Sparrows | Page 5

Montague's first wife. Whether or not this were so, in manner, mind, and appearance Harold was generations removed from his parents and brother. He had been the delight of his father's eye, until an accident had put an end to the high hopes which his father had formed of his future. A canal ran through Melkbridge; some way from the town this narrowed its course to run beneath a footbridge, locally known as the "Gallows" bridge.
It was an achievement to jump this stretch of water; Harold Devitt was renowned amongst the youth of the neighbourhood for the performance of this feat. He constantly repeated the effort, but did it once too often. One July morning, he miscalculated the distance and fell, to be picked up some while after, insensible. He had injured his spine. After many weeks of suspense suffered by his parents, these learned that their dearly loved boy would live, although he would be a cripple for life. Little by little, Harold recovered strength, till he was able to get about Melkbridge on a self-propelled tricycle; any day since the year of the accident his kindly, distinguished face might be seen in the streets of the town, or the lanes of the adjacent country, where he would pull up to chat with his many friends.
His affliction had been a terrible blow to Harold; when he had first realised the permanent nature of his injuries, he had cursed his fate; his impotent rage had been pitiful to behold. This travail occurred in the first year of his affliction; later, he discovered, as so many others have done in a like extremity, that time accustoms the mind to anything: he was now resigned to his misfortune. His sufferings had endowed him with a great tolerance and a vast instinct of sympathy for all living things, qualities which are nearly always lacking in young men of his present age, which was twenty-nine. The rest of the family stood in some awe of Harold; realising his superiority of mind, they feared to be judged at the bar of his opinion; also, he had some hundreds a year left him, in his own right, by his mother: it was unthinkable that he should ever marry. Another thing that differentiated him from his family was that he possessed a sense of humour.
It may be as well to state that Harold plays a considerable part in this story, which is chiefly concerned with a young woman, of whom the assembled Devitts were speaking in the interval between tea and dinner on a warm July day. Before setting this down, however, it should be said that the chief concern of the Devitts (excepting Harold) was to escape from the social orbit of successful industrialism, in which they moved, to the exalted spheres of county society.
Their efforts, so far, had only taken them to certain halfway houses on their road. The families of consequence about Melkbridge were old-fashioned, conservative folk, who resented the intrusion in their midst of those they considered beneath them.
Whenever Montague, a borough magistrate, met the buffers of the great families upon the bench, or in the hunting field, he found them civil enough; but their young men would have little to do with Lowther, while its womenfolk ignored the assiduities of the Devitt females.
The drawing-room in which the conversation took place was a large, over-furnished room, in which a conspicuous object was a picture, most of which, the lower part, was hidden by padlocked shutters; the portion which showed was the full face of a beautiful girl.
The picture was an "Etty," taken in part payment of a debt by Montague's father, but, as it portrayed a nude woman, the old Puritan had employed a Melkbridge carpenter to conceal that portion of the figure which the artist had omitted to drape. Montague would have had the shutters removed, but had been prevailed upon by his wife to allow them to remain until Victoria was married, an event which, at present, she had no justification for anticipating.
The late afternoon post had brought a letter for Mrs Devitt, which gave rise to something of a discussion.
"Actually, here is a letter from Miss Annie Mee," said Mrs Devitt.
"Your old schoolmistress!" remarked Miss Spraggs.
"I didn't know she was alive," went on Mrs Devitt. "She writes from Brandenburg College, Aynhoe Road, West Kensington Park, London, asking me to do something for her."
"Of course!" commented the agreeable rattle.
"How did you know?" asked Mrs Devitt, looking up from the letter she was reading with the help of glasses.
"Didn't you know that there are two kinds of letters: those you want and those that want something?" asked Miss Spraggs, in a way that showed she was conscious of saying a smart thing.
"I can hardly believe human nature to be so depraved as