How many times since boyhood has he had to shift quarters? and each time he has experienced a struggle, and has had to surrender some things on which his heart was fixed, but from which it was, perhaps, well to be free. He recalls how one winter at Bayonne, he collected every match and spill-end that had been used for lighting cigars and candles till he had accumulated a trunk full. When, in spring, the move came, his father peremptorily refused to despatch this trunk-load of scorched paper scraps by grande or petite vitesse to Vienna, and they were consigned to the flames. When he was in Yorkshire, he had collected some prehistoric querns, stone hand-mills. When he contracted with a furniture-mover to translate his goods to the south of England, the man struck at the mill-stones, they were not in his bond. The author had to resign them; but his heart aches for those stones to this day.
When a family has inhabited a house for nigh on twenty years, it is incredible what accumulations have gathered round them, how every corner, cupboard, closet, drawers, the cellar, the attic are stuffed with articles of various utility and importance, or let us rather say of different degrees of inutility and worthlessness; none of which, however, can be spared without a pang, for to every one of them a recollection clings.
The Cusworths had been, not indeed twenty years, but approaching that time, in the house of Mr. Pennycomequick. Every room, the garden, the attic, were crowded with reminiscences, mostly pleasant; to the ordinary eye a thin veil of soot took the brilliance and sharpness off all things in this smoke-laden part of England, but to the girls, Salome and Janet, everything was overlaid with the gold dust of childish memories. Mrs. Cusworth had come to regard the house as a quiet home in which she might spend her declining days, without a care for the future of her children, for Janet was provided for, and Salome would not be forgotten. But now, with the loss of Mr. Pennycomequick, the prop had fallen on which the future was reared; and suddenly she found herself in bad health, obliged to think about her prospects, and leave the house in quest of another home.
Mrs. Sidebottom, with the eagerness with which some women fly to do a spiteful thing, had taken advantage of her position to give the widow notice to remove.
The Cusworths had received notice to move within a fortnight, and it was not easy for them to find quarters into which to go. Salome had sought lodgings in Mergatroyd, but in vain. There none were vacant, and she had been obliged to engage temporarily a part of a house in the nearest manufacturing town, a house that was called Redstone, but which was popularly known only as Blackhole. It was a low house, surrounded by tall factories that crushed it into a well between them, into which no sun could penetrate, but which received all day and night showers of condensed soot. She counted herself fortunate in having secured this, and she had already given orders for the removal to it of some of the packing-cases filled with their goods.
The time had been one of strain to Salome, already distressed by the loss of her best friend, and the subsequent doubt about the identity of the corpse recovered. Mrs. Sidebottom had gone out of her way to make her feel uncomfortable, had said ill-natured things, had slighted her mother, and irritated Janet to the verge of an outbreak. She had been obliged to exercise great self-control, to disregard the sneers of Mrs. Sidebottom, to screen her mother and hold her sister in check. She had been painfully affected, moreover, by the mistrust Philip had shown, and though he had apologized for what he had said, the wound dealt to her self-respect was unhealed. She felt this blow the more because she had unconsciously reposed confidence in Philip; not that he had given her reason for reliance on him, but that she had felt the need for someone to whom to look, now that Mr. Jeremiah Pennycomequick was removed, and she had trusted that he would be honourable and considerate in his conduct, as behoved a Pennycomequick.
To add to her difficulties, her mother had suddenly and unaccountably had a relapse, was seriously shaken, and in no condition to be moved. Unaccountably, for the attack had not come on when it might have been expected—on hearing the news of the death of the old manufacturer. She had borne up marvellously under this trial; the bringing the corpse to the house and the funeral had not materially affected her. She had spoken of the necessity she was under of leaving the house with sorrow, indeed, but not agitation; she had taken some interest in the assortment and packing of the family goods; and then, in the midst of the preparations to depart, had been taken alarmingly ill.
When the funeral was over, Mrs. Sidebottom had returned to her own house. All necessity for her remaining in that of her deceased half-brother was gone. Nevertheless, she was in and out of the house several times during the day.
One evening she had left after nine, having dined there with her nephew, who had moved into his uncle's apartments, and had enjoyed some of her brother's best wine.
At half-past nine the front-door was locked and chained, and the gaslight in the hall turned down, but not extinguished. Old Mr. Pennycomequick had kept early hours, and the servants observed the same routine of meals and work that had been instituted in his time, as they had received no orders to the contrary. Now that Philip had taken possession of his uncle's apartments on the first-floor, and went to the mill at the same hours, and took his meals at the same hours, the house seemed to have relapsed into its old ways, out of which it had been bustled by the advent of Mrs. Sidebottom.