“Not the slightest notion,” declared Marston. “But you know how things are. Your father’s a Radical, and Sir Cheville’s an out-and-out Tory of the old school. And there was a difference over that last County Council election. That’s all I can think of.”
“There’s something more than that,” said Letty. “They were always — well, pleasantly friendly, until lately. My father’s been awfully bothered for some time — I’ve seen it, though he tries to keep it from me.”
“Business matters?” asked Marston.
“It may be,” replied Letty. “But I don’t know. They say trade’s bad. You see, you and I don’t know anything about things of that sort — we’re only children, after all.”
Marston made no answer. He was thinking of what lay beyond the northern edge of the moor — the manufacturing villages, the big mills, the crowds of folk who worked in them, and particularly of Lithersdale Old Mill, Lucas Etherton’s place, which was one of the biggest manufactories in the district. He was thinking, too, of Lucas Etherton himself, a big, burly, reserved man, who always gave people the impression of power and of well-to-do-ness.
“I should have thought your father was all right in the way of business!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Why, look at the number of people he employs, and his mill’s always running!”
“All the same, I know there’s something,” declared Letty. “And — I don’t want to bother him about anything just now, so let it wait. Wait until Sir Cheville’s married, anyway.”
“After all,” said Marston ruminatively, “they must know, if they’ve got any eyes. All right! — leave it till the old chap’s tied himself up to the Frenchwoman. Then I’ll tell my mother, and you can tell your father, and we’ll get married this summer. How will that do?”
“I suppose so,” said Letty.
She looked down at him in a half-amused, half-teasing fashion, and Marston knocked the ashes out of his pipe and slipped his arm round her waist.
“It’s jolly hot here,” he said. “Come on through the coppice — only bit of shade there is on this moor.”
The two lovers strolled away in the direction of the pines; an hour had passed before they came out again on the farther side and walked rather more rapidly in the direction of the valley. A winding track led downwards, and Marston and Letty turned along it until they came to a point, close by an old farmstead, where it divided.
“I’m going down to the mill, to take father home,” said Letty. “He’s been there since seven o’clock this morning.”
“All right, tomorrow then, same time,” said Marston.
The click of the gate close by made him turn sharply. Letty turned, too. A tall, thin, pale-faced young man, of a peculiarly reserved and watchful expression of eye and mouth, came out of the garden of the old farmstead, wheeling a bicycle. He lifted his cap as he turned the machine in the direction of the valley, and while Letty nodded in response, Marston scowled.
“Can’t stand that clerk of your father’s!” he growled. “He always makes me think of that chap in Dickens — you know, Uriah Heep. What’s the fellow’s name?”
“Bradwell Pike,” answered Letty. “He isn’t prepossessing — but I believe he’s useful.”
“Pike!” sneered Marston. “Good name for him! Shark would have been better, though. Well, — tomorrow, then.”
Letty smiled and nodded as they separated. Tomorrow seemed close at hand, and there was nothing to indicate that the sunshine of today was not to last.
Chapter II
The Gathering Clouds
Lithersdale Old Mill, towards which Letty took her way after leaving Marston Stanbury, was the oldest industrial building in that district, a survival of the age wherein manufacturers got their motive power from water. Its machinery had long been driven by steam, but the old water-wheel still stood, and the water-course still ran down from the moors above. The mill itself was out of date, and its present owner had often been advised to pull it down. But Lucas Etherton, Radical though he was in politics, was conservative enough in all else. The lives and endeavours of five generations of Ethertons were built into its gray walls, and Lucas Etherton felt that it would last his time — he was the last of his race in the male line, and Letty would marry. Let the old place stand, till he and it finished together.
Letty turned into the mill through a garden and orchard which lay at one end of it. There was a private door at the end of the garden which admitted to a staircase at the head of which were two or three rooms, shut off from the rest of the premises; Lucas Etherton used these as offices for himself and his clerk, Bradwell Pike. Letty always used this entrance when she went down to the mill of an afternoon, to fetch her father away in good time for their six-o'clock dinner. Lucas, in her opinion, was too much at the mill — going there at an early hour in the morning, breakfasting and lunching there, and occasionally staying there until late in the evening. And of late she had made a practice of going down to the mill between four and five in the afternoon and dragging him away, so that he might have an hour’s rest before dinner.
The rooms at the head of the private staircase up which Letty presently climbed were three in number: the first, a sort of anteroom for callers; the second, Lucas Etherton’s own room; the third, which opened into the mill, an office wherein Bradwell Pike was usually to be found. All three opened one into another, and instead of being shut off by doors were separated by heavy curtains, made of a certain fabric manufactured on the premises. They were all heavily carpeted, and Letty was light of foot, and she was halfway into the anteroom, intending to throw back the intervening curtain and surprise her father at his desk, when she heard voices in the next room, and knew that Lucas was there talking with Sir Cheville. There was nothing in that, but there was something in the words she caught which pulled her up sharply and sent the blood flushing hotly to her brown cheeks.
“Dishonourable!” Sir Cheville Stanbury was saying in loud, angry tones. “No other word for it! You’re treating me in a dishonourable fashion — a highly dishonourable fashion. That’s plain truth, Mr. Etherton.”
Letty felt her heart throb painfully as she waited for her father to speak. She had no impulse of retreating; after what she had heard, her one instinct was to stay where she was. There was trouble here, and bad trouble, and her father had no one in the world but herself.
It seemed a long time before Lucas spoke. She heard a movement, as if he were shifting or rearranging books or papers on the desk at which she knew he would be seated; it appeared to suggest that he wanted to gain time, or as if he felt at a loss for words.
“There are — well — various ways — of regarding it,” said Lucas Etherton. “It depends how — how you look at it.”
Letty heard a hasty, half-suppressed exclamation from Sir Cheville — it seemed to express contempt as much as to show irritation.
“Pshaw!” he said. “There is only one way of looking at it. You come to me a year ago, as a neighbour, and tell me that owing to certain trading reasons, which I, of course, didn’t ask you to explain, you were temporary short of ready money, and asked for a loan of five thousand pounds. I gave you a cheque for that amount there and then — with pleasure, and without even so much as asking for an acknowledgment. I naturally expected you to return my money as soon as your temporary embarrassment was over. A year has passed — you haven’t given me back one penny! Yet your mill goes on working — you are turning out quantities of goods — you seem to be going on as, to my knowledge, you have gone on for many a long year. What does it all mean?”
Letty’s heart was beating like a sledgehammer on an anvil by this time. Here, then, was the trouble of which she had had some foreboding, at which she had hinted to Marston. In the silence which followed upon Sir Cheville’s direct question, she stole gently to the curtain which separated her from the two men and looked cautiously into the room beyond.