“Sir Ralph Duxbury is younger than you,” she argued, “and he’s retiring at the end of the war. They’re going to London to enjoy life before they’re too old.”
“Duxbury,” said William severely, “is a war-profiteer. His future plans tally with his present.”
“Oh, how can you say that of your friend?”
“I can say it of most of my friends. But you would hardly suggest that it is true of me. You would hardly put the case of a Hepplestall on all fours with the case of a Duxbury.”
She did suggest it. “But surely you are all in business to make money!”
“My dear,” he said, with dignified rebuke, “I am a Hepplestall,” and left it, without more argument, at that. He knew no cure for eyes which saw no difference between the Service and the nimble men who had thriven by the mushroom trades of temporary war-contractors. “And we go to Staithley.”
If it was a matter of capitulations, he had his own to make in his disappearance from Manchester, his familiar scene. The Head of Hepplestalls made no half-and-half business of it, dividing his days between the mills, the Manchester office and the Manchester Exchange. He left others to cut a figure on ‘Change and to hold court in the offices. His place was at the source, at the mills, a standard-bearer of the cotton trade, a manufacturer first and a salesman and distributor only by proxy. It meant, for William, the change in the habits of half a lifetime, the end of his pleasant Cheshire County associations at Alderley, the end of his lunches in his club in Manchester, and, so far, he could have sympathized with Gertrude if only she hadn’t, by the violence of her expression, driven him hotly to resent her view.
She called it “darkest Lancashire”—Staithley, the Staithley of the Hepplestalls! “Caretakers for Rupert!” There was truth in that, though the caretaking, by reason of the war and because when the war ended Rupert had still to begin at the beginning, would last ten years and (confound Gertrude), couldn’t she see what it meant to William that he was going to live and to have his children live in Staithley Hall where he had spent his boyhood? Caretakers! They were all caretakers, they were all trustees. Above all, he, William, was Head of Hepple-stall’s and his wife had so little appreciation of the glory that was his as to be captious about the trivial offsets.
The responsibility, heaven knew, was heavy enough without Gertrude’s adding to it this galling burden of her discontent, but, though she submitted, it was never gracefully. She went to Staithley determined that their time there should be short, that she would lose no opportunity to press for his retirement; but she had learned the need of subtlety. She had found her William a malleable husband, but there were hard places in the softest men and here was one of them not to be negotiated easily or hurriedly, but by a gentle tactfulness. Perhaps she knew, better than he knew himself, that there was no granite in him.
She reminded him, not every day or every week, but sufficiently often to show that she did not relent, of her hatred of Staithley. She had the wisdom not to criticize the Hall—indeed she couldn’t, even when she flogged resentment, disrelish that aging place of mellow beauty—but, “If it were anywhere but at Staithley!” she cried with wearying monotony, and in a score of ways she made dissatisfaction rankle. It was a fact in their lives which she intended to turn into a factor.