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A Feud
by
‘Uncle,’ he said, ‘how should you like me to come and live here with you? I’ve been thinking things out a bit, and I thought perhaps you’d like it. I expect you must feel rather lonely now.’
The neat, fragrant shop was empty, and the two men stood behind the big glass-fronted case of Burroughs and Wellcome’s preparations. Clive’s venerable uncle happened to be looking into a drawer marked ‘Gentianae Rad. Pulv.’ He closed the drawer with slow hesitation, and then, stroking his long white beard, replied in that deliberate voice which seemed always to tremble with religious fervour:
‘The hand of the Lord is in this thing, Clive. I have wished that you might come to live here with me. But I was afraid it would be too far from the works.’
‘Pooh! that’s nothing,’ said Clive.
As he lingered at the shop door for the Bursley car to pass the end of Machin Street, Eva Brunt went by. He raised his hat with diffidence, and she smiled. It was a marvellous chance. His heart leapt into a throb which was half agony and half delight.
‘I am in love,’ he said gravely.
He had just discovered the fact, and the discovery filled him with exquisite apprehension.
If he had waited till the age of thirty-two for that springtime of the soul which we call love, Clive had not waited for nothing. Eva was a woman to enravish the heart of a man whose imagination could pierce the agitating secrets immured in that calm and silent bosom. Slender and scarcely tall, she belonged to the order of spare, slight-made women, who hide within their slim frames an endowment of profound passion far exceeding that of their more voluptuously-formed sisters, who never coarsen into stoutness, and who at forty are as disturbing as at twenty. At this date Eva was twenty-six. She had a rather small, white face, which was a mask to the casual observer, and the very mirror of her feelings to anyone with eyes to read its signs.
‘I tell you what you are like,’ said Clive to her once: ‘you are like a fine racehorse, always on the quiver.’
Yet many people considered her cold and impassive. Her walk and bearing showed a sensitive independence, and when she spoke it was usually in tones of command. The girls in the shop, where she was a power second only to Ezra Brunt, were a little afraid of her, chiefly because she poured terrible scorn on their small affectations, jealousies, and vendettas. But they liked her because, in their own phrase, ‘there was no nonsense about’ this redoubtable woman. She hated shams and make-believes with a bitter and ruthless hatred. She was the heiress to at least five thousand a year, and knew it well, but she never encouraged her father to complicate their simple mode of life with the pomps of wealth. They lived in a house with a large garden at Pireford, which is on the summit of the steep ridge between the Five Towns and Oldcastle, and they kept two servants and a coachman, who was also gardener. Eva paid the servants good wages, and took care to get good value therefor.
‘It’s not often I have any bother with my servants,’ she would say, ‘for they know that if there is any trouble I would just as soon clear them out and put on an apron and do the work myself.’
She was an accomplished house-mistress, and could bake her own bread: in towns not one woman in a thousand can bake. With the coachman she had little to do, for she could not rid herself of a sentimental objection to the carriage–it savoured of ‘airs’; when she used it she used it as she might use a tramcar. It was her custom, every day except Saturday, to walk to the shop about eleven o’clock, after her house had been set in order. She had been thoroughly trained in the business, and had spent a year at a first-rate shop in High Street, Kensington. Millinery was her speciality, and she still watched over that department with a particular attention; but for some time past she had risen beyond the limitations of departments, and assisted her father in the general management of the vast concern. In commercial aptitude she resembled the typical Frenchwoman.