Everyone at Melkbridge knew the Devitts: they lived in the new, pretentious-looking house, standing on the right, a few minutes after one left the town by the Bathminster road. It was a blustering, stare-one-in-the-face kind of house, which defied one to question the financial stability of its occupants. The Devitts were like their home in being new, ostentatious folk; their prosperity did not extend further back than the father of Montague, the present head of the family.
Montague Devitt did little beyond attending board meetings of the varied industries which his father's energy had called into being. He was a bluff, well-set-up man, who had married twice; both of his wives had brought him money. Each time Montague chose a mate, he had made some effort to follow the leanings of his heart; but money not lying in the same direction as love, an overmastering instinct of his blood had prevailed against his sentimental inclinations; in each case it had insisted on his marrying, in one instance an interest in iron works, in another, a third share of a Portland cement business.
His first wife had borne him two sons and a daughter; his second was childless.
Montague was a member of two or three Bohemian clubs in London, to which, as time went on, he became increasingly attached. At these, he passed as a good fellow, chiefly from a propensity to stand drinks to any and everyone upon any pretence; he was also renowned amongst his boon companions for his rendering of "The Village Blacksmith" in dumb show, a performance greeted by his thirsty audience with thunders of applause.
Harold, his first born, will be considered later.
Lowther, his second son, can be dismissed in a few words. He was a good-looking specimen of the British bounder. His ideas of life were obtained from the "Winning Post," and the morality (or want of it) suggested by musical comedy productions at the Gaiety Theatre. He thought coarsely of women. While spending money freely in the society of ladies he met at the Empire promenade, or in the Cafe d' l'Europe, he practised mean economics in private.
Victoria, Montague's daughter, was a bit of a puzzle to friends and relations alike, all of whom commenced by liking her, a sentiment which, sooner or later, gave place to a feeling of dissatisfaction. She was a disappointment to her father, although he would never admit it to himself; indeed, if he had tried to explain this displeasure, he would have been hard put to it to give a straightforward cause for a distressing effect. On first acquaintance, it would seem as if she were as desirable a daughter as heart of father could want. She was tall, good-looking, well educated; she had abundance of tact, accomplishments, and refinement; she had never given her parents a moment of anxiety. What, then, was wrong with her from her father's point of view? He was well into middle age; increasing years made him yearn for the love of which his life had been starved; this craving would have been appeased by love for his daughter, but the truth was that he was repelled by the girl's perfection. She had never been known to lose her temper; not once had she shown the least preference for any of the eligible young men of her acquaintance; although always becomingly dressed, she was never guilty of any feminine foibles, which would have endeared her to her father. To him, such correctness savoured of inhumanity; much of the same feeling affected the girl's other relatives and friends, to the ultimate detriment of their esteem.
Hilda, Montague's second wife, was the type of woman that successful industrialism turns out by the gross. Sincere, well-meaning, narrow, homely, expensively but indifferently educated, her opinion on any given subject could be predicted; her childlessness accentuated her want of mental breadth. She read the novels of Mrs Humphry Ward; she was vexed if she ever missed an Academy; if she wanted a change, she frequented fashionable watering-places. She was much exercised by the existence of the "social evil"; she belonged to and, for her, subscribed heavily to a society professing to alleviate, if not to cure, this distressing ailment of the body politic. She was the honorary secretary of a vigilance committee, whose operations extended to the neighbouring towns of Trowton and Devizeton. The good woman was ignorant that the starvation wages which her husband's companies paid were directly responsible for the existence of the local evil she deplored, and which she did her best to eradicate.
Miss Spraggs, Hilda Devitt's elder sister, lived with the family at Melkbridge House. She was a virgin with a taste for scribbling, which commonly took the form of lengthy letters written to those she thought worthy of her correspondence. She had diligently read every volume of letters, which she could lay hands on, of persons whose performance was at all renowned in this department of literature (foreign ones in translations), and was by way of being an agreeable rattle, albeit of a pinchbeck, provincial genus. Miss Spraggs was much courted by her relations, who were 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 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 you would make it out to be, Eva," remarked Mrs Devitt, who disliked the fact of her unmarried sister possessing sharper wits than her own.
"Oh! I say, is that your own?" guffawed Devitt from his place on the hearthrug.
"Why shouldn't it be?" asked Miss Spraggs demurely.
"Anyway," continued Mrs Devitt impatiently, "she wishes to know if I am in want of a companion, or anything of that sort, as she has a teacher she is unable to keep owing to her school having fallen on bad times."
"Then she's young!" cried Lowther, who was lolling near the window.
"'Her name is Mavis Keeves; she is the only daughter of the late Colonel Keeves, who, I believe, before he was overtaken by misfortune, occupied a position of some importance in the vicinity of Melkbridge,'" read Mrs Devitt from Miss Annie Mee's letter.
"Keeves! Keeves!" echoed her husband.
"Do you remember him?" asked his wife.
"Of course," he replied. "He was a M.F.H. and knew everyone" (everyone was here synonymous with the elect the Devitts were pining to meet on equal terms). "His was Sir Henry Ockendon's place."
The prospects of Mavis Keeves securing employment with the Devitts had, suddenly, increased.
"How was it he came 'down'?" asked the agreeable rattle, keenly interested in anything having to do with the local aristocracy, past or present.
"The old story: speculatin' solicitors," replied Montague, who made a point of dropping his "g's." "One week saw him reduced from money to nixes."
Mrs Devitt raised her eyebrows.
"I mean nothin'," corrected Devitt.
"How very distressing!" remarked Victoria in her exquisitely modulated voice. "We should try and do something for her."
"We will," said her father.
"We certainly owe a duty to those who were once our neighbours," assented Miss Spraggs.
"Do you remember her?" asked Mrs Devitt of her husband.
"Of course I do, now I come to think of it," he replied.
"What was she like?"
He paused for a moment or two before replying.
"She'd reddy sort of hair and queer eyes. She was a fine little girl, but a fearful tomboy," said Devitt.
"Pretty, then!" exclaimed Mrs Devitt, as she glanced apprehensively at her step-daughter.
"She was then. It was her hair that did it," answered her husband.
"H'm!" came from his wife.
"The pretty child of to-day is the plain girl of to-morrow" commented Miss Spraggs.
"What was her real disposition?" asked Mrs Devitt.
"I know nothin' about that; but she was always laughin' when I saw her."
"Frivolous!" commented Mrs Devitt.
"Perhaps there's more about her in the letter," suggested Lowther, who had been listening to all that had been said.
"There is," said his step-mother; "but Miss Mee's writing is very trying to the eyes."
Montague took the schoolmistress's letter from his wife's hand. He read the following in his big, blustering voice:
"'In all matters affectin' Miss Keeves's educational qualifications, I find her comme il faut, with the possible exception of freehand drawing, which is not all that a fastidious taste might desire. Her disposition is winnin' and unaffected, but I think it my duty to mention that, on what might appear to others as slight provocation, Miss Keeves is apt to give way to sudden fits of passion, which, however, are of short duration. Doubtless, this is a fault of youth which years and experience will correct.'"
"Rebellious!" commented Mrs Devitt.
"Spirit!" said Harold, who all this while had been reclining in his invalid chair, apparently reading a review.
Mrs Devitt looked up, as if surprised.
"After all, everything depends on the point of view," remarked Miss Spraggs.
"Is there any more?" asked Harold.
By way of reply, his father read from Miss Mee's letter:
"'In conclusion, I am proud to admit that Miss Keeves has derived much benefit from so many years' association with one who has endeavoured to influence her curriculum with the writin's of the late Mr Ruskin, whose acquaintance it was the writer's inestimable privilege to enjoy. With my best wishes for your welfare, I remain, dear Madam, your obedient servant, Annie Allpress Mee.' That's all," he added, as he tossed the letter on to the table at his wife's side.
"Did she know Ruskin?" asked Harold.
"When I was at her school—it was then at Fulham—she, or her sister, never let a day go by without making some reference to him," replied his step-mother.
"What are you going to do for Miss Keeves?" asked Harold.
"It's so difficult to decide off-hand," his step-mother replied.
"Can't you think of anything, father?" persisted Harold.
"It's scarcely in my line," answered Montague, glancing at his wife as he spoke.
Harold looked inquiringly at Mrs Devitt.
"It's so difficult to promise her anything till one has seen her," she remarked.
"Then why not have her down?" asked Harold.
"Yes, why not?" echoed his brother.
"She can get here and back again in a day," added Harold, as his eyes sought his review.
"Very well, then, I'll write and suggest Friday," said Mrs Devitt, not too willingly taking up a pen.
"You can always wire and put her off, if you want to do anything else," remarked her sister.
"Won't you send her her fare?" asked Harold.
"Is that necessary?" queried Mrs Devitt.
"Isn't it usual?"
"I can give it to her when she comes," said Mrs Devitt, who hated parting with money, although, when it was a question of entertaining the elect of Melkbridge, she spent her substance lavishly.
Thus it came about that a letter was written to Miss Annie Mee, Brandenburg College, Aynhoe Road, West Kensington Park, London, W., saying that Mrs Devitt would expect Miss Keeves, for an interview, by the train that left Paddington for Melkbridge at ten on Friday next; also, that she would defray her third-class travelling expenses.
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