CHAPTER XX. BY THE FURNACE FIRES.
Then there began a strange time of dreary waiting for some crisis which Bram felt was approaching, although he could hardly foreshadow what the nature of it would be.
Things could not go on much longer at Duke’s Farm in the way they had been doing for some time now. With nobody to look after him, the farm bailiff grew daily more neglectful of all business but his own. It went to Bram’s heart to see ruin creeping gradually nearer, while he dared not put out a helping hand to arrest its approach. He did try. He wrote a note to Claire, studiously formal, saying that while her father’s illness continued he should be glad to keep an eye on the management of the farm, as he had done some months ago. But the answer he got was a note still more formal than his own, in which Claire thanked him, but said she thought it better now that affairs had reached their present stage to let them go on as they were. After this to move a step in the direction of helping her would have been unwarrantable interference, which Bram would have undertaken once, when they were friends, but which he could not venture upon now.
Still he tried to perform the office of guardian angel, hampered as he was.
Joan, who was his good friend still, and who went daily to the farm to do the housework as usual, kept him fully acquainted with all that went on there. She told him that Mr. Biron, who was still suffering from erysipelas, which died away and broke out again, was growing more irritable every day, so that it was a marvel how his daughter could treat him with the patience and gentleness she showed. Claire herself, so Joan said, was altogether changed; and indeed Bram, when he caught a glimpse of her at the windows, could see the alteration for himself. She had grown quite white, and the set, hard expression her face wore made it weird and uncanny. All her youthful prettiness seemed to have disappeared; she never smiled, she hardly ever talked. No single word, so far as Joan knew, had passed between father and daughter on the subject of the latter’s disappearance and return. Theodore was glad to get his patient nurse back; glad to have some one to bully, to grumble at, and that seemed to be all.
Claire never went out, and Joan never encouraged her to do so, for Meg Tyzack still hung about the place, Joan having encountered her early in the morning and late in the evening, on her way to and from the farm. Meg, so Joan said, would slink out of the way with a laugh or a jeering question about Claire or her father.
“Ah doan’t believe,” remarked Joan, when she had given Bram the account of one of these meetings, “as the lass is quite right. Yon young spark has a deal to answer for!”
The “young spark” in question, Christian Cornthwaite, was in the meantime doing something to expiate his misdeeds, for his illness was both dangerous and tedious. Day after day, week after week, there came the same bulletin to the many inquirers down at the works—“No change.” Mr. Cornthwaite lost his grave, harassed look. He consulted Bram daily; took him, if possible, more into his confidence than before, over the details of the business; but he never talked about his son. He seemed, Bram thought, to have given up hope in a singularly complete manner; he spoke, he looked, as if Christian were already dead. In the circumstances, Bram found it impossible to bring before the anxious father the subject of Claire, and the distresses of the household at Duke’s Farm.
Bram heard from Joan of the duns whose presence was now daily felt. Some of these he found out and settled with quietly himself; but he did not dare to pursue this course very far, lest Claire’s feminine quickness should find him out.
The subject of ready money was a more delicate one still. Bram began by giving Joan small sums to supply the most pressing needs of the household at the farm, and for a little while she managed to evade Claire’s curious questions, and even to pretend that it was she, Joan, who occasionally lent a few shillings for the daily purchase of necessary food.
But one evening, when Bram, as his custom was, waylaid her as she came from the farm, as soon as she was out of sight of the window, Joan looked at him with eyes full of alarm.
“Eh, but she’s found me aht, Mr. Elshaw, an’ she’s led me a pretty dance for what you’ve done, Ah can tell ye.”
“Why, what’s that, Joan?”
“That there money! She guessed, bless ye! who ’twas as gave it to me. ‘Joan,’ says she, ‘if ye take money from him again, if it’s to keep us from starving, Ah’ll go and throw mysen down t’ pit shaft oop top o’ t’ hill!’ And she means it, she do! Ah doan’t like t’ looks of her. What between her father and t’other one—” and Joan jerked her head in the direction of the works down in the town—“she’s losing her wits too, Mr Elshaw, that’s what she’s doing!”
Bram was silent for some minutes.
“Well, it can’t go on like this,” said he at last. “The creditors will get too clamorous to be put off. If I could see Mr. Biron I should advise him to——”
But Joan cut him short with an emphatic gesture.
“Doan’t you try it on, Mr. Elshaw!” cried she earnestly. “Doan’t you try to get at Mr. Biron. That’s joost what he wants, to get hold of you. Time after time he says to Miss Claire, ‘If Ah could see young Elshaw,’ says he, ‘Ah could settle summat.’ But she won’t have it. It’s t’ one thing she won’t let him have his way abaht. ‘If he cooms in t’ house,’ says she, ‘Ah’ll go aht o’ ’t.’ So now you know how she feels, Mr. Elshaw, and bless her poor little heart, Ah like her t’ better for ’t!”
Bram did not say what he felt about it. He listened to all she had to say, and then with a husky “Good-night, Joan,” he left her and went home. He too liked the spirit Claire showed in avoiding him, in refusing help from the one friend whose hand was always held out to her. But, on the other hand, the impossibility of doing her any good, of even seeing her to exchange the warm handclasp of an old friend, gnawed at his heart, and made him sore and sick.
A dozen times he found himself starting for the farm with the intention of forcing himself upon her, of insisting on being seen by her, so that he might offer the help, the comfort, with which heart and hand were overflowing. But each time he remembered that, brave as he felt before seeing her, in her presence he would be constrained and helpless, easily repelled by the coldness which she knew how to assume, by the look of suffering, only too genuine, he could see in her drawn face.
And so the days grew into weeks, until one day, not long before Christmas, he was crossing from one room to another down at the works with a sheaf of letters in his hand, when he came face to face with Christian.
Bram stopped, almost fell back; but he did not utter a word.
Christian, who was looking pale and very delicate, held out his hand with a smile.
“Well, Bram, glad or sorry to see me back again?”
“Glad, very glad indeed, Mr. Christian,” said Bram.
He wanted to speak rather coldly, but he could not. The sight of his friend, so lately recovered from a dangerous illness, and even now evidently suffering from its effects, was too much for him. Every word of that short speech seemed to bubble up from his heart. Christian, perhaps even more touched than he, and certainly, by reason of his recent illness, less able to conceal his feelings, broke into a sob.
“They told me—my father told me, you wouldn’t be,” said he, trying to laugh. “Said you came up to the house with the intention of punching my head, but that you relented, and consented to put off the gentle chastisement until I was on my feet again. Oh, Bram, Bram, for shame! When you knew I was always a mauvais sujet too, and never pretended to be anything else!”
“But, Mr. Christian,” began Bram, who felt that he was choking, that the passions of love for Claire and loyalty to the friend to whom he owed his rise in life were tearing at his heartstrings, “when a woman——” Chris interrupted him, placing one rather tremulous hand lightly on his shoulder.
“My dear boy, d—— the women! Oh, don’t look shocked when I say d—— the women, because I speak from conviction, and a man’s convictions should be respected, especially when he speaks, as I do, from actual experience. I say d—— the women; and, moreover, I say that until you can say d—— the women too, you are incapable of any friendship that is worthy of the name. There! Now, go home, and ponder those words; for they are words of wisdom!”
And Chris, giving him a familiar, affectionate push towards the door of the room he had been about to enter, passed on.
The news of Christian’s return to the office spread quickly, and was received with great personal satisfaction throughout the works, where the easy, pleasant manners of the “guv’nor’s” son had made him a universal favorite. The tidings flew beyond the works, too, for Joan told Bram that Mr. Biron and his daughter had heard of Christian’s return, and added that the mention of his name had been received by Claire in dead, blank silence.
“Poor lass! She looked that queer when she heard it,” said Joan.
Bram, as usual, said nothing. The conflict between his feeling towards Claire and his feeling towards Christian grew hourly more acute.
“She wouldn’t hear what Mr. Biron had to say,” pursued Joan. “But she joost oop and went to her room, and Ah saw no more of her till Ah coom away. But she were that white! Ah wished she’d talk more, or else cry more; Ah doan’t like them pains as you doan’t hear nothing abaht. They gnaw, they do! It’d be better for her to go abaht calling folks names, like Meg!”
But this reference to Meg Tyzack in the same breath with Claire wounded Bram, who turned away quickly. Surely the life of patient self-sacrifice she was leading in constant attendance upon her selfish father was ample atonement for the error into which she had been driven.
It was a great shock to him when, on the afternoon of the following day, just before the clerks left the office, he heard a rumor that Miss Biron had come down to the works, and was asking to see Mr. Christian. Bram at first refused to believe the report. He went downstairs on purpose to find out the truth for himself, and saw in the yard, to his dismay, the figure of Claire in an angle of the wall. Well as he knew the little figure, he would not even then believe the evidence of his own eyes without further proof. He crossed the yard towards her. Claire ran out, passing close to him, so that he was able to look into her face. It was indeed she, but her face was so much changed, wore an expression so wild, so desperate, that Bram felt his heart stand still.
He called to her, but she only ran the faster. She disappeared into the building which contained the offices, and quickly as Bram followed he could not track her. When he reached the bottom of the staircase, he could neither see nor hear anything of her.
While he was wondering what would happen, whether she would present herself in the office of old Mr. Cornthwaite himself, and be treated by him with the brutal cynicism he always expressed while speaking of her, or whether she would find her way straight to Christian, he heard footsteps in the corridor above, and a moment later Chris himself, singing softly to himself, and swinging his umbrella as if he had not a care in the world, appeared at the top of the stair.
“Hallo, Bram!” cried he, catching sight of the young fellow, and laughing at him over the iron balustrade. “You look as solemn as a whole bench of judges. What’s the matter?”
Bram hesitated. He did not know whether to tell Christian that Claire was about, or whether to hold his tongue. Doubt was cut short in a couple of seconds, however, when Christian reached the bottom of the staircase. For he came face to face with Claire, who had appeared as quickly and as silently as she had previously disappeared from one of the doors which opened on the ground floor.
Both stared at each other without a word for the space of half a minute. Both were pale as the dead; but while he shook from head to foot she was outwardly quite calm.
“I want—to speak to you,” she said at last.
Her voice sounded hard, unlike her usual tones. There was something in them which sounded in Bram’s ears like a menace.
Christian looked around, as if afraid of being seen.
“Not here,” said he quickly. “In the works. I will go first.”
He disappeared at once, and Claire followed him out through the door and across the first of the yards, where the work was slackening off, and where swarms of dusky, grimy figures, their eyes gleaming white in their smoke and dust-begrimed faces, were hustling each other in their eagerness to be out. Like a flash of lightning there passed through Bram’s mind, brought there by the sudden contact with this black, toiling world from which Christian had rescued him, by the strong well-remembered smell of mingled sweat, coal-dust, and fustian, an overwhelming sense of love and gratitude for Chris, mingled with fear.
Yet what was he afraid of? What made him struggle through the crowd with a white face and laboring breath, in mad anxiety to keep close to the footsteps of the man and the woman? He could not tell. For surely he had no fear of poor, little, helpless Claire, however wild her look might be, however desperate the straits in which she found herself!
He had lost sight of both of them within a few steps of the office doors. They had been swallowed up in the stream of workmen who were pressing out as they went in.
Bram could only go at a venture in one direction through yards and past workshops, without much idea whether he was on the right track or not. He had a fancy that he might perhaps come up with them near the spot where he had first seen them together on that hot August afternoon eighteen months before, when Christian had picked him out for notice to his father, and so laid the foundation of his fortunes.
But when Bram got there, and stood where, rod in hand, he had stood that day, just outside one of the great rolling sheds, wiping the sweat from his forehead, he found the place deserted. The noise of the day had ceased; the steam hammers stood in their places like a row of closed jaws after an infernal meal. A huge iron plate, glowing red under its dusky gray surface in the darkness lay on the ground near Bram’s feet—fiery relic of the labors of the day.
Bram passed on, peering into the sheds, where the machinery was still, and where the great leather bands hung resting on the grinding wheels. Past the huge presses he went, where the glowing plates of steel are curled into shape like wax under the slow descending, crushing weight of iron. Through the great room where the great armor-plates are shaved down, the steel shavings curling up like yards upon yards of silver ribbon under the slow, steady advance of the huge machine.
At last Bram fancied that he caught the sound of voices: the one shrill and vehement, the other deeper, lower, the voice of a man. He hurried on.
Through the heart of the works, which stretched for hundreds of acres on either side of it, ran the railway, at this point a wide network of lines, crossing and recrossing each other, carrying the goods traffic of the busy city. Bram came out upon it as he heard the voices, and looked anxiously, about him.
And at once he discerned, on the other side of the railway line, two figures engaged not merely in the wordy conflict which had already come to his ears, but in an actual physical struggle, the girl clinging, dragging; the man trying to push her off.
Bram’s heart seemed to stand still. For, with a thrill of horror, he saw that a train had suddenly come out from under the bridge on his left, and was rapidly approaching the spot where the two struggling, swaying figures stood. He shouted, and dashed forward across the broad network of lines. Caution was always necessary when these were crossed, but he did not look either to the right or to the left; he could see only those struggling figures and the train bearing down upon them.
But his effort was made in vain. Before he could reach them the train had overtaken them, there was a wild, horrible shriek, and then a deep groan. Bram stood back shaking in every limb, until the train had passed by. Then, sick, blinded, he stared down at the line with a terrible sound in his ears.
On the ground before him lay a bleeding, mangled heap, writhing in agony, uttering the horrible groans and sobs of a man dying in fearful pain.
It was Christian Cornthwaite.