Leonora | Page 9

of those words, so simply and affectionately
whispered in the darkness, was to bring a tear to her eye. As the mother
comprehended the whole staggering situation, the woman envied Ethel
for her youth, her naughty innocence, her romance, her incredibly
foolish audacity in thus risking the disaster of parental wrath. Leonora
heard cautious footsteps on the gravel, and the slow closing of a
window. 'My life is over!' she said to herself. 'And hers beginning. And
to think that this afternoon I called her a schoolgirl! What romance
have I had in my life?'

She put her head out of the window. There was no movement now, but
above her a radiance streaming from Rose's dormer showed that the
serious girl of the family, defying commands, plodded obstinately at
her chemistry. As Leonora thought of Rose's ambition, and Ethel's
clandestine romance, and little Millicent's complicity in that romance,
and John's sinister secrets, and her own ineffectual repining--as she
thought of these five antagonistic preoccupied souls and their different
affairs, the pathos and the complexity of human things surged over her
and overwhelmed her.

CHAPTER II
MESHACH AND HANNAH
The little old bachelor and spinster were resting after dinner in the
back-parlour of their house near the top of Church Street. In that abode
they had watched generations pass and manners change, as one list
hearthrug succeeded another in the back-parlour. Meshach had been
born in the front bedroom, and he meant to die there; Hannah had also
been born in the front bedroom, but it was through the window of the
back bedroom that the housewife's soul would rejoin the infinite. The
house, which Meshach's grandfather, first of his line to emerge from
the grey mass of the proletariat, had ruined himself to build, was a
six-roomed dwelling of honest workmanship in red brick and tile, with
a beautiful pillared doorway and fanlight in the antique taste. It had
cost two hundred pounds, and was the monument of a life's ambition.
Mortgaged by its hard-pressed creator, and then sold by order of the
mortgagee, it had ultimately been bought again in triumph by
Meshach's father, who made thirty thousand pounds out of pots without
getting too big for it, and left it unspoilt to Meshach and Hannah. Only
one alteration had ever been made in it, and that, completed on
Meshach's fiftieth birthday, admirably exemplified his temperament.
Because he liked to observe the traffic in Church Street, and liked
equally to sit in the back-parlour near the hob, he had, with an oriental
grandeur of self-indulgence, removed the dividing wall between the
front and the back parlours and substituted a glass partition: so that he

could simultaneously warm the fire and keep an eye on the street. The
town said that no one but Meshach could have hit on such a scheme, or
would have carried it out with such an object: it crowned his reputation.
John Stanway's maternal uncle was one of those individuals whose
character, at once strong, egotistic, and peculiar, so forcibly impresses
the community that by contrast ordinary persons seem to be without
character; such men are therefore called, distinctively, 'characters'; and
it is a matter of common experience that, whether through the
unconscious prescience of parents or through that felicitous sense of
propriety which often guides the hazards of destiny, they usually bear
names to match their qualities. Meshach Myatt! Meshach Myatt! What
piquant curious syllables to roll glibly off the tongue, and to repeat for
the pleasure of repetition! And what a vision of Meshach their utterance
conjured up! At sixty-four, stereotyped by age, fixed and confirmed in
singularity, Meshach's figure answered better than ever to his name. He
was slight of bone and spare in flesh, with a hardly perceptible stoop.
He had a red, seamed face. Under the small, pale blue eyes, genial and
yet frigid, there showed a thick, raw, red selvedge of skin, and below
that the skin was loose and baggy; the wrinkled eyelids, instead of
being shaped to the pupil, came down flat and perpendicular. His nose
and chin were witch-like, the nostrils large and elastic; the lips, drawn
tight together, curved downwards, indifferently captious; a short white
beard grew sparsely on the chin; the skin of the narrow neck was
fantastically drawn and creased. His limbs were thin, the knees and
elbows sharpened to a fine point; the hands very long, with blue,
corded veins. As a rule his clothes were a distressing combination of
black and dark blue; either the coat, the waistcoat, or the trousers would
be black, the rest blue; the trousers had the old-fashioned flap-pockets,
like a sailor's, with a complex apparatus of buttons. He wore loose
white cuffs that were continually slipping down the wrist, a starched
dickey, a collar of too