The Price of Love written by Arnold Bennett

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THE PRICE OF LOVE

A Tale

by

ARNOLD BENNETT

1914

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. MONEY IN THE HOUSE

II. LOUIS' DISCOVERY

III. THE FEAST

IV. IN THE NIGHT

V. NEWS OF THE NIGHT

VI. THEORIES OF THE THEFT

VII. THE CINEMA

VIII. END AND BEGINNING

IX. THE MARRIED WOMAN

X. THE CHASM

XI. JULIAN'S DOCUMENT

XII. RUNAWAY HORSES

XIII. DEAD-LOCK

XIV. THE MARKET

XV. THE CHANGED MAN

XVI. THE LETTER

XVII. IN THE MONASTERY

XVIII. MRS. TAMS'S STRANGE BEHAVIOUR

XIX. RACHEL AND MR. HORROCLEAVE

CHAPTER I

MONEY IN THE HOUSE

I

In the evening dimness of old Mrs. Maldon's sitting-room stood the
youthful virgin, Rachel Louisa Fleckring. The prominent fact about
her appearance was that she wore an apron. Not one of those
white, waist-tied aprons, with or without bibs, worn proudly,
uncompromisingly, by a previous generation of unaspiring housewives
and housegirls! But an immense blue pinafore-apron, covering the whole
front of the figure except the head, hands, and toes. Its virtues were
that it fully protected the most fragile frock against all the perils
of the kitchen; and that it could be slipped on or off in one
second, without any manipulation of tapes, pins, or buttons and
buttonholes--for it had no fastenings of any sort and merely yawned
behind. In one second the drudge could be transformed into the elegant
infanta of boudoirs, and _vice versa_. To suit the coquetry of
the age the pinafore was enriched with certain flouncings, which,
however, only intensified its unshapen ugliness.

On a plain, middle-aged woman such a pinafore would have been
intolerable to the sensitive eye. But on Rachel it simply had
a piquant and perverse air, because she was young, with the
incomparable, the unique charm of comely adolescence; it simply
excited the imagination to conceive the exquisite treasures of contour
and tint and texture which it veiled. Do not infer that Rachel was
a coquette. Although comely, she was homely--a "downright" girl,
scorning and hating all manner of pretentiousness. She had a fine best
dress, and when she put it on everybody knew that it was her best; a
stranger would have known. Whereas of a coquette none but her intimate
companions can say whether she is wearing best or second-best on a
given high occasion. Rachel used the pinafore-apron only with her best
dress, and her reason for doing so was the sound, sensible reason that
it was the usual and proper thing to do.

She opened a drawer of the new Sheraton sideboard, and took from it
a metal tube that imitated brass, about a foot long and an inch
in diameter, covered with black lettering. This tube, when she
had removed its top, showed a number of thin wax tapers in various
colours. She chose one, lit it neatly at the red fire, and then,
standing on a footstool in the middle of the room, stretched all her
body and limbs upward in order to reach the gas. If the tap had been
half an inch higher or herself half an inch shorter, she would have
had to stand on a chair instead of a footstool; and the chair would
have had to be brought out of the kitchen and carried back again. But
Heaven had watched over this detail. The gas-fitting consisted of a
flexible pipe, resembling a thick black cord, and swinging at the
end of it a specimen of that wonderful and blessed contrivance, the
inverted incandescent mantle within a porcelain globe: the whole
recently adopted by Mrs. Maldon as the dangerous final word of modern
invention. It was safer to ignite the gas from the orifice at the
top of the globe; but even so there was always a mild disconcerting
explosion, followed by a few moments' uncertainty as to whether or not
the gas had "lighted properly."

When the deed was accomplished and the room suddenly bright with soft
illumination, Mrs. Maldon murmured--

"That's better!"

She was sitting in her arm-chair by the glitteringly set table, which,
instead of being in the centre of the floor under the gas, had a place
near the bow-window--advantageous in the murky daytime of the Five
Towns, and inconvenient at night. The table might well have been
shifted at night to a better position in regard to the gas. But it
never was. Somehow for Mrs. Maldon the carpet was solid concrete, and
the legs of the table immovably embedded therein.

Rachel, gentle-footed, kicked the footstool away to its lair under the
table, and simultaneously extinguished the taper, which she dropped
with a scarce audible click into a vase on the mantelpiece. Then she
put the cover on the tube with another faintest click, restored the
tube to its drawer with a rather louder click, and finally, with a
click still louder, pushed the drawer home. All these slight sounds
were familiar to Mrs. Maldon; they were part of her regular night
life, part of an unconsciously loved ritual, and they contributed in
their degree to her placid happiness.

"Now the blinds, my dear!" said she.

The exhortation was ill-considered, and Rachel controlled a gesture of
amicable impatience. For she had not paused after closing the drawer;
she was already on her way across the room to the window when Mrs.
Maldon said, "Now the blinds, my dear!" The fact was that Mrs. Maldon
measured the time between the lighting of gas and the drawing down of
blinds by tenths of a second--such was her fear lest in that sinister
interval the whole prying town might magically gather in the street
outside and peer into the secrets of her inculpable existence.

II

When the blinds and curtains had been arranged for privacy, Mrs.
Maldon sighed securely and picked up her crocheting. Rachel rested her
hands on the table, which was laid for a supper for four, and asked in
a firm, frank voice whether there was anything else.

"Because, if not," Rachel added, "I'll just take off my pinafore and
wash my hands."

Mrs. Maldon looked up benevolently and nodded in quick agreement.
It was such apparently trifling gestures, eager and generous, that
endeared the old lady to Rachel, giving her the priceless sensation
of being esteemed and beloved. Her gaze lingered on her aged employer
with affection and with profound respect. Mrs. Maldon made a striking,
tall, slim figure, sitting erect in tight black, with the right side
of her long, prominent nose in the full gaslight and the other heavily
shadowed. Her hair was absolutely black at over seventy; her eyes were
black and glowing, and she could read and do coarse crocheting
without spectacles. All her skin, especially round about the eyes, was
yellowish brown and very deeply wrinkled indeed; a decrepit, senile
skin, which seemed to contradict the youth of her pose and her glance.
The cast of her features was benign. She had passed through desolating
and violent experiences, and then through a long, long period of
withdrawn tranquillity; and from end to end of her life she had
consistently thought the best of all men, refusing to recognize evil
and assuming the existence of good. Every one of the millions of her
kind thoughts had helped to mould the expression of her countenance.
The expression was definite now, fixed, intensely characteristic after
so many decades, and wherever it was seen it gave pleasure and by
its enchantment created goodness and goodwill--even out of their
opposites. Such was the life-work of Mrs. Maldon.

Her eyes embraced the whole room. They did not, as the phrase is,
"beam" approval; for the act of beaming involves a sort of ecstasy,
and Mrs. Maldon was too dignified for ecstasy. But they displayed a
mild and proud contentment as she said--

"I'm sure it's all very nice."

It was. The table crowded with porcelain, crystal, silver, and
flowers, and every object upon it casting a familiar curved shadow on
the whiteness of the damask toward the window! The fresh crimson and
blues of the everlasting Turkey carpet (Turkey carpet being the _ne
plus ultra_ of carpetry in the Five Towns, when that carpet was
bought, just as sealskin was the _ne plus ultra_ of all furs)!
The silken-polished sideboard, strange to the company, but worthy
of it, and exhibiting a due sense of its high destiny! The sombre
bookcase and corner cupboard, darkly glittering! The Chesterfield
sofa, broad, accepting, acquiescent! The flashing brass fender
and copper scuttle! The comfortably reddish walls, with their
pictures--like limpets on the face of precipices! The new-whitened
ceiling! In the midst the incandescent lamp that hung like the moon
in heaven!... And then the young, sturdy girl, standing over the
old woman and breathing out the very breath of life, vitalizing
everything, rejuvenating the old woman!

Mrs. Maldon's sitting-room had a considerable renown among her
acquaintance, not only for its peculiar charm, which combined and
reconciled the tastes of two very different generations, but also for
its radiant cleanness. There are many clean houses in the Five Towns,
using the adjective in the relative sense in which the Five Towns is
forced by chimneys to use it. But Mrs. Maldon's sitting-room (save for
the white window-curtains, which had to accept the common grey fate of
white window-curtains in the district) was clean in the country-side
sense, almost in the Dutch sense. The challenge of its cleanness
gleamed on every polished surface, victorious in the unending battle
against the horrible contagion of foul industries. Mrs. Maldon's
friends would assert that the state of that sitting-room "passed"
them, or "fair passed" them, and she would receive their ever-amazed
compliments with modesty. But behind her benevolent depreciation she
would be blandly saying to herself: "Yes, I'm scarcely surprised it
passes you--seeing the way you housewives let things go on here."
The word "here" would be faintly emphasized in her mind, as no native
would have emphasized it.

Rachel shared the general estimate of the sitting-room. She
appreciated its charm, and admitted to herself that her first vision
of it, rather less than a month before, had indeed given her a new and
startling ideal of cleanliness. On that occasion it had been evident,
from Mrs. Maldon's physical exhaustion, that the housemistress had
made an enormous personal effort to _dazzle_ and inspire her new
"lady companion," which effort, though detected and perhaps scorned by
Rachel, had nevertheless succeeded in its aim. With a certain presence
of mind Rachel had feigned to remark nothing miraculous in the
condition of the room. Appropriating the new ideal instantly, she
had on the first morning of her service "turned out" the room before
breakfast, well knowing that it must have been turned out on the
previous day. Dumbfounded for a few moments, Mrs. Maldon had at length
said, in her sweet and cordial benevolence, "I'm glad to see we think
alike about cleanliness." And Rachel had replied with an air at once
deferential, sweet, and yet casual, "Oh, of course, Mrs. Maldon!" Then
they measured one another in a silent exchange. Mrs. Maldon was aware
that she had by chance discovered a pearl--yes, a treasure beyond
pearls. And Rachel, too, divined the high value of her employer, and
felt within the stirrings of a passionate loyalty to her.

III

And yet, during the three weeks and a half of their joint existence,
Rachel's estimate of Mrs. Maldon had undergone certain subtle
modifications.

At first, somewhat overawed, Rachel had seen in her employer the Mrs.
Maldon of the town's legend, which legend had travelled to Rachel
as far as Knype, whence she sprang. That is to say, one of the
great ladies of Bursley, ranking in the popular regard with
Mrs. Clayton-Vernon, the leader of society, Mrs. Sutton, the
philanthropist, and Mrs. Hamps, the powerful religious bully. She had
been impressed by her height (Rachel herself being no lamp-post), her
carriage, her superlative dignity, her benevolence of thought, and
above all by her aristocratic Southern accent. After eight-and-forty
years of the Five Towns, Mrs. Maldon had still kept most of that
Southern accent--so intimidating to the rough, broad talkers of the
district, who take revenge by mocking it among themselves, but for
whom it will always possess the thrilling prestige of high life.

And then day by day Rachel had discovered that great ladies are, after
all, human creatures, strangely resembling other human creatures. And
Mrs. Maldon slowly became for her an old woman of seventy-two,
with unquestionably wondrous hair, but failing in strength and in
faculties; and it grew merely pathetic to Rachel that Mrs. Maldon
should force herself always to sit straight upright. As for Mrs.
Maldon's charitableness, Rachel could not deny that she refused to
think evil, and yet it was plain that at bottom Mrs. Maldon was not
much deceived about people: in which apparent inconsistency there hid
a slight disturbing suggestion of falseness that mysteriously fretted
the downright Rachel.

Again, beneath Mrs. Maldon's modesty concerning the merits of her
sitting-room Rachael soon fancied that she could detect traces of an
ingenuous and possibly senile "house-pride," which did more than fret
the lady companion; it faintly offended her. That one should be proud
of a possession or of an achievement was admissible, but that one
should fail to conceal the pride absolutely was to Rachel, with her
Five Towns character, a sign of weakness, a sign of the soft South.
Lastly, Mrs. Maldon had, it transpired, her "ways"; for example, in
the matter of blinds and in the matter of tapers. She would actually
insist on the gas being lighted with a taper; a paper spill, which was
just as good and better, seemed to ruffle her benign placidity: and
she was funnily economical with matches. Rachel had never seen a taper
before, and could not conceive where the old lady managed to buy the
things.

In short, with admiration almost undiminished, and with a rapidly
growing love and loyalty, Rachel had arrived at the point of feeling
glad that she, a mature, capable, sagacious, and strong woman, was
there to watch over the last years of the waning and somewhat peculiar
old lady.

Mrs. Maldon did not see the situation from quite the same angle. She
did not, for example, consider herself to be in the least peculiar,
but, on the contrary, a very normal woman. She had always used tapers;
she could remember the period when every one used tapers. In her
view tapers were far more genteel and less dangerous than the untidy,
flaring spill, which she abhorred as a vulgarity. As for matches,
frankly it would not have occurred to her to waste a match when fire
was available. In the matter of her sharp insistence on drawn blinds
at night, domestic privacy seemed to be one of the fundamental
decencies of life--simply that! And as for house-pride, she considered
that she locked away her fervent feeling for her parlour in a manner
marvellous and complete.

No one could or ever would guess the depth of her attachment to that
sitting-room, nor the extent to which it engrossed her emotional life.
And yet she had only occupied the house for fourteen years out of the
forty-five years of her widowhood, and the furniture had at intervals
been renewed (for Mrs. Maldon would on no account permit herself to
be old-fashioned). Indeed, she had had five different sitting-rooms in
five different houses since her husband's death. No matter. They were
all the same sitting-room, all rendered identical by the mysterious
force of her dreamy meditations on the past. And, moreover, sundry
important articles had remained constant to preserve unbroken the
chain that linked her to her youth. The table which Rachel had so
nicely laid was the table at which Mrs. Maldon had taken her first
meal as mistress of a house. Her husband had carved mutton at it, and
grumbled about the consistency of toast; her children had spilt jam on
its cloth. And when on Sunday nights she wound up the bracket-clock on
the mantelpiece, she could see and hear a handsome young man in a long
frock-coat and a large shirt-front and a very thin black tie winding
it up too--her husband--on Sunday nights. And she could simultaneously
see another handsome young man winding it up--her son.

Her pictures were admired.

"Your son painted this water-colour, did he not, Mrs. Maldon?"

"Yes, my son Athelstan."

"How gifted he must have been!"

"Yes, the best judges say he showed very remarkable promise. It's
fading, I fear. I ought to cover it up, but somehow I can't fancy
covering it up--"

The hand that had so remarkably promised had lain mouldering for a
quarter of a century. Mrs. Maldon sometimes saw it, fleshless, on a
cage-like skeleton in the dark grave. The next moment she would see
herself tending its chilblains.

And if she was not peculiar, neither was she waning. No!
Seventy-two--but not truly old! How could she be truly old when she
could see, hear, walk a mile without stopping, eat anything whatever,
and dress herself unaided? And that hair of hers! Often she was still
a young wife, or a young widow. She was not preparing for death; she
had prepared for death in the seventies. She expected to live on
in calm satisfaction through indefinite decades. She savoured life
pleasantly, for its daily security was impregnable. She had forgotten
grief.

When she looked up at Rachel and benevolently nodded to her, she saw
a girl of line character, absolutely trustworthy, very devoted, very
industrious, very capable, intelligent, cheerful--in fact, a splendid
girl, a girl to be enthusiastic about! But such a mere girl! A girl
with so much to learn! So pathetically young and inexperienced
and positive and sure of herself! The looseness of her limbs, the
unconscious abrupt freedom of her gestures, the waviness of her auburn
hair, the candour of her glance, the warmth of her indignation against
injustice and dishonesty, the capricious and sensitive flowings of
blood to her smooth cheeks, the ridiculous wise compressings of
her lips, the rise and fall of her rich and innocent bosom--these
phenomena touched Mrs. Maldon and occasionally made her want to cry.

Thought she: "_I_ was never so young as that at twenty-two! At
twenty-two I had had Mary!" The possibility that in spite of having
had Mary (who would now have been fifty, but for death) she had as a
fact been approximately as young as that at twenty-two did not ever
present itself to the waning and peculiar old lady. She was glad that
she, a mature and profoundly experienced woman, in full possession
of all her faculties, was there to watch over the development of the
lovable, affectionate, and impulsive child.

IV

"Oh! Here's the paper, Mrs. Maldon," said Rachel, as, turning away to
leave the room, she caught sight of the extra special edition of
the _Signal_, which lay a pale green on the dark green of the
Chesterfield.

Mrs. Maldon answered placidly--

"When did you bring it in? I never heard the boy come. But my
hearing's not quite what it used to be, that's true. Open it for me,
my dear. I can't stretch my arms as I used to."

She was one of the few women in the Five Towns who deigned to read
a newspaper regularly, and one of the still fewer who would lead the
miscellaneous conversation of drawing-rooms away from domestic chatter
and discussions of individualities, to political and municipal topics
and even toward general ideas. She seldom did more than mention a
topic and then express a hope for the best, or explain that this
phenomenon was "such a pity," or that phenomenon "such a good thing,"
or that about another phenomenon "one really didn't know what to
think." But these remarks sufficed to class her apart among her sex as
"a very up-to-date old lady, with a broad outlook upon the world,"
and to inspire sundry other ladies with a fearful respect for her
masculine intellect and judgment. She was aware of her superiority,
and had a certain kind disdain for the increasing number of women
who took in a daily picture-paper, and who, having dawdled over its
illustrations after breakfast, spoke of what they had seen in the
"newspaper." She would not allow that a picture-paper was a newspaper.

Rachel stood in the empty space under the gas. Her arms were stretched
out and slightly upward as she held the _Signal_ wide open and
glanced at the newspaper, frowning. The light fell full on her coppery
hair. Her balanced body, though masked in front by the perpendicular
fall of the apron as she bent somewhat forward, was nevertheless the
image of potential vivacity and energy; it seemed almost to vibrate
with its own consciousness of physical pride.

Left alone, Rachel would never have opened a newspaper, at any rate
for the news. Until she knew Mrs. Maldon she had never seen a woman
read a newspaper for aught except the advertisements relating to
situations, houses, and pleasures. But, much more than she imagined,
she was greatly under the influence of Mrs. Maldon. Mrs. Maldon made
a nightly solemnity of the newspaper, and Rachel naturally soon
persuaded herself that it was a fine and a superior thing to read the
newspaper--a proof of unusual intelligence. Moreover, just as she
felt bound to show Mrs. Maldon that her notion of cleanliness was as
advanced as anybody's, so she felt bound to indicate, by an appearance
of casualness, that for her to read the paper was the most customary
thing in the world. Of course she read the paper! And that she should
calmly look at it herself before handing it to her mistress proved
that she had already established a very secure position in the house.

She said, her eyes following the lines, and her feet moving in the
direction of Mrs. Maldon--"Those burglaries are still going on ...
Hillport now!"

"Oh, dear, dear!" murmured Mrs. Maldon, as Rachel spread the newspaper
lightly over the tea-tray and its contents. "Oh, dear, dear! I do
hope the police will catch some one soon. I'm sure they're doing their
best, but really--!"

Rachel bent with confident intimacy over the old lady's shoulder, and
they read the burglary column together, Rachel interrupting herself
for an instant to pick up Mrs. Maldon's ball of black wool which had
slipped to the floor. The _Signal_ reporter had omitted none of
the classic _cliches_ proper to the subject, and such words
and phrases as "jemmy," "effected an entrance," "the servant, now
thoroughly alarmed," "stealthy footsteps," "escaped with their booty,"
seriously disquieted both of the women--caused a sudden sensation of
sinking in the region of the heart. Yet neither would put the secret
fear into speech, for each by instinct felt that a fear once uttered
is strengthened and made more real. Living solitary and unprotected
by male sinews, in a house which, though it did not stand alone, was
somewhat withdrawn from the town, they knew themselves the ideal prey
of conventional burglars with masks, dark lanterns, revolvers, and
jemmies. They were grouped together like some symbolic sculpture, and
with all their fortitude and common sense they still in unconscious
attitude expressed the helpless and resigned fatalism of their sex
before certain menaces of bodily danger, the thrilled, expectant
submission of women in a city about to be sacked.

Nothing could save them if the peril entered the house. But they would
not say aloud: "Suppose they came _here_! How terrible!" They
would not even whisper the slightest apprehension. They just briefly
discussed the matter with a fine air of indifferent aloofness,
remaining calm while the brick walls and the social system which
defended that bright and delicate parlour from the dark, savage
universe without seemed to crack and shiver.

Mrs. Maldon, suddenly noticing that one blind was half an inch
short of the bottom of the window, rose nervously and pulled it down
farther.

"Why didn't you ask me to do that?" said Rachel, thinking what a
fidgety person the old lady was.

Mrs. Maldon replied--"It's all right, my dear. Did you fasten the
window on the upstairs landing?"

"As if burglars would try to get in by an upstairs window--and on
the street!" thought Rachel, pityingly impatient. "However, it's her
house, and I'm paid to do what I'm told," she added to herself, very
sensibly. Then she said, aloud, in a soothing tone--

"No, I didn't. But I will do it."

She moved towards the door, and at the same moment a knock on the
front door sent a vibration through the whole house. Nearly all
knocks on the front door shook the house; and further, burglars do
not generally knock as a preliminary to effecting an entrance.
Nevertheless, both women started--and were ashamed of starting.

"Surely he's rather early!" said Mrs. Maldon with an exaggerated
tranquillity.

And Rachel, with a similar lack of conviction in her calm gait, went
audaciously forth into the dark lobby.

V

On the glass panels of the front door the street lamp threw a faint,
distorted shadow of a bowler hat, two rather protruding ears, and
a pair of long, outspreading whiskers whose ends merged into broad
shoulders. Any one familiar with the streets of Bursley would have
instantly divined that Councillor Thomas Batchgrew stood between the
gas-lamp and the front door. And even Rachel, whose acquaintance
with Bursley was still slight, at once recognized the outlines of the
figure. She had seen Councillor Batchgrew one day conversing with Mrs.
Maldon in Moorthorne Road, and she knew that he bore to Mrs. Maldon
the vague but imposing relation of "trustee."

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