The Grim Smile of the Five Towns | Page 5

It would not have been quite correct; it would have been, as they
say in Bursley, too thick. Besides, there was the question of age.
Horace was over thirty, and Mrs Penkethman was also--over thirty;
whereas Sidney was twenty-one, and so was Ella. Hence Sidney
walked behind with Ella, and the procession started in silence. Horace
did not look round too often--that would not have been quite
proper--but whenever he did look round the other couple had lagged
farther and farther behind, and Ella seemed perfectly to have recovered
her speech. At length he looked round, and lo! they had not turned the
last corner; and they arrived at Mrs Penkethman's cottage at Hillport a
quarter of an hour after their elders.

IV

The wedding cost Horace a large sum of money. You see, he could not
do less than behave handsomely by the bride, owing to his notorious
admiration for her; and of course the bridegroom needed setting up.
Horace practically furnished their home for them out of his own pocket;
it was not to be expected that Sidney should have resources. Further,
Sidney as a single man, paying seven-and- six a week for board and
lodging, could no doubt struggle along upon three pounds weekly. But
Sidney as a husband, with the nicest girl in the world to take care of,
and house-rent to pay, could not possibly perform the same feat.
Although he did no more work at the manufactory--Horace could not
have been so unbrotherly as to demand it--Horace paid him eight
pounds a week instead of three.
And the affair cost Horace a good deal besides money. But what could
Horace do? He decidedly would not have wished to wreck the
happiness of two young and beautiful lives, even had he possessed the
power to do so. And he did not possess the power. Those two did not
consult Horace before falling in love. They merely fell in love, and
there was an end of it--and an end of Horace too! Horace had to suffer.
He did suffer.
Perhaps it was for his highest welfare that other matters came to
monopolize his mind. One sorrow drives out another. If you sit on a pin
you are apt to forget that you have the toothache. The earthenware
manufactory was not going well. Plenty of business was being done,
but not at the right prices. Crushed between the upper and nether
millstones of the McKinley Tariff and German competition, Horace, in
company with other manufacturers, was breathing out his life's blood in
the shape of capital. The truth was that he had never had enough capital.
He had heavily mortgaged the house at Toft End in order to purchase
his partners' shares in the business and have the whole undertaking to
himself, and he profoundly regretted it. He needed every penny that he
could collect; the strictest economy was necessary if he meant to
survive the struggle. And here he was paying eight pounds a week to a
personage purely ornamental, after having squandered hundreds in
rendering that personage comfortable! The situation was dreadful.
You may ask, Why did he not explain the situation to Sidney? Well,
partly because he was too kind, and partly because he was too proud,
and partly because Sidney would not have understood. Horace fought

on, keeping up a position in the town and hoping that miracles would
occur.
Then Ella's expectations were realized. Sidney and she had some
twenty thousand pounds to play with. And they played the most
agreeable games. But not in Bursley. No. They left Horace in Bursley
and went to Llandudno for a spell. Horace envied them, but he saw
them off at the station as an elder brother should, and tipped the
porters.
Certainly he was relieved of the formality of paying eight pounds a
week to his brother. But this did not help him much. The sad fact was
that 'things' (by which is meant fate, circumstances, credit, and so on)
had gone too far. It was no longer a question of eight pounds a week; it
was a question of final ruin.
Surely he might have borrowed money from Sidney? Sidney had no
money; the money was Ella's, and Horace could not have brought
himself to borrow money from a woman--from Ella, from a heavenly
creature who always had a soothing sympathetic word for him. That
would have been to take advantage of Ella. No, if you suggest such a
thing, you do not know Horace.
I stated in the beginning that he had no faults. He was therefore
absolutely honest. And he called his creditors together while he could
yet pay them twenty shillings in the pound. It was a noble act, rare
enough in the Five Towns and in other parts of England.