As if revealed in one magnetic flash, he saw in a moment what it was that woman meant to man; saw the attraction that the rough lads of his acquaintance found in the slovenly, noisy girls of their own courts and alleys; stood transfixed, coarse-handed son of toil that he was, under the spell of love.
The voice of Chris Cornthwaite close to his ear startled him out of a stupor of intoxication.
“What’s the matter with you, Bram? You look as if you’d been struck by lightning. You are to go round the works with Miss Biron and explain things, you know. And listen” (he might well have to recall Bram’s wandering attention, for this command had thrown the lad into a sort of frenzy, on which he found it difficult enough to suppress all outward signs), “I have something much more important to tell you than that.” But Bram’s face was a blank. “You are to come up to the Park next Thursday evening, and I think you’ll find my father has something to say to you that you’ll be glad to hear. And mind this, Bram, it was I who put him up to it. It’s me you’ve got to thank.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Bram, touching his cap respectfully, and trying to speak as if he felt grateful.
But he was not. He felt no emotion whatever. He was stupefied by the knowledge that he was to go round the works with Miss Biron.
CHAPTER II. CLAIRE.
Bram wondered how Mr. Christian could give up the pleasure of showing Miss Biron round the works himself. Christian’s partiality for feminine society was as great as his popularity with it, and as well known. The partiality, but not perhaps the popularity, was inherited from his father—at least, so folks said.
And Bram Elshaw, looking about for a reason for this extraordinary conduct on the part of the young master, and noting the wistfulness of that young man’s glances and the displeasure on the face of the elder Mr. Cornthwaite, came very near to a correct diagnosis of the case.
Bram was always the person chosen to carry messages between the works and Holme Park, the private residence of the Cornthwaites, and the household talk had filtered through to him about Theodore Biron, the undesirable relation of French extraction, who had settled down too near, and whose visits had become too frequent for his rich kinsman’s pleasure. And the theory of the servants was that these visits were always paid with the object of borrowing money.