Sparrows | Page 5

genuinely proud of her local literary reputation.
Also, let it be said, that she had the disposal of capital bringing in five

hundred a year.
Montague's eldest son, Harold, was, at once, the pride and grief of the
Devitts, although custom had familiarised them with the calamity
attaching to his life.
He had been a comely, athletic lad, with a nature far removed from that
of the other Devitts; he had seemed to be in the nature of a reversion to
the type of gentleman, who, it was said, had imprudently married an
ancestress of 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