The Spinners. Eden Phillpotts

      "There's very little we can do against the writing of the dead," answered Mr. Gurd. Then he saluted a man who bustled into the bar.

      "Morning, Job. What's the trouble?"

      Job Legg was very tall and thin. He dropped at the middle, but showed vitality and energy in his small face and rodent features. His hair was black, and his thin mouth and chin clean-shaven. His eyes were small and very shrewd; his manner was humble. He had a monotonous inflection and rather chanted in a minor key than spoke.

      "Mrs. Northover's compliments and might we have the big fish kettle till to-morrow? A party have been sprung on us, and five-and-twenty sit down to lunch in the pleasure gardens at two o'clock."

      "And welcome, Job. Go round to the kitchen, will 'e?"

      Job disappeared and Mr. Gurd explained.

      "My good neighbour at 'The Seven Stars'—her with the fine pleasure gardens and swings and so on. And Job Legg's her potman. Her husband's right hand while he lived, and now hers. I have the use of their stable-yard market days, for their custom is different from mine. A woman's house and famous for her meat teas and luncheons. She does very well and deserves to."

      "That old lady with the yellow wig?"

      Mr. Gurd pursed his lips.

      "To you she might seem old, I suppose. That's the spirit that puts a bit of a strain on the middle-aged and makes such men as me bring home to ourselves what we said and thought when we were young. 'Tis just the natural, thoughtless insolence of youth to say Nelly Northover's an old woman—her being perhaps eight-and-forty. And to call her hair a wig, because she's fortified it with home-grown what's fallen out over a period of twenty years, is again only the insolence of youth. One can only say 'forgive 'em, for they know not what they do.'"

      "Well, get me another brandy anyway."

      Then entered Raymond Ironsyde, and Mr. Gurd for once felt genuinely sorry to see his customer.

      The young man was handsome with large, luminous, grey eyes, curly, brown hair and a beautiful mouth, clean cut, full, firm and finely modelled in the lips. His nose was straight, high in the nostril and sensitive. He resembled his brother, Daniel, but stood three inches taller, and his brow was fuller and loftier. His expression in repose appeared frank and receptive; but to-day his face wore a look half anxious, half ferocious. He was clad in tweed knickerbockers and a Norfolk jacket, of different pattern but similar material. His tie was light blue and fastened with a gold pin modelled in the shape of a hunting-horn. He bore no mark of mourning whatever.

      "Whiskey and soda, Gurd. Morning, Neddy."

      He spoke defiantly, as though knowing his entrance was a challenge. Then he flung himself down on a cushioned seat in the bow window of the bar-room and took a pipe and tobacco pouch from his pocket.

      Mr. Gurd brought the drink round to Raymond. He spoke upon some general subject and pretended to no astonishment that the young man should be here on this day. But the customer cut him short. There was only one subject for discussion in his mind.

      "I suppose you thought I should go to my father's funeral? No doubt, you'll say, with everybody else, that it's a disgrace I haven't."

      "I shall mind my own business and say nothing, Mister Raymond. It's your affair, not ours."

      "I'd have done the same, Ray, if I'd been treated the same," said Neddy

       Motyer.

      "It's a protest," explained Raymond Ironsyde. "To have gone, after being publicly outraged like this in my father's will, was impossible to anybody but a cur. He ignored me as his son, and so I ignore him as my father; and who wouldn't?"

      "I suppose Daniel will come up to the scratch all right?" hazarded

       Motyer.

      "He'll make some stuffy suggestion, no doubt. He can't see me in the gutter very well."

      "You must get to work, Mr. Raymond; and I can tell you, as one who knows, that work's only dreaded by them who have never done any. You'll soon find that there's nothing better for the nerves and temper than steady work."

      Neddy chaffed Mr. Gurd's sentiments and Raymond said nothing. He was looking in front of him, his mind occupied with personal problems.

      Neddy Motyer made another encouraging suggestion.

      "There's your aunt, Miss Ironsyde," he said. "She's got plenty of cash, I've heard people say, and she gives tons away in charity. How do you stand with her?"

      "Mind your own business, Ned."

      "Sorry," answered the other promptly. "Only wanted to buck you up."

      "I'm not in need of any bucking up, thanks. If I've got to work, I'm quite equal to it. I've got more brains than Daniel, anyway. I'm quite conscious of that."

      "You've got tons more mind than him," declared Neddy.

      "And if that's the case, I could do more good, if I chose, than ever

       Daniel will."

      "Or more harm," warned Mr. Gurd. "Always remember that, Mister Raymond.

       The bigger the intellects, the more power for wrong as well as right."

      "He'll ask me to go into the works, I expect. And I may, or I may not."

      "I should," advised Neddy. "Bridetown is a very sporting place and you'd be alongside your pal, Arthur Waldron."

      "Don't go to Bridetown with an idea of sport, however—don't do that, Mister Raymond," warned Richard Gurd. "If you go, you put your back into the work and master the business of the Mill."

      The young men wasted an hour in futile talk and needless drinking while Gurd attended to other customers. Then Raymond Ironsyde accepted an invitation to return home with Motyer, who lived at Eype, a mile away.

      "I'm going to give my people a rest to-day," said Raymond as he departed. "I shall come in here for dinner, Dick."

      "Very good, sir," answered Mr. Gurd; but he shook his head when the young men had gone.

      Others in the bar hummed on the subject of young Ironsyde after his back was turned. A few stood up for him and held that he had been too severely dealt with; but the majority and those who knew most about him thought that his ill-fortune was deserved.

      "For look at it," said a tradesman, who knew the facts. "If he'd been left money, he'd have only wasted the lot in sporting and been worse off after than before; but now he's up against work, and work may be the saving of him. And if he won't work, let him die the death and get off the earth and make room for a better man."

      None denied the honourable obligation to work for every responsible human being.

CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

      THE HACKLER

      The warehouse of Bridetown Mill adjoined the churchyard wall and its northern windows looked down upon the burying ground. The store came first and then the foreman's home, a thatched dwelling bowered in red and white roses, with the mill yard in front and a garden behind. From these the works were separated by the river. Bride came by a mill race to do her share, and a water wheel, conserving her strength, took it to the machinery. For Benny Cogle's engine was reinforced by the river. Then, speeding forward, Bride returned to her native bed, which wound through the valley south of the works.

      A bridge crossed the river from the yard and communicated with the mills—a heterogeneous pile of dim, dun colours and irregular roofs huddled together with silver-bright excrescences of corrugated iron. A steady hum and drone as of some gigantic beehive ascended from the mills, and their combined steam and water power produced a tremor of earth and a steady roar in the air;