Sister Gertrude: A Tale of the West Riding

by D. F. E. Sykes

CHAPTER I.

It was a summer evening of the early eighties, and market-day in the ancient manufacturing town of Huddersfield, in the West Riding. The town is called a manufacturing town in the geographies, and its name may be found therein among the leading centres of the great cloth industry. As a matter of fact, though, to be sure, there are still some few mills in the lower quarters and outskirts of the town, and hard by the inky river that runs through it, the cloth for which Huddersfield is noted is manufactured for the most part in the adjacent villages, and the town itself is its central mart. On market-days the manufacturers of the rural districts, if rural is a term to be applied with any propriety to clusters of mills situate on lofty steeps, betake themselves to the town, attend the Cloth Market, or may be seen in their town warehouses or at the corners of the streets converging on the Cloth Hall, dine heavily at the market ordinary of their favourite hostelry, see their bankers and their lawyers, and not uncommonly, in the late afternoon, join their buxom wives or comely daughters at an accustomed rendezvous, assist in the weekly household shopping of their frugal dames, and by them are driven home in that outward and visible sign of commercial prosperity and social respectability, the family gig or trap. By the time the worthy owner of mill and loom is seated at his ample board, surrounded by his Lares and Penates, consuming the home-fed ham and domestic muffin, and quaffing his fragrant Souchong, his mill hands, male and female, donned in their second-best, have in their turn betaken themselves townwards to see the sights, and indulge the mild dissipation of strolling the streets, gazing in the shop-windows, making a modest purchase—it is then that the Phyllis of the loom buys for Corydon the meerschaum pipe he is afraid to smoke except on Sundays, and that Corydon wastes his substance on sweet-meats for the ripe lips of his charmer. Or maybe Phyllis and Corydon, amorously-linked, seek the pit-door of the town theatre to suck oranges and furtive peppermints, whilst the buskined villain struts upon the none too ample stage and declaims his stilted speech.

It was, then, about eight of the evening of a certain Summer market-day when two young men, arm in arm, lounged leisurely past the Market Place, and stopped for no other reason than to see why others had stopped, for a small and shifting crowd had gathered round the base of the Market Cross, and were giving, some a rapt and sustained attention, others but the brief hearing of a soon-sated curiosity to a speaker standing upon the Cross’s pedestal. The audience were, for the most part, of young and little heedful holiday-makers, who took the speaking as part of their outing, and one of the many wonderful things to be heard of market-days, and to be mused upon at leisure, amid the clack of the loom and the hum of the revolving wheels, or discussed in the interchange of feminine experiences for which the all too brief dinner-hour avails.

There was, however, a fringe of the more serious-minded, who listened to the speaker with solemn attention, and regarded her with respectful appreciation. These, one may surmise, were in their several homes Sunday-school teachers or chapel members themselves, with some experience of spiritual exhorting, and feeling under some compulsion to lend their countenance, if only, by the way, even to an unauthorised Evangelist. Nearer to the speaker stood a body of men and women, some with cymbals or other instruments of music or of noise, wearing the scarlet tunic and German-band cap, or the close-fitting serge costume and coal-scuttle bonnet by which the gentler soldiers of the Salvation Army seek to conceal what fairness of feature it has pleased the good God to give them.

These militant believers served not only as a body-guard of the central figure of the gathering, but as a chorus; a stalwart, rugged-featured soldier, whose secular calling was the ungentle craft of a butcher, evoking an occasional subdued note from the drum he beat o’ nights to the praise and glory of God; whilst a neat and modest maiden, once the slattern scullery-maid of the Red Lion, gently tinkled a tambourine, that served also as a collection-box for stray coppers earnestly entreated; and their brethren of both sexes punctuated the address of their leader by fervent “Amens,” “Glorys,” and “Hallelujahs,” ejaculated at frequent intervals and interspersed with as little regard to their appropriateness to the spoken word as a ’prentice compositor displays in the sprinkling of his commas in the printed line.

The speaker, to whom all faces were turned, was young and of a rare beauty. Her features were of Grecian cast, her eye of a soft, dark violet hue, her lips of that Cupid arch so seldom seen, her complexion pure, and suffused now with the glow of health or excitement, and her wealth of rippling hair was of dark chestnut hue, just touched by the parting rays of the westerning sun as it declined behind the roofs of the Bank on the opposite side of New Street, off which the Market Place stood. Her dress was of blue serge, fitting closely to a form of just proportions and unrelieved by any kind of ornament, unless a small cross of chased silver suspended round the neck might deserve the term. The hand, which was occasionally moved to emphasise a sentence or point a remark, was white and soft and well-formed. The voice in which she spoke was soft, sweet, pure, musical, almost caressing; her diction the chaste speech of education and refinement.

“Que diable, fait-elle dans cette galère?” muttered Edward Beaumont to his companion, as the two young men above-mentioned lingered on the fringe of the crowd.

“Oh! it’s one of that Salvation Army lot,” replied his friend, Sam Storth. “Come along, Beaumont. The usual thing, you know: hell and brimstone, blood and fire, and a collection.”

“Poachers on the preserves of the Church, eh, Sam? Well, you’ll admit the saint is pretty enough for a sinner. Let us listen.”

Sam Storth shrugged his shoulders, stretched his little legs apart, thrust his hands into his trousers’ pockets, yawned drearily, and fixed his big and bulging eyes upon the speaker, eyeing her beauty with the calmly critical survey he was wont to bestow upon the Coryphées of the local ballet. Edward Beaumont, whom two or three of the more respectably clad of the audience recognised and saluted, turned to the speaker with respectful and serious attention, already repenting of his jesting allusion to her good looks.