorry not to have seen much of their cousin lately, and would be pleased if he would accompany them to the Saturday reading in Eastgate Sunday School. Would he call at Eastgate House for them, and return for supper afterwards? Brigg emphatically would; he cancelled two other engagements joyously, hummed to himself as he made an elaborate toilet on Saturday evening, and came downstairs looking so spruce and so well-pleased with himself that his father, who was just departing for the Liberal Club, observed with a laugh:

  “Going courting, eh?”

  Brigg’s easy colour rose as he stuttered a confused assent. His mother, who was in the hall helping the elder Brigg on with his coat, thereupon said in her high piping tones:

  “When are you going to bring her to see me, Brigg?”

  “Yes, when?” said her husband. “It’s time we had a look at her, I think. You’d better invite the lot of them to dinner—I daresay we’ve plates to go round.”

  Brigg dutifully laughed at this old jest, and fled.

  His heart beat suffocatingly as he approached Eastgate House. Henry answered his ring, gave him a very friendly welcome and led him into the front room. Brigg, who was conscious in his every fibre that Janie was there, kept his eyes lowered as he murmured, with less than his usual grace, greetings to his aunt and uncle.

  “Aren’t you going to speak to me, Cousin Brigg?” demanded Janie then in her sweet mocking tone.

  Brigg’s blood coursed madly through his veins; his eyelids seemed to bear the weight of the world as he strove to raise them and look at her. Ah! She was beautiful, beautiful, he loved her madly. He took the hand she offered, stuttered something, and lost himself in her brilliant eyes. Suddenly Janie too was overwhelmed with confusion, she made as though to drop his hand but could not free it, turned aside her head, gave a soft exclamation and blushed to the roots of her hair.

  “It’s all over,” thought Henry. “She’ll marry him.”

  His father and mother thought the same; Helena with a resigned smile called Brigg to a seat at her side and began to talk to him maternally: Jonathan, sighing a little for his son’s sake, nevertheless felt warmed and touched by the sight of this hot young love, and was carried back across more than forty years to the passionate love he had felt for Helena. Well! Their love was as strong to-day as then, stronger perhaps; he hoped Brigg and Janie would keep their love as long and as well. He foresaw that Janie would have an immense influence over Brigg, and rejoiced that the breach between the Oldroyd descendants should thus be healed. He spoke to Brigg, calling him “my boy,” and asked him how his father did. The atmosphere was, indeed, so very much that of a betrothal that Brigg ventured to stammer out to his aunt his father’s dinner invitation to the Bamforths. Could she perhaps mention some suitable date?

  “If your mother writes to me, my dear,” said Helena with her grandest air: “I have no doubt I shall be able to accept her invitation.”

  “Confound the woman!” thought Brigg irritably. “Why is she so high with me? You might think she was a duchess at least.” Aloud he said formally that in that case his mother would give herself the pleasure of writing soon.

  3

  The invitation, composed by Brigg and
copied by his mother, was sent and accepted, and one Saturday evening the Oldroyds awaited in some nervousness the arrival of their four guests. The elder Brigg was excited by the prospect of meeting his half-brother again after all these years; he quite maddened his son by repeating to him over and over again the story of their quarrel, which young Brigg thought best forgotten, and by making constant remarks to the effect that Joth would be surprised to see the splendour of the plate, the china, the flowers, the wine, the table-linen, or whatever part of the dinner service came just then under his eye. Young Brigg was nervous, partly because he feared what Janie would think of his parents, and partly because Janie had not yet promised to marry him—she put him off with a tender coquetry, which Brigg forgave because it was so delicious, when he pressed for an answer—and he thought he might try his luck again that night. His mother was nervous at the approach of Helena, whose character she seemed to have a very shrewd idea of, for as she sat gazing sardonically at the splendours of her own establishment, she threw out drily malicious remarks about her guest which made her husband laugh and drew a wry smile even from, the exasperated Brigg.

  At last, however, the awaited moment arrived. The bell rang, the maid let in the Bamforths, and Brigg, followed after a moment’s hesitation by his father, rushed out to greet them. The elder Brigg looked about him astounded for a moment, unable to recognise in the little lame old man who confronted him the lofty and determined Jonathan he remembered; his gaze wandered to Henry; but no! that face was strange. He returned to Jonathan again, held out his hand and said in a confused perplexity: “Well, Joth!”

  “Well, Brigg!” returned his brother.

  They shook hands, and their hearts warmed to each other. To each, the touch of the other’s hand was agreeable; Brigg was filled with compassion for the cold slender old man’s hand he held, and Jonathan liked the hearty warm clasp, so familiar to him in days of old. “We haven’t met since your mother’s funeral,” said Brigg. “I don’t know why we didn’t make friends then, I’m sure.” He sounded sincerely perplexed; whereat Jonathan, who remembered how he had been ushered to his mother’s deathbed in Brigg’s wretched little house in Irebridge by a maidservant—Mary had died suddenly at the end, passing out of his life a stranger, without a farewell from him, and his half-brother summoned him by a brief note and kept out of his way while he was in the house; it was not Brigg’s fault that Mary died without giving him time to send for Jonathan, but it was one of the bitterest memories of Jonathan’s life—Jonathan, remembering all this, looked grave and stern. Helena, however, who felt that, however much she and her husband might regret Janie’s apparent decision to marry Brigg, it would not be right of them to put any obstacle in the young people’s way, came to the rescue by a polite greeting to her brother-in-law. The elder Brigg responded with the. irony he always felt towards Helena—he could never forget that Helena was older than Jonathan, and was amused by the thirty years’ difference in age between his own wife and his brother’s—and shook hands with Henry with tepid enthusiasm; he thought him a dry stick, not to be compared with his own fine lad, who, talking to Janie, looked particularly bright and handsome.