Anna of the Five Towns

profound grief, and the restrained bitterness against all the world, which were expressed in these words⁠—the sole epitaph of Titus Price⁠—nearly made Anna cry. She would have cried, if the cat had not opportunely jumped on her knee again; she controlled herself by dint of stroking it. She sympathised with him more intensely in that first moment of his loneliness than she had ever sympathised with anyone, even Agnes. She wished passionately to shield, shelter, and comfort him, to do something, however small, to diminish his sorrow and humiliation; and this despite his size, his ungainliness, his coarse features, his rough voice, his lack of all the conventional refinements. A single look from his guileless and timid eyes atoned for every shortcoming. Yet she could scarcely open her mouth. She knew not what to say. She had no phrases to soften the frightful blow which Providence had dealt him.

“I’m very sorry,” she said. “You must be relieved it’s all over.”

If she could have been Mrs. Sutton for half an hour! But she was Anna, and her feelings could only find outlet in her eyes. Happily young Price was of those meek ones who know by instinct the language of the eyes.

“You’ve come about the works, I suppose?” she went on.

“Yes,” he said. “Is your father in? I want to see him very particular.”

“He isn’t in now,” she replied: “but he will be back by four o’clock.”

“That’s an hour. You don’t know where he is?” She shook her head. “Well,” he continued, “I must tell you, then. I’ve come up to do it, and do it I must. I can’t come up again; neither can I wait. You remember that bill of exchange as we gave you some weeks back towards rent?”

“Yes,” she said. There was a pause. He stood up, and moved to the mantelpiece. Her gaze followed him intently, but she had no idea what he was about to say.

“It’s forged, Miss Tellwright.” He sat down again, and seemed calmer, braver, ready to meet any conceivable set of consequences.

“Forged!” she repeated, not immediately grasping the significance of the avowal.

“Mr. Sutton’s name is forged on it. So I came to tell your father; but you’ll do as well. I feel as if I should like to tell you all about it,” he said, smiling sadly. “Mr. Sutton had really given us a bill for thirty pounds, but we’d paid that away when Mr. Tellwright sent word down⁠—you remember⁠—that he should put bailiffs in if he didn’t have twenty-five pounds next day. We were just turning the corner then, father said to me. There was a goodish sum due to us from a London firm in a month’s time, and if we could only hold out till then, father said he could see daylight for us. But he knew as there’d be no getting round Mr. Tellwright. So he had the idea of using Mr. Sutton’s name⁠—just temporary like. He sent me to the post-office to buy a bill stamp, and he wrote out the bill all but the name. ‘You take this up to Tellwright’s,’ he says, ‘and ask ’em to take it and hold it, and we’ll redeem it, and that’ll be all right. No harm done there, Will!’ he says. Then he tries Sutton’s name on the back of an envelope. It’s an easy signature, as you know; but he couldn’t do it. ‘Here, Will,’ he says, ‘my old hand shakes; you have a go,’ and he gives me a letter of Sutton’s to copy from. I did it easy enough after a try or two. ‘That’ll be all right, Will,’ he says, and I put my hat on and brought the bill up here. That’s the truth, Miss Tellwright. It was the smash of that London firm that finished my poor old father off.”

Her one feeling was the sense of being herself a culprit. After all, it was her father’s action, more than anything else, that had led to the suicide, and he was her agent.

“Oh, Mr. Price,” she said foolishly, “whatever shall you do?”

“There’s nothing to be done,” he replied. “It was bound to be. It’s our luck. We’d no thought but what we should bring you thirty pound in cash and get that bit of paper back, and rip it up, and no one the worse. But we were always unlucky, me and him. All you’ve got to do is just to tell your father, and say I’m ready to go to the police-station when he gives the word. It’s a bad business, but I’m ready for it.”

“Can’t we do something?” she naively inquired, with a vision of a trial and sentence, and years of prison.

“Your father keeps the bill, doesn’t he? Not you?”

“I could ask him to destroy it.”

“He wouldn’t,” said Willie. “You’ll excuse me saying that, Miss Tellwright, but he wouldn’t.”

He rose as if to go, bitterly. As for Anna, she knew well that her father would never permit the bill to be destroyed. But at any cost she meant to comfort him then, to ease his lot, to send him away less grievous than he came.

“Listen!” she said, standing up, and abandoning the cat, “I will see what can be done. Yes. Something shall be done⁠—something or other. I will come and see you at the works tomorrow afternoon. You may rely on me.”

She saw hope brighten his eyes at the earnestness and resolution of her tone, and she felt richly rewarded. He never said another word, but gripped her hand with such force that she flinched in pain. When he had gone, she perceived clearly the dire dilemma; but cared nothing, in the first bliss of having reassured him.

During tea it occurred to her that as soon as Agnes had gone to bed she would put the situation plainly before her father, and, for the first and last time in her life, assert herself. She would tell him that the affair was, after all, entirely her own, she would firmly demand