Tales of the West Riding (11 page)

“Every good wish for your future happiness, James.”

“I wanted you to be the first to know, Eliza,” repeated James anxiously.

He babbled on for a few minutes about Esther's beauty and Esther's sweetness, then left, soothed and cheered.

Eliza could not allow herself a moment's respite. Already in the next room the family would be growing curious. She rose and swept back, dignity in her step, to the dinner-table.

“Don't get up, Tom. It was just James Butterfield, Clara, come to tell us he is engaged to Esther.”

“You've let yourself be jilted for that little hussy?” shouted her brother, crimsoning.

“I shall be obliged if you will not make reflections of that kind, Tom,” said Eliza calmly, “Either publicly or in private. They will do nobody any good.”

“Well, upon my word!'”

“Now, Tom,” pleaded his wife.

Tom snorted but was silent.

“Well, they married,” said my mother with a sigh. “They were married at Resmond Street Chapel. I don't remember what excuse she made for this departure from the convention of marrying in the bride's church. The reception was held in the Sunday School. Eliza was the only bridesmaid.”

I exclaimed.

“Yes—it was hard on her, I expect,” said my mother thoughtfully. “We all noticed how much older and plainer she suddenly looked. But she was so calm and serene, you know, and so kind to Esther, allowing her to dress in her room and so on, we concluded
she hadn't cared for James after all. And you know he did seem at that time rather less worthy of Eliza than we had previously imagined. He was flustered and agitated and hot in the face. Infatuated with that girl, perhaps.”

“Or perhaps not. She may have pushed him into it. Perhaps he had hoped Eliza would rescue him.”

“Well, we shall never know. He certainly trembled like a leaf as Esther came up the aisle.”

“You were present at the wedding, then?”

“Of course. Esther's father and mother were good plain farming people, I thought; very fond and proud of Esther, but rather frightened of her, and perplexed. Nobody stood up at the wedding to plead a just cause or impediment, so they were duly married. Yes.”

“And that is why great-aunt Eliza was an old maid,” I said in a concluding tone.

“Oh, my dear! You haven't heard the half of it yet,” said my mother distressfully.

So James and Esther married, and soon it was obvious that she was with child.

James rented a small house near the Egmont mill. It was a nice little house in a respectable street, said my mother, or rather, it would have been nice if Esther had kept it so, but of course she didn't. Her pregnancy was uncomfortable, and she made this an excuse for doing nothing, but in fact she was “bone idle,” said my mother warmly. Even at that early stage of their life together, Esther made her husband's life miserable by her whimsies and tantrums. Her temper was terrible—she even broke china in her rage—and she was extravagant in both the ways which may afflict a woman, for she spent sudden large sums and also frittered small sums daily. James began to look harassed and it was rumoured that, in spite of the salary rise and bonus Egmont's gave him as a wedding present, he was “feeling the pinch.” The ladies of the Resmond Street congregation, good housewives all, were beginning to be shocked and alienated by Esther's slovenliness when her confinement won back their sympathies.

For this was a disaster. Occurring prematurely (as the congregation thought) it was terribly protracted. (“Things went wrong,”
said my mother mysteriously. For my part I guessed that whatever went wrong was due to earlier attempts at abortion.) The child, though fortunately born without deformity, was extremely delicate at first; as for poor Esther, her health was ruined. She lay in bed, petulant, capricious, demanding, for the next seven years. (Oh, those bed-ridden Victorian invalids, I thought angrily; nowadays they'd have had her up in a fortnight.) Her beauty lasted for a year or two and then went haggard, and at this naturally her temper deteriorated further. The Resmond Street ladies behaved with splendid charity; “poor Mrs. Butterfield” became a regular recipient of calls, prayers, flowers and a portion of anything good that they put in the oven. For a time, that is; presently they grew a little tired. Poor Mrs. Butterfield could be so very disagreeable; it was mortifying.

Bringing up the child—a boy, Philip—offered a difficult problem; James hired a series of women who coped with his ill-health with varying success—their notions and nostrums had indeed little chance of success, for Esther quarrelled with them all without too much delay. Naturally under such a discontinuous and varying régime the child's digestion suffered; he slept ill, ate little and became as peevish and ill-tempered as his mother. In fact, as my mother said emphatically, James Butterfield hadn't a moment's peace for the next seven years.

As for Eliza, at first she visited Esther often, did errands for her and tried to soothe her. But then one afternoon as she stood at Esther's bedside, trying to make her farewells but delayed by the invalid's peevish complaints, James came in from the mill. Baby Philip was crawling on the hearthrug. James went to the child, picked him up and talked to him with great tenderness and affection. Whether Esther saw something in Eliza's quiet look at this point, or whether (more probably) it was just her guilty conscience which drove her, I do not know; but she suddenly broke out into a violent attack on Eliza.

“You wanted my husband and I wish you'd got him! Get out of my house! Get out of here!”

She followed this with a storm of epithets such as Eliza had never in her innocent life heard before. She drew on her gloves and went downstairs without a word. James, the child on his arm, followed.

“She's not herself, Eliza,” he said pleadingly as they stood at the house door.

“I know, James,” replied Eliza. “I fully understand. All the same—”

All the same she never entered the house again. She also withdrew from the Resmond Street Chapel, and gave her allegiance to another congregation. Thus she never saw James Butterfield.

At first it was expected that Eliza would marry, but she turned down two nice chances. A third would come, no doubt, but while her friends waited for this, time moved inexorably on. Suddenly Eliza was beyond the customary marrying age. She was a kind sister-in-law, a devoted aunt, full of good works, altogether a fine woman; but by the conventions of the period she was unmarriageable; she had become an old maid.

Then one evening Eliza opened the local evening newspaper and turned pale. She sat in silence for so long that it was noticed by her sister-in-law.

“Is anything the matter, Eliza?”

“The death of a girl I used to know well,” replied Eliza quietly.

She turned the leaves of the newspaper, folded it, laid it down casually, and left the room. Immediately her sister-in-law picked up the paper and scanned the appropriate column.

“James Butterfield's wife has died at last, Tom,” she said in a meaning tone.

“Who's James Butterfield?” said Tom.

“Have you forgotten him? He used to teach in the Resmond Street Sunday School, don't you remember? We thought he and Eliza would make a match of it, don't you remember? We haven't seen much of him lately, it's true. But mark my words, Eliza hasn't forgotten him.”

“Oh, rubbish,” said Tom in an uneasy tone. “Don't go putting ideas into her head, now.”

“I shan't say anything either way. She's old enough to know her own mind.”

She kept to this resolution and made no comment when a few days later Eliza left the house clad in the all-embracing black garb then thought proper for funerals.

The chapel was cold and empty; apart from the minister and
the necessary attendants, only the widower and his young son were present.

Eliza from the shadows beneath the gallery had a long clear view of James as he followed his wife's remains out of the building. Her heart turned over in pity. She remembered James young, tall, fair, strong; she saw a man middle-aged, elderly in appearance, with bowed shoulders, thin greying hair, anxious eyes, wrinkled cheek. He was quietly weeping. The child beside him, hand reluctantly in his, had all Esther's pert dark beauty—and also her mutinous resentful air.

What tumult of feeling, what agony of decision, went on in Eliza's mind we cannot know. But she remained in the shadow, unperceived, and James passed by.

“But why didn't she step forward? Why didn't she seize on James and marry him?” I cried, exasperated.

“She told me,” said my mother hesitantly, “that she was afraid she might not be able to keep silence, you know, if she married him.”

“Silence? About Esther, you mean?”

My mother nodded.

“And why not? That little viper was dead.”

“Turn James against the child? Let him know he'd wasted his life for a lie?”

“Well! So nothing happened?”

So nothing happened. Nothing, nothing, at all, for days, weeks, months, a couple of years. Then one evening the newspaper announced James Butterfield's death. Best not enquire in what anguish Eliza spent that night. Next morning she received a letter from an Annotsfield solicitor about the matter of her executorship of James Butterfield's estate. Astonished, she called on the man, who read James's Will to her. All was left to “my dearly loved son, Philip,” and the solicitor and herself were joint executors. Finding perhaps something a trifle odd and muted in her response, the lawyer said suddenly:

“Mr. Butterfield had secured your consent to the executorship, I presume?”

Eliza replied truthfully: “No.”

The lawyer raised his eyebrows. “In that case,” he said: “It is my duty to ask you now whether you will undertake it. There is the child, you know, the son. Philip. He is nine. Mr. Butterfield had no relatives to whom he could be entrusted.”

“What about Mrs. Butterfield's relatives?”

“Unfortunately she had quarrelled with them.”

“So if I do not undertake the executorship?”

“I see nothing for it but an orphanage. Perhaps you will decide on that in any case? There are some reputable establishments.”

It would seem that here again Eliza had a chance to break out in a fury, to reveal Esther's betrayal, to decline all responsibility for this by-blow Philip, to announce in trenchant tones that Philip was not James's son. But she was silent.

After a moment she said quietly: “I accept the executorship.”

“Ah, good!” said the lawyer, relieved. “And the boy? An orphanage?”

“I will enquire whether my brother will consent to receive him into his household. There are four children there already—one more can perhaps be squeezed in.”

This was tried, but proved a most uncomfortable failure. At that stage Philip was almost everything a child ought not to be. Not only peevish, selfish, bad-tempered, unmannerly, but a sneak, a would-be tyrant, even possibly a little of a thief. To strangers he was charming, and he lied about his peccadilloes so convincingly that Eliza's nieces and nephews were always finding themselves in trouble for sins committed by him. After a few weeks they could not stand him any longer, and after he had ridden the eldest boy's bicycle without permission and smashed the lamp, the whole family blew up into a flaming row. Tom, enlightened by his daughter, declared that he would not have that detestable trouble-maker in the house a moment longer.

“Then I shall have to leave too,” said Eliza firmly.

“You will do nothing of the kind,” raged Tom. “That fellow's affairs are in a hopeless mess. They're no concern of yours, and I insist that you renounce the executorship and resume a quiet life with us here.”

But Eliza did not renounce the executorship or the care of Philip. She moved out into the cheap little house behind the
railway station which had recently been the only home James could afford, and devoted herself to bringing up Esther's child. Her brother was furious and washed his hands of her. He was not the kind of man, as he truly said, to resent his sister's spending her money in her own way instead of leaving it to his children—though it was annoying—provided the way was sensible and made her happy; but this was all for a twopenny ha'penny chap, a poor tool, who'd jilted her into the bargain.

His contemptuous references to James Butterfield were from the monetary point of view correct. There was no National Health Service in those days, and his wife's long illness had stripped James of all his savings. Then again, the promise of his youth in industry had not been fulfilled. Egmont's still employed him, but in a very subordinate capacity; his attendances had been too irregular, his mind too preoccupied, to earn promotion. In a word, James's legacy to the child he believed his son was simply a mountain of debt.

With this Eliza struggled. There were Philip's school fees, too, and his frequent illnesses, and as he grew older his extravagances. Eliza's small patrimony slowly melted. In those days women of the middle class were not trained to earn their living, and presently Eliza took to doing fine needlework and mending, for pay, as the only gainful activity of which she was capable. When Tom heard this he was really upset. He came down from his high horse and went to see his sister, and employed the kindest tone he could find to urge her to return to them and give up her efforts for the child. He would speak to someone he knew about getting Philip into a good orphanage, he said.

“Come back to us, Lizzie love. Clara begs you to come back.”

“I can't, Tom. It was all my fault.”

“What was all your fault?”

“Never mind. I can't leave the boy.”

“Well, I can't help you much, Lizzie, and that's a fact,” said Tom heavily. “Textiles aren't too good just now.”

For the year now was in the 1890's, when the sudden American tariffs brought many a West Riding firm to ruin.