Israel Rank

by Roy Horniman

I said nothing that week to Mr. Gascoyne of my having made the acquaintance of his nephew and niece. I waited to see how matters progressed. As I thought things over I came to the conclusion that he would dislike it more than I had at first imagined. After all, it was not he who had been insulted, it was his wife, and that was the difficult thing to forgive. The young Gascoynes’ opportunity had been their cousin’s death. It was undoubtedly an aggravation of the estrangement that they seemed to have completely ignored the event.

I went down to Copsley, the village where Henry Gascoyne’s romance dwelt, to reconnoitre. It was a fair-sized place, a village in the proper sense of the word, and not a mere hamlet.

Janet Gray’s father was the blacksmith of the place, and he and two of his sons drove a thriving trade. Three more of his sons were well placed in the neighbourhood, and the sixth was a soldier, a lance corporal. Janet and her mother kept house, and from all that I could hear a happier or better managed establishment it would have been impossible to find. There was something patriarchal in the way the old blacksmith ruled his household. I have seen him, when his younger son proved rebellious, enforce his decree with a strong, effective clout. He was what would be described as an honest, God-fearing man; that is to say, he lived strictly within the conventions of his class, and would have scouted the idea that the rights and wrongs of almost every subject on earth were not to be easily grasped by a well-intentioned mind.

His daughter was his joy and delight. He was proud of her looks, which like those of all of his children were out of the common. When he stood on Sunday evening in church surrounded by his family, a more moving spectacle of physical health and primal beauty it would have been difficult to imagine.

He was also proud of his daughter’s housekeeping capabilities, and not only he, but his wife and sons, looked forward with dismay to the time when some stalwart lover would claim her. Mrs. Gray almost hoped that her sons would marry and settle down first in order to avoid the desecration of her household arrangements by the unheard-of innovation of a servant.

Mrs. Gray had a sister, a spinster some years older than herself, who, having entered the service of the Gascoynes many years before, had never left it, but had become an institution in the family. The two sisters were devoted, and it had long been their habit to see each other at least once a week. Sometimes Janet accompanied her mother, and when Mrs. Gray was unable to go, for she suffered somewhat from rheumatism, her daughter went alone.

It was on one of these expeditions that she had met young Gascoyne. He had related the circumstances to me a dozen times.

“She was coming back to the station through the pine-trees, and I was struck all of a heap, bowled over first time. I don’t know how it all came about, but we talked about her aunt. It was something to go on with. It took me a long time to persuade her to meet me, though.”

Judging by the character and determination in the faces of old Gray and his sons, it did not appear that the man who trifled with their womankind would have a very pleasant time of it. It was the identity of her rustic suitor, however, that I was anxious to discover. I was not long in doing so, for he haunted the Gray threshold. Personally, had I been in Janet’s place, I should not have hesitated a moment between the magnificent specimen of manhood who was anxious to make her his wife, and the spoilt and vicious youth, who, if her ruin could have been accomplished with safety, would have regarded it as a mere pleasurable and excusable incident in his life.

Nat Holway was in every way a splendid fellow. His occasional violence of temper was a part of the general strenuousness of his character. He was slowly conquering this failing, however, and was likely to make the same sort of man as Janet’s father. He had never known any other sweetheart. It had, at least as he thought, been an understood thing between them since they were children. He delayed speaking just a little too long, and it was after young Gascoyne had appeared on the scene that he asked her to be his wife. To his amazement and the no little surprise of her friends she refused him. Ignorant of the existence of Harry Gascoyne in his relation to Janet, they looked around vainly for a cause.