said the vicar, kindly.
“But I wean’t stand it, that I wean’t,” roared the young man, like an angry bull. “A man’s a man even if he is a master. I’ll fight fair; but if I don’t break every bone in his false skin, my name ain’t Tom Podmore.”
This burst over, he resumed his cap and snatched down his sleeves, looking half ashamed of his effusion in the presence of a stranger, and he shrank away a little as the vicar laid his hand upon his arm.
“Look here, Podmore,” he said kindly; “when I went first to school they used to give me for a copy to write, ‘Do nothing rashly.’ Don’t you do anything rashly, my friend, because things done in haste are repented of at leisure. I have come down here to be a friend, I hope, to everybody, and as you were the first man I met in Dumford, I shall look upon you as one of the first to have a call upon me.”
“Thanky, sir, thanky kindly,” said Podmore, in a quieter tone. “I don’t know how it is, but you’ve got a kind of way with you that gets over a fellow.”
“She seems a nice, pretty, well-behaved girl, that Daisy Banks,” said the vicar.
“There isn’t a better nor a truer-hearted girl nor a prettier nowhere for twenty miles round,” cried the young fellow, flushing up with a lover’s pride. “Why look at her, sir, side by side with Miss Eve, that’s a born lady. Why, Miss Eve’s that delicate and poor beside my Daisy, as there ain’t no comparison ’tween ’em. My Daisy, as was,” he added, sorrowfully. “Something’s come over her like of late, and it’s all over now.”
The great strong fellow turned his back, and resting one hand upon the stile, his broad shoulders gave a heave or two.
“I shan’t take on about it,” he said, roughly, as he turned round with a sharp, defiant air of recklessness. “I ain’t the first fool that’s been jilted by a woman, ay, parson – hundred and sixty pound ’ll buy a sight o’ gills o’ ale. Don’t you take no heed o’ what I said.”
He was turning away, but a strong hand was upon his shoulder.
“Look here, Podmore,” said the vicar, firmly, “you said something about fools just now. You are not a fool, and you know it. You leave the ale alone – to the fools – and go back and get to work as hard, or harder, than you ever worked before. I shall see you again soon, perhaps bowl to you in the cricket field. As for your affairs, you leave them to me. Do you know why Englishmen make the best soldiers?”
“Do I know why Englishmen make the best soldiers, parson?” said Podmore, staring. “No: can’t say I do.”
“Because, my lad, they never know when they are beaten. Now, you are not beaten yet. Good-bye.”
He held out his hand, and the great grimy, horny palm of the workman came down into it with a loud clap, and the grip that ensued from each side would have been unpleasant to any walnut between their palms.
Then they parted, taking different routes, and ten minutes later the Reverend Murray Selwood was walking quietly through the empty town street, quite conscious though that head after head was being thrust out to have a look at the stranger.
There was the usual sprinkling of shops and private houses, great blank red-brick dwellings, which told their own tale of being the houses of the lawyer, the doctor, and their newer opponents. Then there was the factory-looking place, with great gates to the yard, and a time-keeper’s lodge inside, surmounted by a bell in its little wooden hutch. The throb of machinery could be heard, and the shriek of metal being tortured into civilised form came painfully to the ear from time to time. Smoke hung heavily in the air – smoke tinged with lurid flame; and above all came the roar of the reverberating furnaces, where steel or some alloy was being fused for the castings which had made out-of-the-way, half-savage Dumford, with its uncouth, independent people, famous throughout the length and breadth of the land.
There were very few people visible, for the works had not yet begun to pour forth their masses of working bees, but there were plenty of big rough lads hanging about the corners of the streets.
“I wonder what sort of order the schools are in,” said the new vicar to himself, as he neared the church, towards which he was bending his steps, meaning to glance round before entering the vicarage. “Yes, I wonder what sort of a condition they are in. Bad, I fear. Very bad, I’m sure,” he added.
For at that moment a great lump of furnace refuse, or glass, there known as slag, struck him a heavy blow in the back.
He turned sharply, but not a soul was visible, and he stooped and picked up the lump, which was nearly equal in size to his fist.
“Yes, no doubt about it, very bad,” he said. “Well, I’ll take you to my new home, and you shall have the first position in my cabinet of specimens, being kept as a memorial of my welcome to Dumford.”
“Well,” he said, as he reached the church gate, “I’ve made two friends already, and – perhaps – an enemy. By Jove, there’s another brick.”
Volume One – Chapter Three.
At the Foundry House
Mrs Glaire lived in a great blank-looking red-brick house in the main street, two ugly steep stone steps coming down from the front door on to the narrow kidney pebble path, and encroaching so upon the way that they were known as the tipsy-turvies, in consequence of the number of excited Dumfordites who fell over them in the dark. Though for the matter of that they were awkward for the most sober wayfarer, and in a town with a Local Board would have been condemned long before.
The ugliness of the Foundry House, as it was called, only dwelt on the side giving on the street; the back opened upon an extensive garden, enclosed by mighty red-brick walls, for the greater part concealed by the dense foliage, which made the fine old garden a bosky wilderness of shady lawn, walk, and shrubbery.
For Mrs Glaire was great upon flowers, in fact, after “my son, Richard,” her garden stood at the top of her affections, even before her niece, Eve, whom she loved very dearly all the same.
Mrs Glaire was a little busy ant of a woman, with a pleasant, fair face, ornamented with two tufts of little fuzzy blonde curls, which ought to have hung down, but which seemed to be screwed up so tightly that they took delight in sticking out at all kinds of angles, one or two of the most wanton – those with the rough ends – that had been untwisted by Mrs Glaire’s curl-papers, even going so far as to stick straight up.
On the morning when the new vicar made his entry into Dumford, Mrs Glaire was out in her garden busy. She had on her brown holland apron, and her print drawn hood, the strings of which seemed to cut deeply into her little double chin, and altogether did nothing to improve her personal appearance. A little basket was in one hand half-filled with the dead leaves of geraniums which she had been snipping off with the large garden scissors she held in the other hand – scissors which, for fear of being mislaid, were attached to a silken cord, evidently the former trimming of some article of feminine attire, and this cord was tied round her waist.
She had two attendants – Prince and the gardener, Jacky Budd – Jacky: for it was the peculiarity of Dumford that everybody was known by a familiar interpretation of his Christian name, or else by a sobriquet more quaint than pleasant.
Prince was a King Charles spaniel, with the shortest of snub noses, the most protrusive of great intelligent eyes, and long silky ears that nearly swept the ground. Prince had a weakness, and that was fat. He had been fed into such a state of rotundity that he had long ceased running and barking, even at
