The History of David Grieve

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

'Ah! Dora, this is nice. Lucy says you will stay to supper. We get so busy, you and I, we see each other much too seldom.'

He spoke in his most cordial, brotherly tone, and, standing on the rug with his back to the fire, he looked down upon her with evident pleasure.

As for her, though the throb of her young passion had been so soon and so sternly silenced, it was still happiness to her to be in the same room with David Grieve, and any unusual kindness from him, or a long talk with him, would often send her back to her little room in Ancoats stored with a cheerful warmth of soul which helped her through many days. For of late years she had been more liable than of old to fits of fretting—fretting about her father, about her own sins and other people's, about the little worries of her Sunday-school class, or the little rubs of church work. The contact with a nature so large and stimulating, though sometimes it angered and depressed her through the influence of religious considerations, was yet on the whole of infinite service to her, of more service than she knew.

'Have you forgiven me for upsetting Sandy?' she asked him, with a smile.

'I'm on the way to it. I left him just now prancing about Lucy's bed, and making an abominable noise. She told him to be quiet, whereupon he indignantly informed her that he was "a dwagon hunting wats." So I imagine he hasn't had "the wrong dinner" to-day.'

They both laughed.

'And you have been in Ancoats?'

'Yes,' said David, tossing back his black hair with an animated gesture, and thrusting his hands into his pockets. 'Yes—we are getting on. We have got the whole of that worst James Street court into our hands. We shall begin pulling down directly, and the plans for the new buildings are almost ready. And we have told all the old tenants that they shall have a prior claim on the new rooms if they choose to come back. Some will; for a good many others of course we shall be too respectable, though I am set on keeping the plans as simple and the rents as low as possible.'

Dora sat looking at him with somewhat perplexed eyes.

Her Christianity had been originally of the older High Church type, wherein the ideal of personal holiness had not yet been fused with the ideal of social service. The care of the poor and needy was, of course, indispensable to the Christian life; but she thought first and most of bringing them to church, and to the blessing and efficacy of the sacraments; then of giving them money when they were sick, and assuring to them the Church's benediction in dying. The modern fuss about overcrowded houses and insanitary conditions—the attack on bricks and mortar—the preaching of temperance, education, thrift—these things often seemed to Christian people of Dora's type and day, if they spoke their true minds, to be tinged with atheism and secularism. They were jealous all the time for something better. They instinctively felt that the preeminence of certain ideas, most dear to them, was threatened by this absorption in the detail of the mere human life.