“Oh! Henry!” she exclaimed.
“Call me Harry,” he entreated, his arm still round her waist; “I want you to call me Harry. No one else does or ever has done, and no one shall, now.”
“Harry,” she said deliberately, bracing her mind to a positive determination. She must please him, and she said it again: “Harry; yes, it has a nice sound.”
Ephraim sat reading the Signal in the parlour when she arrived home at five minutes to ten. Imbued then with ideas of duty, submission, and systematic kindliness, she had an impulse to attempt a reconciliation with her father.
“Good night, father,” she said, “I hope I’ve not kept you up.”
He was deaf.
She went to bed resigned; sad, but not gloomy. It was not for nothing that during all her life she had been accustomed to infelicity. Experience had taught her this: to be the mistress of herself. She knew that she could face any fact—even the fact of her dispassionate frigidity under Mynors’ caresses. It was on the firm, almost rapturous resolve to succour Willie Price, if need be, that she fell asleep.
The engagement, which had hitherto been kept private, became the theme of universal gossip immediately upon the return of the Suttons from the Isle of Man. Two words let fall by Beatrice in the St. Luke’s covered market on Saturday morning had increased and multiplied till the whole town echoed with the news. Anna’s private fortune rose as high as a quarter of a million. As for Henry Mynors, it was said that Henry Mynors knew what he was about. After all, he was like the rest. Money, money! Of course it was inconceivable that a fine, prosperous figure of a man, such as Mynors, would have made up to her, if she had not been simply rolling in money. Well, there was one thing to be said for young Mynors, he would put money to good use; you might rely he would not hoard it up same as it had been hoarded up. However, the more saved, the more for young Mynors, so he needn’t grumble. It was to be hoped he would make her dress herself a bit better—though indeed it hadn’t been her fault she went about so shabby; the old skinflint would never allow her a penny of her own. So tongues wagged.
The first Sunday was a tiresome ordeal for Anna, both at school and at chapel. “Well, I never!” seemed to be written like a note of exclamation on every brow; the monotony of the congratulations fatigued her as much as her involuntary efforts to grasp what each speaker had left unsaid of innuendo, malice, envy or sycophancy. Even the people in the shops, during the next few days, could not serve her without direct and curious reference to her private affairs. The general opinion that she was a cold and bloodless creature was strengthened by her attitude at this period. But the apathy which she displayed was neither affected nor due to an excessive diffidence. As she seemed, so she felt. She often wondered what would have happened to her if that vague “something” between Henry and Beatrice, to which Beatrice had confessed, had ever taken definite shape.
“Hancock came back from Lancashire last night,” said Mynors, when he arrived at Manor Terrace on the next Saturday afternoon. Ephraim was in the room, and Henry, evidently joyous and triumphant, addressed both him and Anna.
“Is Hancock the commercial traveller?” Anna asked. She knew that Hancock was the commercial traveller, but she experienced a nervous compulsion to make idle remarks in order to hide the breach of intercourse between her father and herself.
“Yes,” said Mynors; “he’s had a magnificent journey.”
“How much?” asked the miser.
Henry named the amount of orders taken in a fortnight’s journey.
“Humph!” the miser ejaculated. “That’s better than a bat in the eye with a burnt stick.” From him, this was the superlative of praise. “You’re making good money at any rate?”
“We are,” said Mynors.
“That reminds me,” Ephraim remarked gruffly. “When dost think o’ getting wed? I’m not much for long engagements, and so I tell ye.” He threw a cold glance sideways at Anna. The idea penetrated her heart like a stab: “He wants to get me out of the house!”
“Well,” said Mynors, surprised at the question and the tone, and, looking at Anna as if for an explanation: “I had scarcely thought of that. What does Anna say?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured; and then, more bravely, in a louder voice, and with a smile: “The sooner the better.” She thought, in her bitter and painful resentment: “If he wants me to go, go I will.”
Henry tactfully passed on to another phase of the subject: “I met Mr. Sutton yesterday, and he was telling me of Price’s house up at Toft End. It belonged to Mr. Price, but of course it was mortgaged up to the hilt. The mortgagees have taken possession, and Mr. Sutton said it would be to let cheap at Christmas. Of course Willie and old Sarah Vodrey, the housekeeper, will clear out. I was thinking it might do for us. It’s not a bad sort of house, or, rather, it won’t be when it’s repaired.”
“What will they ask for it?” Ephraim inquired.
“Twenty-five or twenty-eight. It’s a nice large house—four bedrooms, and a very good garden.”
“Four bedrooms!” the miser exclaimed. “What dost want wi’ four bedrooms? You’d have for keep a servant.”
“Naturally we should keep a servant,” Mynors said, with calm politeness.
“You could get one o’ them new houses up by th’ park for fifteen pounds as would do you well enough”; the miser protested against these dreams of extravagance.
“I don’t care for that part of the town,” said Mynors. “It’s too new for my taste.”
After tea, when Henry and Anna went out for the Saturday evening stroll, Mynors suddenly suggested: “Why not go up and look through that house of Price’s?”
“Won’t it
