Читать книгу Fame is the Spur - Howard Spring - Страница 8

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Lizzie was the youngest of the Sudgens. She was fifteen years younger than Lillian. Her father and mother both died when she was in her middle teens, and so it happened that, of all the Sugden girls, she was the only one who chose a husband for herself. The other sisters felt that it was rather a scandalous affair. Lizzie met Arthur Lightowler during a holiday at Scarborough. There was no introduction; no family acquaintance; it was a “pick-up”—that was the only word for it. Lightowler saw the girl, liked the look of her, raised his straw boater and said “Good-afternoon.” Lizzie liked the bronzed tall youngster, returned his greeting, and they were married three months later.

None of the sisters could deny that the marriage was a smashing success. Arthur was not an adventurer, as Lillian had at first suggested. He was a junior partner in a prosperous Bradford wool firm; and if Lizzie was not as lucky financially as some of the others had been, at any rate she was in clover compared with most folk; and she had something that none of her sisters had succeeded in finding; a perfect marriage.

If Arthur Lightowler was not a financial adventurer, he was an adventurer in every other way. He dragged Lizzie off to the Lake District for the honeymoon and made her climb what seemed to her dizzying vertical rock-faces. Arthur laughed, and said it was a little practice for the Alps. In the evenings he read poetry to her, and during the first winter of their marriage he playfully upbraided her with her ignorance and set her going on languages. She protested that she could at least play the piano. He laughed again, and said: “D’you call that playing? Listen to this.”

She had not known he could play. She was amazed, and under his guidance she found teachers who taught her to play, too, though she never played as well as he did.

“You women are so uneducated,” Arthur teased her. “It’s not your fault. It’s the damn’ fool way you’re brought up. But you wait. Your turn will come. It’s in the air.”

He taught her what a joyous and happy thing education was. He took her abroad twice a year; in ten years he made her a well-read woman. She spoke French and German, she played well, and Arthur joked: “Well, you’ve got a living at your finger-tips now. When I’m gone, you can become a school-ma’am.” And then he was gone, as suddenly and boisterously as he had done everything. She remembered watching the lanterns flickering up the path, and the white shoulders of the mountains shining under the moon. It seemed an easy job that he and a few guides had undertaken: to bring down a man who was lying up there with a broken leg. She never saw him again. The avalanche that tore out of the night carried the whole party into a crevasse and buried them there. She was thirty then. Now she had been running her school for five years.

During the ten years of her marriage Lizzie saw little of Lillian, nor did she wish to see more. She was a woman of the world in a way that Lillian would never be, and so she had the dexterity and address to keep their relationship on an easy basis, but she had no desire to come back to Manchester and lead the sort of life that Lillian, with an elder sister’s solicitude and a born interferer’s persistence, thought would be best for her. A Sugden girl running a school was a shock to Lillian at first; but she came to realise that it was not a usual school: there were few girls, and they were all from families who belonged to the commercial and industrial aristocracy. And so, when the crisis arose with Ann, Lillian had no misgiving about sending the girl to her aunt, especially as this was the Christmas season and there would be no pupils at the school.

Hawley prided himself on his hardiness, but the morning of December 24 was so bitterly cold that he told Haworth he would not use the victoria. The closed carriage was brought round to the door. In the hall Lillian pecked Ann’s cheek frostily. “You’ve spoiled Christmas for us,” she said; and added with the look of a Christian martyr: “I hope you have a very happy one with your Aunt Elizabeth.”

Ann submitted to the kiss but did not return it. She stepped into the carriage; Hawley followed; and when her box had been hoisted to the roof they started. By the time they reached Victoria Station it had begun to snow—so heavily that the horses’ hoof-beats fell muffled upon the road.

Ann’s spirits rose as soon as they were in the station. The morning was so dark that gas-lamps were lit everywhere. Down below, all was colour and movement. The bookstalls were enchanting splashes of red and blue and yellow and crimson; the jackets of the shoeblacks glowed; piles of luggage trundled by on barrows. Up above, the roof was a dusky violet firmament; and far away, beyond the proscenium arch at the end of the platform, she could see the snow drifting down in a white flurry. She took her father’s arm impulsively and hugged it. “Tha’s glad to be going,” he said with gruff affectionate disapproval.

He was wrapped in a great plaid ulster with a deer-stalker upon his head; and she in a sleek sealskin coat with a hat and muff of the same material. A porter staggered before them with Ann’s trunk on his shoulder.

They travelled first-class, and had the compartment to themselves. Hawley was in a cross and disappointed mood. He didn’t talk much, but sat back in a corner reading the Manchester Guardian. Ann, who had never made this journey before, was not sorry to be left alone to stare out of the window. It was not at first an exhilarating prospect. The slummy purlieus of the great city, even kindly disguised as they now were by the snow, could not but look their hideous selves; and soon they gave way to the not more inspiring plain in whose midst Manchester sits like a sordid egg in a frying-pan. Flat, featureless, depressing, the country spread out on either hand, punctuated here and there by the huge rectangularity of a mill, lifting into the falling snow its tall smoke-plumed chimneys over row upon row of windows lighted in the dark morning one above another like the portholes of a great ship at midnight.

Ann was looking forward, facing the way the train was going, and the snow hid the hills from her till the train was almost upon them. “Hills!” she cried, clapping her hands; for, to a Manchester-bred girl, hills were something to shout about.

Hawley put down the paper. “That’s t’Pennine Chain,” he said. “Ay, we’re going through Todmorden. We’ll soon be in t’tunnel, and when we get to t’other end we’ll be in Yorkshire.”

The engine suddenly shrieked, the train was precipitated into blackness, and even through the closed windows a foul and sulphurous reek permeated the carriage. “Ah think this is t’filthiest tunnel in t’world,” Hawley announced, a mere voice speaking out of the circumambient obscurity. “It’s a pretty long ’un, too. Right through t’mountains. Theer!” as the windows became faintly luminous, slowly brighter, and then fog-steamed and opaque but clearly apparent. “Yorkshire!”

Yorkshire was a surprise to Ann after the grey monotony of the Lancashire plain. She was glad that Hawley had returned to his paper; she looked out fascinated upon a different world. As if to emphasize the difference, even the weather had changed on this side of the great watershed. It had been snowing and the country was white, but now there were breaks in the clouds, patches of pale wintry blue, and here and there even a hint of sunlight falling upon the tumultuous landscape. Hills, shaggily fleeced with snow-laden trees, rose on either hand, narrowing down the view, but exchanging for the austerity of Lancashire a variety, an unexpectedness, a charm that yet was not soft but bold and striking and individual. She spoke aloud: “I’m going to like Yorkshire!”

Hawley put down his paper again and blew upon his cold fingers. “Ah hope so,” he said. “Yorkshire’s not Lancashire, but it’s all reight so far as it goes.”

The journey to Bradford took an hour-and-a-half. As they approached the city the charm of Yorkshire faded. Slummy-looking townships and hamlets; a nauseous, reeking tunnel, and they steamed slowly into a station that seemed to Ann small and unimpressive after Manchester’s Victoria.

Elizabeth Lightowler was waiting beyond the barrier—barely beyond it, for both her hands were resting upon it, and she was heaving up her small body and glancing with the bright intentness of a bird along the platform. She was the smallest as well as the youngest of the Sugden girls. At a casual glance, you might have called her the oldest, for, at thirty-five, she had a head of beautiful white hair. She was a living proof of the old superstition that hair can go white in a night. It happened to Lizzie Lightowler the night she knew beyond question that the lantern-shine moving up the mountain-path was the last she would ever see of her husband. It was hair that curled naturally and beautifully; she had cut it short, and the lovely bunch of it on her neck was her most characteristic feature. You soon saw that she wasn’t old. Her face was round and unlined; her eyes were dark and bright, sparkling with intelligence; and her whole slight body had about it something vital and indomitable that gave Lizzie Lightowler an importance beyond her few inches.

She came forward now and took Ann in a warm embrace. “Well, my dear child,” she said, “how you have grown! I shouldn’t have known you.”

And certainly Ann would hardly have known Aunt Elizabeth. Nearly five years had passed since she last saw her. The girl of fifteen, verging on young womanhood, did not retain very clear impressions from the time when she was ten.

“I hope you’re going to stay to lunch, Hawley,” said Lizzie, who hadn’t kissed her brother-in-law.

Ann felt that Lizzie Lightowler looked almost relieved when Hawley said: “Nay, lass. Ah’ll get a bite at the hotel. Ah must be handy for t’next train back. There’s plenty to do at t’shop, what with Christmas an’ all. Lillian sends her love.”

“Thank you,” said Lizzie dutifully. “And do give her mine. Now, Ann, let’s be going. This is a draughty place to stand about in.”

Hawley walked with them out to the station approach, where Lizzie had a four-wheeler cab waiting. He kissed Ann, tipped the porter who had brought out her luggage, and rather furtively—as though he feared that even at that distance Lillian might be watching him—he slipped her two golden sovereigns. “Theer, lass,” he said. “Be a good girl and write often to thi mother. A merry Christmas. And to you, Lizzie.”

They watched him disappear into the station hotel; then the cabby whipped up his horse, and off they went through the snowy streets. They were streets nothing like so long and imposing as Manchester’s, but they looked attractive under the snow, and the shop windows were bright with Christmas goods, and, above all, Ann was uplifted by a sense of freedom, of adventure, that seemed to heighten all her faculties and sharpen all her perceptions. The horse went slowly up the stiff slippery climb of Darley Street, and when he reached the top and mended his pace along the level of Manningham Lane, she saw that all the streets that came into it on the left flowed down towards them, and all the streets that went off it on the right flowed down away from them. Manningham Lane was carved out of a hillside. Down in the valley to which those right-hand streets flowed she could see the steam of passing trains; and beyond the valley bottom she saw the land rising steeply to a great hill, thickly built over with houses and mills.

Lizzie Lightowler divined her thoughts. “None of your Manchester about this, my dear,” she said. “This is a good town for goats. You’ll find you can’t go far without going uphill or down.”

Aunt Lizzie’s house, Ann knew, was in Ackroyd Park. It was the house Arthur Lightowler had taken when they married. There Lizzie had remained and opened her school. Ackroyd Park, it appeared, was one of those right-hand turnings, dropping downhill off Manningham Lane towards the valley bottom. Like everything along the Lane, which did not seem to contain a single brick—nothing but buildings of hewn stone, darkened by the city’s smoke—Ackroyd Park looked built to last for ever. Vast iron gates were at its entrance, hung between stone pillars on which the name Ackroyd Park was deeply carved. It was no park, but a wide road with spacious stone houses on either hand. Each stood in its own ground. All alike had the forbidding granitic integrity of fortresses. There was sufficient ground about Aunt Lizzie’s house for the cab to go through the gate, pass round a small circular shrubbery of rhododendrons, and come to a stop before a front door which Ann perceived, when she alighted, was hidden from the observation of all neighbours. The imposing gates at the entrance to the Park, Aunt Lizzie’s own private gate and garden, combined to give the house a feeling of being islanded and secure that Ann found very much to her taste.

“Who built these houses and why,” said Aunt Lizzie, “I don’t know. We’ve got a big garden and, as you see, even stables; but this place must always have been in the muck as soon as Bradford was Bradford. There’s far more dirt here than you ever see at Fallowfield. But there it is. My husband liked the place, and so do I. Come in. Marsden, pay the cabby and bring in the box.”

Marsden was an old man with white hair, rheumy eyes, and a little silky moustache that would have been white if tobacco juice had not stained it a dirty yellow. He looked at the trunk and said: “I’ll do my best, Mrs. Lightowler.”

“That’s fine,” said Aunt Lizzie. “Take it up to Miss Artingstall’s room. Mrs. Marsden knows where that is. You come with me, Ann.”

These Bradford merchants knew how to make themselves comfortable. The hall was not big, but there was a fireplace in it and a fire was burning there. It was a proper little room, with a couple of easy chairs and a well-filled bookcase on either side of the fire. Ann noted it with satisfaction as she followed her aunt up the wide staircase, carpeted in crimson, with mahogany handrails that were as richly dark and polished as Haworth liked his horses’ flanks to be. From the landing a corridor ran towards the back of the house. Lizzie opened a door at the end of the corridor and said: “Come in here, my dear. Let’s make ourselves comfortable.”

Ann gave an exclamation of delight. She thought it a lovely room with its olive-green woodwork and its simple olive-green fireplace, its biscuit-coloured walls, along one of which, breast-high, ran bookcases. The carpet and the curtains were fawn coloured. There were no pictures, and, save for one piece of porcelain, which Ann did not know was a Ming horse, on the mantelpiece, there was nothing to represent that miscellaneous class of dirt-gatherers which Lillian referred to generically as “ornaments.” Ann walked to the window and looked out on the large back-garden, white now, and terminated by a dozen Lombardy poplars whose graceful vertical lines were brushed upon the snow-white face of the hill that rose across the valley.

She turned back to the room, which was rather dusky and for that reason the more inviting in the firelight twinkling on the brass fender and the surfaces of the writing-table, which made up, with two wicker chairs and a small folding table, all the furniture in the room.

“I can see you like it,” said Aunt Lizzie whose small resolute figure was posed in front of the fire.

“I love it,” Ann confessed whole-heartedly. “I feel so happy—so safe—here with you.”

Aunt Lizzie did not encourage emotion. “I hope you don’t expect a big lunch,” she said. “I rarely have more than tea and toast. Here it comes. You can make the toast.”

She pulled forward the folding table and placed it between the wicker chairs in front of the fire. “Thank you, Mrs. Marsden,” she said, as the housekeeper brought in a tray. “Did Mr. Marsden get that box up to Miss Artingstall’s room?”

“He just about managed it,” Mrs. Marsden conceded.

“Good. Now take Miss Artingstall’s hat and coat along there. Thank you. There’s a toasting-fork by the fire, Ann.”

It was not for nothing that Lizzie Lightowler had managed in five years to make for herself an enviable position. There was no need at all for her to teach. She had money of her own and her husband had left her money. But she wanted to do something, and the training of young girls, once she had decided to try it, soon justified itself as an enterprise for which she was exquisitely adapted. Her house was not a school in the usual sense of the word. She took no girl who was younger than fifteen, and though there was a certain amount of formal schooling for those who wanted to improve their English, French, German, or piano-playing, her real intention was to introduce the girls to life as it is lived in an industrial city.

Mrs. Lightowler and her handful of girls could be found in the public gallery when the City Council met at political meetings, police courts and the Assizes in neighbouring Leeds. They went to the Art Galleries, and to concerts, to theatres and to dances, to mills and factories, workhouses, inquests and prisons. Some of the girls stayed with her for a year, some for two. Few went away without a poise, a knowledge of the commonplaces of life, and a first-hand experience of wide social contacts that could not have been gained in the cloistered life of a “finishing” school. She never had more than six girls at a time. They came to her from all over the north of England, and her method had been so successfully its own advertisement that there were now more applicants for admission to the school than she could accept.

It did not take such a woman long to read between the lines of a domestic situation. When Lillian had suddenly written to suggest Ann’s visit, giving slender and unconvincing reasons for sending the girl out of the house on the very eve of Christmas, Lizzie divined a domestic crisis of the first magnitude. There, in the quiet of her little sitting-room, with the firelight shining on her books and on her own white and deceptively venerable hair, she waited for Ann to make the first move of confidence. She was very quick at seizing such moments, and she saw her chance when the girl said: “I liked that, Aunt Elizabeth—having a little meal without fuss.”

“I like it myself,” said Lizzie. “When the girls are on holiday, I always have this meal up here by myself. When they’re about, they come up one by one. There are six of them. They have one day a week each, and I have Sunday to myself.”

“That’s a good idea,” Ann said. “It feels such a lovely room to talk in, and I should think your girls must like having a chance to talk to you with no one else about.”

Lizzie smiled. “Between ourselves, that was the idea. I’ve never said so to any of them; but I find it works that way and that there’s usually something they want to get off their minds. Making the toast seems to help them.”

Ann glanced at the little clock on the writing-table. “How long do you give them?” she asked.

The smile on Lizzie’s face widened. “How long will it take you?”

Aunt Lizzie let the girl run on. She knelt on the hearth-rug and spread her hands to the fire, and Ann, lying back in one of the wicker chairs, looked at the light shining through the dandelion-clock of her hair. She could not see her aunt’s face, but caught her occasionally murmured word of encouragement or understanding. She appealed to her again and again: “Do you think I was right, Aunt Elizabeth?”

“Aunt Lizzie, please,” she said, half-turning her face over her shoulder. “Do you remember my husband?”

“Not very well,” said Ann.

“He used to say to me: ‘Ah, proud Elizabeth, I’ll make a Lizzie of you yet.’ And so he did; and I like to be called Lizzie, though Lizzie Lightowler sounds a horrible name to me.”

“Well, Aunt Lizzie, do you think I was right?”

“I cannot see any right or wrong in it,” said Lizzie. “There you were with your Uncle Birley at this Shawcross house, and then there you were without him at the other house. You had nothing to do with it either way, had you?”

“No, but I liked it. I thought it was exciting.”

Aunt Lizzie would commit herself to no opinion about rights and wrongs. She contented herself with saying: “I understand exactly how you felt about it, my dear, and if I had been you, I should no doubt have felt the same.”

Ann was comforted when she heard that, and when Lizzie added: “As to the Ryerson boy, we must see if something can’t be done about him,” she felt happier than she had been for days past.

Ann was accustomed in those days to say her prayers, morning and night. She had gone out with her Aunt Lizzie after dinner, trudging the hilly streets with the snow crackling underfoot, inspecting the big covered market, full of naphtha flares and sizzling gas-light, gay on this Christmas Eve with seasonable meat and poultry, fruit and berried greenery; and then they had gone home and Lizzie had taken her up to her attic bedroom. It was a long, narrow room under the roof, with a dormer window looking towards the hills of Idle. When her aunt was gone down, the girl did not undress for a long time. She stood before the window, delighted with what she saw. From her window on the Manchester plain she could see nothing but the few circumjacent yards of grass and trees. Now her eye feasted itself upon a prospect which suggested that all the constellations had fallen to earth. Chains and festoons of light, miles distant, looped and dipped upon the faces of the hills that were all a cold grey glimmer of snow; and besprinkled among these ordered galaxies were scores, hundreds, of little individual rebel lights burning with various brilliance like the uncharted star-dust of the heavens.

Ann found it an uplifting and liberating spectacle. Thinking of her last few miserable days, she felt almost literally unchained. She turned back to the narrow white room that had no fireplace and only a candle for light. She set the candle before the mirror on the dressing-table and for a long time brushed at her shining hair. Then she got down on her knees. Her childish jumble of requests to God contained two items: “God bless Mother.” “Please God, let me stay here with Aunt Lizzie for a long time.”

If Lillian Artingstall had been “blessed” in the simple literal sense that Ann had in mind, which would doubtless have meant kept in good health and enjoyment of her fortunate station, then it is not likely that Ann would have remained in Bradford for the long visit which she very much wanted. Providence, to give Ann that boon, had to do something about Lillian; and something had already been done. Little Ann could not know it, but while she was on her knees the woman upon whom she invoked blessings was on her back.

Hawley did not get home to his dinner that night. He was one of those individuals who believe that even a machine which they have themselves wound up perfectly cannot run without them. It was Christmas Eve, a gladsome season indeed, but also one which Artingstall’s might expect to be profitable. The shops would be open late, and Hawley would want to see them working at their greatest efficiency to the last moment. He journeyed back, fuming at the time lost on this little fool daughter, but by eight o’clock the nerves of Mr. Tattersall the Manager were relaxing. Hawley’s face was registering pleasure at the way things were going.

Lillian dined alone, without enjoyment. She had had to explain as best she could that Ann would not, after all, be able to accept this invitation and that. She knew that servants had heard her shouting as she thrashed the child, and that they were aware that Ann’s departure indicated a family crisis. Her self-esteem was dependent on the opinion of other people; and, unsupported by Hawley, she could hardly bear to sit there with two servants fluttering in and out of the room. She retreated towards the drawing-room as early as possible, horribly aware that it was a retreat.

She was crossing the hall when a maid in the room behind her dropped a tray. It was the sort of thing that normally would have caused her to tighten her thin lips and march ahead with added dignity. One simply did not comment on the clumsiness of such louts. But now she turned back swiftly, pushed open the dining-room door, and saw the two girls grinning at one another. One was swinging the tray in her hand in a way which made Lillian think it had not been dropped at all: it had been deliberately gonged against a corner of the sideboard. “I hope that startled some of the starch out of the frosty old bitch,” the girl said. As the words left her mouth she saw Lillian. Lillian would have retreated if she had not been seen. Now she had to do something. “Get out,” she said. “Go and pack your things and get out.”

The girl put the tray on the table and looked at her defiantly.

“You can’t put me out on the street like that, you can’t,” she said. “Not without notice.”

“Never mind notice. You’ll have a week’s money.”

“An’ how d’you think I’m going to get home to Blackburn at this time o’ night? An’ to-morrow Christmas Day.”

“That’s your affair. Get out,” said Lillian. “I’ll have your money ready when you come down.”

“How am I going to get to Blackburn? Walk it?”

“You can run it if you like,” said Lillian, and instantly regretted the idiotic words. They were the sort of cheap retort the girl would herself have used. That she had been trapped into them suddenly made her hate the girl, standing there, arms a-kimbo, staring at her insolently. For the second time within a few days Lillian learned that hate is physically dangerous. Her heart was patting playfully against her ribs, gently, warningly. The girl sensed the deepening venom of her mood, and reacted swiftly.

“Oh, I can run it, can I?” she demanded shrilly. “That’s funny, isn’t it? That’s your idea of a joke. Well, this was my first job as a slavey, and it’ll be my last. Why any Lancashire girl is such a bloody fool as to leave a good job in a mill, I don’t know. Well, this child’s learned her lesson.” She tore the absurd little goffered cap from her hair and untied her apron. She threw them at Lillian’s feet. “Take ’em,” she shouted. “Thank God, I’ll have a shawl on my head an’ clogs on my feet next week. No more slaving for the likes of you. A stuck-up bitch who can’t manage her own kid.”

Lillian could feel a mad stampede of vituperative words surging from her mind, crying for utterance. A lifetime’s training made her fight them back. But the struggle was terrible, and now her heart was pounding. In her temples, in her throat, she could feel the blood working like a loud rhythmic piston. Suddenly she clutched at the table by which she was trying to stand with an erect patrician dignity. Then she was on her back on the carpet.

The girls were frightened out of their wits. They called the cook-housekeeper who sent one of them for the doctor and with the help of the other put Mrs. Artingstall to bed. The doctor was still there when Hawley got home. They were old friends. They had a drink together in the drawing-room. The doctor was solicitious, non-committal. “I didn’t know Lillian had a heart like that.”

“Like what?” Hawley demanded brutally.

“Well—tricky—letting her down like that, you know. We’ll have to watch it, Hawley, my boy. Avoid excitement. Could you get her away for a holiday?”

“It’s as bad as that?”

“Well——” He finished his whiskey and Hawley accompanied him to the front door. “Don’t worry, Hawley, my boy. And a merry Christmas.”

Ann away—Lillian ill; Hawley thought he had never had less reason to expect a Christmas to be merry. He stood before the dining-room fire, his arms resting along the mantelpiece, his head laid upon them. He kicked savagely at a lump of coal. “Blast that Birley!” he said. He did not go up again to see Lillian. He hated the look of her when she was unwell.

The Sugden girls made use of one another shamelessly. A refractory child was always packed off to Lizzie. Any one in need of a holiday descended on Clara. Clara was the only one of them who had married Money in the absolute sense that the owner of it didn’t want to work any more and didn’t need to work any more. Joe Blamires had a lovely house and exhibition gardens at St. Annes on the Lancashire seacoast. The region was as flat as a board; the climate was mild; there were Joe’s gardens to walk in, and Joe liked nothing better than to walk in them and, pipe in mouth, explain that all this—waving his plump arms about him—had been created out of Nothing. In fact, it had been created out of Joe Blamires’ money, spent by a Scotch head gardener with four assistants.

This clearly was the place for Lillian with her troublesome heart; and thither she went early in the new year. Hawley had suggested that Ann should accompany her: Clara was accommodating and had no children of her own: but Lillian’s opposition was so firm that it surprised him. Lillian had not forgotten that Ann had said: “You filthy beast! I’ve finished with you.” Even to recall that moment imaginatively caused uncomfortable tremors. She felt that she didn’t want to see Ann for a long time.

Then Hawley suggested that the child should come home; but again Lillian opposed him. “And be on her own all day long? How do you know what she’ll be up to?” A child alone would always, in Lillian’s view, be up to something. “You’d better leave her where she is, if Elizabeth will keep her.”

Lillian wrote a long letter to Lizzie. She had not, she said, explained before that Ann’s sudden departure from home was caused by bad conduct, and, as if that were not enough, by most insolent behaviour to her parents when the conduct was condemned. Lillian explained all about it at great length, but she did not mention the thrashing or the words that Ann had used when the thrashing was over. She said that the affair had distressed her so deeply that her health had suffered, and would Elizabeth be so kind as to keep Ann in Bradford until it would be convenient to have her home again.

During the last five years Lizzie Lightowler had learned a lot about girls. During the last few days she had learned a lot about Ann, and this, combined with what she knew about Lillian, caused her to crumple the letter with an impatient grunt and throw it into the fire. She was alone in her little sitting-room, and what is more she was lonely in it. Since Ann had come, she had had one or two pangs of loneliness. She had thought she was done with that sort of thing. She prided herself on being a self-sufficient woman. But she hated the thought that the eager lovable child would soon be leaving her. And now Lillian wanted her to stay. But not on those terms, Lizzie grunted to herself. She crossed to her writing-table and sat down.

“Dear Lillian.—I am sorry to hear that your health is not good, and I am sure that a visit to Clara and Joe will be beneficial. Give them my love. Ann is happy here, and if you would like her to stay I shall be delighted to have her. But, as you know, this is a school, and soon the pupils will be coming back after the holiday. I shall not be able to give Ann the attention she should have unless she, too, becomes a pupil and so gets counted in with all the others. You ought to know, also, that I never accept a girl for less than twelve months. If you could consent to Ann’s remaining with me for that length of time, I am sure that both she and I would be delighted. I enclose a copy of the school prospectus, which shows you the fees. My love to Hawley and yourself, Lizzie.”

“She hates the name Lizzie,” she grinned to herself, “and she’ll hate the idea of fees even more.” But it was a good gamble on getting Ann for a year. Lizzie felt she could do something with the girl in that time.

Lillian’s nose went even thinner than usual. “I should have thought Ann was an educated girl,” she said with a sniff.

Hawley’s face deepened its purple. “Payin’ to slay wi’ ’er aunt!” he cried. “Ba goom, Ah will say you Sugden lasses take after yer father. Ah used to expect ’im to ‘and me a check after dinner every time Ah was there courtin’ you.”

Lillian sat up in bed, where she had remained since Christmas Eve, though now she felt well. She handed him the prospectus. “The fees seem reasonable enough,” she said. “I see they’re payable by the term in advance. You’d better send her a cheque.”

The Artingstall diligence was waiting at the porch. Hawley glanced at his watch and saw that he had no time for argument. He blew gustily out of the room. “Payin’ to stay wi’ ’er aunt!” He couldn’t get over it.

“Isn’t that wonderful!” said Ann. “I didn’t know there was such country in England.”

Lizzie looked with satisfaction at the girl’s cheeks, reddened by the frosty wind and at her shining eyes. “Yes,” she said. “It’s a good walk. I often do it.”

They had set out after lunch and walked along Manningham Lane to Shipley. Then they had dropped down a steep street to the valley bottom and climbed up the other side to the village of Baildon. The snow was crisp under foot as they passed through the one street of the snug place, with the old stocks still there outside the Malt Shovel Inn, though many years must have passed since a malefactor languished in them.

The village street petered out into a moorland track. Across the snowy undulations of the land, whereon the rough unmortared walls drew their crazy zigzags, and over which the sky was a milky blue, they could see the village of Hawksworth among bare winter boughs. A shoulder of hill thrust up behind it.

“When you climb that hill you’re on Ilkley Moor,” Lizzie said pointing. “We’ll do it some day.”

They walked to Hawksworth, and then they turned to the left and followed the road that kept under the shoulder of the hill. It was lovely here, Ann thought, with the snowy hill running up so steeply on their right, its crest cutting a long glittering white line upon the blue of the sky. There was a wind in their faces, sharp and exhilarating, and looking sideways at Lizzie, stepping out briskly with her white hair shining and a stout ash stick in her hand, the girl laughed suddenly for sheer joy and cried: “I hope we get tea soon.”

Lizzie’s stick pointed ahead to the only building now in sight. “That’s Dick Hudson’s. We’ll be all right there.”

“Who’s Dick Hudson?”

“Goodness knows who he is. That’s the name of the pub.”

The pub stood under weather-battered trees. The road they were on flowed past it into the now quickly falling dark. Another road forked off to the left, and to the right a rough path climbed the hill. “That’s the way we’ll take when we go to Ilkley Moor,” Aunt Lizzie said. “Now look at that. Isn’t that encouraging?” She pointed with her stick to the smoke drifting up from Dick Hudson’s chimneys.

In a moment they were sitting before the fire from which the smoke was ascending, in a room with a lighted hanging lamp, and drawn red curtains, and solid furniture of oak and elm.

“Now you’ll see what a Yorkshire moorland pub understands by afternoon tea,” Lizzie laughed.

Ann, with her winter-sharpened appetite, fell upon the inch-thick fried ham, golden-brown, and the eggs that came with it beneath a great metal cover. Lizzie cut at the loaf, poured the tea, and passed the butter.

“How does this suit Your Royal Daintiness?” she asked.

Ann, unashamed in her gusto, wiped grease from her chin with her handkerchief. “Not a crumb too much,” she said.

“I shall never forget this,” Ann thought; and then wondered where she had lately heard those words. Yes—that poor Ryerson boy, sitting in his miserable kitchen, telling her so earnestly that he would never forget her visit, as though she were a fairy princess or something. She had laughed at his grave persistence; “but all the same,” she thought, “I shan’t forget this.”

This first moorland walk at night, in the darkness that had come on while they were in the inn. This grey mysterious shroud stretched over the dead earth, and the few trees clawing up and looking so ancient and cold and threadbare. This silence, broken only by the steady reliable tramp of Lizzie’s feet and the tap, tap of her stick on the ground that the frost was stiffening again. And then the lights, scattered at first, winking out from lovely cottages, gradually thickening into clusters, and at last, as they approached the town again, suddenly leaping upon the sight in those myriad constellations that she was always to think of as one of the glories of Bradford. She said to herself: “A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.”

They were back on the hard prosaic pavements of Manningham Lane. She was tired, but she felt her cheeks glowing and her heart glowing, too. Why am I so happy? she wondered. Suddenly it struck her that she had never been so happy as this before—that perhaps she had not at all before this known what it was to be happy. As they passed between the heavy iron gates of Ackroyd Park she took Aunt Lizzie’s arm and pressed it against her side, and when they came to the house she ran eagerly up the short curving drive and pulled the bell impatiently.

They had dinner in the dining-room. It was the only meal they took there—“but I have breakfast here, too, with the girls when they’re about,” Lizzie explained.

Ann was always glad to escape to the little room upstairs, but the dining-room was cheerful enough. Over the fireplace was an enlarged photograph of the Matterhorn. It was the only thing Lizzie kept to remind her of Arthur, and it wasn’t necessary. She could afford now to laugh at her own loss. “Of course,” she said, “I might have been like Queen Victoria and kept his climbing boots in the hall and an alpenstock in the umbrella-stand and used one of his ropes for a clothes-line. I don’t think it would have done me any good. But I do like to see that picture. I never climbed a mountain myself. I did nothing but scramble about on little hills. He was so much better than I am at everything. Now let’s go upstairs.” She picked up the letters that had come by the evening post and that old Marsden had laid on the table. “That’s your father’s writing, isn’t it?”

Ann nodded. Lizzie watched her closely and saw the disappointment clouding her face. “I expect he wants me to go back already,” the child said.

“Well, maybe, and maybe not. Come along. We’ll open it upstairs.”

They sat on either side of the fire. Lizzie opened the letter. As soon as she saw the cheque she knew it was all right. “We’ve saved him!” she cried. “We’ve saved the little Ryerson boy! You’ve got to go home in the morning to get fitted up with the clothes you need, and then you’re coming to live with me for a year—all bar the holidays. Does that please you?”

She explained what she had done, and Ann listened with shining eyes. “It’s wonderful!” she said. “That walk to-day, with the marvellous ham for tea, and now a year of you! But what’s it got to do with the Ryerson boy?”

“You don’t know anything about poor people, do you?”

Ann shook her head.

“Well, I do; and so will you before I’ve done with you. They’re bound hand and foot. Supposing I got this boy a job here in Bradford, which I intend to do. What would happen?”

Ann shook her head again.

“I’d just be crippling the whole family. Poor people can’t live unless they hang together. He’s too young to earn enough to keep himself, and his mother couldn’t get along because he’d have nothing to send her.”

“He’s got nothing to give her now,” Ann whispered, recalling Mrs. Ryerson’s suffering face and Arnold’s white look of consternation when Hawley railed at him.

“But he’s going to have something,” said Lizzie. “That’s the joke. The man that sacked him is going to keep him. D’you think I’d take a penny for keeping you? Not a ha’penny, my dear, however long you stay. No. This young Arnold can come and work in Bradford. Your father will make up his wages to what he needs to live on and he’ll also provide something for Mrs. Ryerson. Don’t you think that’s good justice? And don’t you think good justice can also be a good joke?”

“It’s a beautiful idea,” said Ann. “Thank you, Aunt Lizzie. Thank you very much.”

“Beautiful? I should say it is. It’s the loveliest idea I’ve ever had.” She lay back in her chair and laughed. “If you breathe a word to your father or mother, I’ll skin you alive.”