Helen with the High Hand | Page 4

rosily yielded. And she was one of your girls who never
blush! The ignominy of it! To blush because she found herself within
thirty inches of a man, an old man, with whom she had never in her life
exchanged a single word!
CHAPTER II

AN AFFAIR OF THE SEVENTIES
Having satisfied her obstinacy by sitting down on the seat of her choice,
she might surely--one would think--have ended a mysteriously difficult
situation by rising again and departing, of course with due dignity. But
no! She could not! She wished to do so, but she could not command her
limbs. She just sat there, in horridest torture, like a stoical fly on a
pin--one of those flies that pretend that nothing hurts. The agony might
have been prolonged to centuries had not an extremely startling and
dramatic thing happened--the most startling and dramatic thing that
ever happened either to James Ollerenshaw or to the young woman.
James Ollerenshaw spoke, and I imagine that nobody was more
surprised than James Ollerenshaw by his brief speech, which slipped
out of him quite unawares. What he said was:
"Well, lass, how goes it, like?"
If the town could have heard him, the town would have rustled from
boundary to boundary with agitated and delicious whisperings.
The young woman, instead of being justly incensed by this monstrous
molestation from an aged villain who had not been introduced to her,
gave a little jump (as though relieved from the spell of an enchantment),
and then deliberately turned and faced Mr. Ollerenshaw. She also
smiled, amid her roses.
"Very well indeed, thank you," she replied, primly, but nicely.
Upon this, they both of them sought to recover--from an affair that had
occurred in the late seventies.
In the late seventies James Ollerenshaw had been a young-old man of
nearly thirty. He had had a stepbrother, much older and much poorer
than himself, and the stepbrother had died, leaving a daughter, named
Susan, almost, but not quite, in a state of indigence. The stepbrother
and James had not been on terms of effusive cordiality. But James was
perfectly ready to look after Susan, his stepniece. Susan, aged
seventeen years, was, however, not perfectly ready to be looked after.

She had a little money, and she earned a little (by painting asters on
toilet ware), and the chit was very rude to her stepuncle. In less than a
year she had married a youth of twenty, who apparently had not in him
even the rudiments of worldly successfulness. James Ollerenshaw did
his avuncular duty by formally and grimly protesting against the
marriage. But what authority has a stepuncle? Susan defied him, with a
maximum of unforgettable impoliteness; and she went to live with her
husband at Longshaw, which is at the other end of the Five Towns. The
fact became public that a solemn quarrel existed between James and
Susan, and that each of them had sworn not to speak until the other
spoke. James would have forgiven, if she had hinted at reconciliation.
And, hard as it is for youth to be in the wrong, Susan would have
hinted at reconciliation if James had not been so rich. The riches of
James offended Susan's independence. Not for millions would she have
exposed herself to the suspicion that she had broken her oath because
her stepuncle was a wealthy and childless man. She was, of course,
wrong. Nor was this her only indiscretion. She was so ridiculously
indiscreet as to influence her husband in such a way that he actually
succeeded in life. Had James perceived them to be struggling in
poverty, he might conceivably have gone over to them and helped them,
in an orgy of forgiving charity. But the success of young Rathbone
falsified his predictions utterly, and was, further, an affront to him.
Thus the quarrel slowly crystallised into a permanent estrangement, a
passive feud. Everybody got thoroughly accustomed to it, and thought
nothing of it, it being a social phenomenon not at all unique of its kind
in the Five Towns. When, fifteen years later, Rathbone died in
mid-career, people thought that the feud would end. But it did not.
James wrote a letter of condolence to his niece, and even sent it to
Longshaw by special messenger in the tramcar; but he had not heard of
the death until the day of the funeral, and Mrs. Rathbone did not reply
to his letter. Her independence and sensitiveness were again in the
wrong. James did no more. You could not expect him to have done
more. Mrs. Rathbone, like many widows of successful men, was "left
poorly off." But she "managed." Once, five years before the scene on
the park terrace, Mrs. Rathbone and James had encountered one
another by hazard on the platform of Knype