Mrs. Day's Daughters. Mary E. Mann
sat before the fire with a sick feeling of impending disaster, and a dismayed inquiry in her dark eyes.
"I'd got you and the children to think about," the man added.
"What could Sir Francis have said to you, William?"
Her husband turned savagely upon her. "Say? He said there was no engagement between his brother—his 'young brother'—and my daughter. That such an engagement would never receive his sanction. That he was not aware his 'young brother'—he's always sticking the word down your throat; the sanctimonious prig—I longed to kick him!—was on terms of intimacy with any one in my family."
"William!" Mrs. Day, cut to the quick, called protestingly upon her husband's name. "I hope you answered him there. I hope you did!"
"I said the young beggar was always hanging about my house. That he had danced half the night with my daughter—and—and made love to her."
"And then? And then, William?"
"He said, 'I wish all acquaintanceship to cease. I beg you not to invite my young brother to your house again.'"
"He said that?"
"Damn him! Yes."
"But that was an insult!" The poor woman was pale with surprise and dismay. She stared breathlessly upon her husband. "Didn't you show him you felt it was an insult, William?"
William moved his huge shoulders. "What do you think?"
"Tell me what you said to him."
"I swore at him for ten minutes. He didn't know if he stood on his head or his heels when I'd done with him. Then I came away."
"I don't think that swearing would improve matters."
"Perhaps you'll tell me what would improve them? It's what I want to hear, and more than I know."
"Poor Bessie! Oh, poor, poor Bessie!"
"Ah!" poor Bessie's father said, and his short-necked head fell upon his breast, and he gazed drearily at the fire again.
Mrs. Day got up and stood, her white hand glittering with its rings laid upon the black marble of the mantelpiece, thinking of Bessie.
"I would go to the club, William," presently she advised. "It can't make matters any better to sit at home and mope over them."
"Didn't I tell you I wasn't going to the club? D'you think I'm like a woman, and don't know my own mind?"
"I thought it would be pleasanter for you," she said; and then she left him. Her mind was full of Bessie, and the blow which must be given to Bessie's hopes.
"I don't know how I shall ever find the heart to tell her," she said to herself as she went from the room.
CHAPTER III
Forcus's Family Ale
It was the period when to rob a poor man—or a rich one, for that matter—of his beer would have been a crime to arouse to furious expression the popular sense of justice; when beer was on the master's table as well as in the servants' hall; when every cellar of the well-to-do held its great cask for family consumption, and no one had thought of attempting to convert the poor man from indulgence in his national beverage. It was the period when brewers made huge fortunes—and that in spite of the fact that they used good malt and hops in their brewings—nor dreamed, save, perhaps, in their worst nightmare, of the interference of Government in their monopoly. In Brockenham and its county the liquor brewed at the Hope Brewery was considered the best tipple procurable. Nothing slipped down the local throat so satisfactorily as Forcus and Son's Family Ale; and the present representatives of the firm were easily the wealthiest people in the town.
There were but two of them at the time: Francis Forcus—Sir Francis, for the last twelve months, he having been knighted in the second year of his mayoralty on the visit of a Royal Personage to his native town—and Reginald, his brother, born twenty years after himself of his father's second marriage, and now in his twenty-fourth year. Very good-looking, very good-natured, very gay and friendly and accessible the younger brother was. Perhaps the most admired and popular young man in the town. His simple-minded pursuit of pleasure occupied a great deal of his time, and prevented his spending much of it at the Brewery where his brother made it a point of honour to pass three or four hours every day. But now and again Mr. Reginald appeared at the enormous pile of buildings, rising out of the slow-flowing river on which Brockenham stands, and where the famous Family Ale was composed. Now and then he would amuse himself for an hour, sauntering in the sunshine about the wide, brightly gravelled yards, inspecting the huge dray-horses in their stables, exchanging "the top of the morning," as he facetiously called it to them, with the draymen. He was seldom tempted to appear where the brewing operations were actually in process, but he never took his departure without looking in upon his brother in the spacious and comfortable room overlooking the river in which that gentleman sat conscientiously for three or four hours a day to read the Times and the local newspaper.
He paid his call upon the senior partner earlier than usual on the morning after Mrs. Day's New Year's Dance, but not so early that Sir Francis Forcus had not received a visitor before him. A visitor who had upset the equanimity of that always outwardly unruffled, and carefully self-contained person.
"You are up with the worm, this morning, Reggie," he said.
He was not at all a typical brewer in appearance, his tall, imposing figure being clothed in no superfluous flesh, his face, with its peculiarly set expression, being pale and handsome. His black hair, worn rather long, after the fashion of the day, was brushed smoothly from his temples; he was shaved but for the close-growing whiskers, which reached half-way down his cheeks.
"To what are we indebted for the honour of so early a call?" he inquired with a twist of his in-drawn lips.
"You were off before I was down this morning," the young man said. "I just looked in to tell you I was going out. That's all."
"You look in rather frequently on the same errand, I believe. Would it be indiscreet on my part to ask where you are going?"
"Not in the least," Reggie declared easily. He lifted for his brother's inspection a pair of skates which he had held dangling at his side. "They've flooded the meadows at Tooley. The ice ought to be in first-rate order, this morning."
"So it is in the moat at home. Half a score people were skating there already as I drove away this morning. Tooley is five miles off. Why need you take the trouble to go to Tooley?"
"Several people, last night, said they were going. I thought I might as well go too."
"Where were you last night, Reggie? I don't want to tie you at home, by any means, but sometimes I like to know where you have been."
"All right, Francis. Of course. There was a dance at the Days' in Queen Anne Street. I've gone to it every New Year's Night, for years. I went there."
"I see." The light hazel eyes of Sir Francis, according strangely with his black hair and palely dusky complexion, considered his brother's cheerful countenance.
"I'm going to ask you not to go to the Days' in Queen Anne Street any more,
Reggie," he said.
Reggie widely stared. "I don't think my going there, when I wish, and they ask me, can do any harm to any one," he protested.
"Sit down, will you?" his brother said, and pointed to the chair on the other side of the table by which he sat.
"I think not, now. I think I'll be off. The ice mayn't keep—"
The other still pointed to the chair. "What I want to say to you won't keep—emphatically. Sit down," he said, and down Reggie sat.
He was by no means embarrassed, or afraid. His