The Manchester Man

Mrs. Day had retired to write her letter to Bernard in the privacy of her own room, and Bessie, in radiant spirits, had gone off to dress for evening service, where she was to go escorted by Franky and Emily. Deleah was left in charge of the boarder.

It was a point of honour with them all that the young man should have his money's worth while under their roof, and above all, should have his meals in comfort. The cup which Bessie had poured out for him stood cold and untasted by his side. Deleah took it from him. Certainly he should not have the dregs of the tea-pot; she would brew a fresh pot for him.

"I beg you will not trouble, Miss Deleah. It is my fault in being late."

He, who held the creed that a gentleman must never allow a lady to wait on him (unless she was his mother, or he was married to her), must follow Miss Deleah to the kitchen, also on the upper floor, must watch her rinse the tea-pot, must advise with her as to the amount of tea required to make the three large cups he always drank, must himself pour the boiling water, she, with many exhortations from him to be very careful lest she scalded her fingers, holding the tea-pot. There was something delightfully homelike and familiar in this sharing of simple duties.

Deleah, returned to the sitting-room where she sat to fill his cup and to cut him bread-and-butter, was as lovely a vision as any man could desire to see at his board. Pleasantly and gaily she chattered, waiting on him with her dainty hands. He, tongue-tied, answering little, embarrassed and ill at ease in that sweet society.

For a year and a half he had lived in the dingy house above the shop in Bridge Street. He had for eighteen months enjoyed that propinquity, that familiar intercourse, which is all that is necessary to make many an ugly woman beautiful in the eyes of the man in enjoyment of her society. It is small wonder then, if the poor Manchester man exaggerated in his own mind those unusual charms which Deleah incontestably possessed.

A year and a half! And in all that time he could never recall an occasion when he had been left for any length of time alone with Deleah, before. It was Bessie who had constituted herself his especial friend, had seized on him, talked to him, made confidences to him, and satisfied herself it was his wish to talk to her. Deleah, he knew, had looked on him as Bessie's property. He had resented this assumption, but had not known how to dispute it.

Besides being of a loveliness which he had come to think unsurpassed, she was so gentle, so tender-hearted, so pitiful, this young Deleah; so adorably kind. She had learnt in that grief and shame which he knew had befallen her a lesson, taught her he was sure by the pitying angels of God; to think no sorrow too trivial to be despised, to be tender even to the scratched finger, the bruised shins of the poor men and women scrambling painfully along the tough and thorny path of life.

He was a short and broad and ugly man, approaching middle age; of a commonplace cut of features, of poor birth, of mean fortunes, of small account in the scheme of things; but he had an eye for beauty; he had a soul; and his eye was filled with a beauty completely satisfying his conception; and with his soul he worshipped the soul of Deleah.

"I am sorry," he suddenly said, cutting across some little triviality of hers with which she was striving to cover his silence—"sorry you did not have even one of the roses I walked ten miles to get for you."

"I?" she glanced fleetingly at him. "Oh, it does not matter, of course.
Bessie has them, and she loves them so. I had far rather Bessie had them."

He gazed upon her, reproachful but silent.

"Bessie so loves flowers," she said, remembering how Bessie had pounced upon the poor roses before they had been offered. It had not been a pretty sight—but Bessie—poor Bessie!—did such things.

"Miss Bessie so loves them to wear in her dress," he corrected.

And at that moment Miss Bessie burst into the room, attired for conquest and for church, the flowers which the boarder had walked so far to procure, pinned, as was the mode of the day, beneath the collar of her jacket. Gibbon glanced grudgingly at them, nestling becomingly enough under Bessie's plump chin.

"Oh, how glum you look!" cried Bessie in the best of spirits.

"Not glum at all," said Mr. Gibbon with something less than his usual politeness of tone.

"Only cross? Ah! I am so afraid of you! I must run away."

She beckoned to Deleah, who followed her to the tiny landing. "The Honourable Charles has got his back up because of Reggie," she whispered, "and Reggie is furious because of the Honourable Charles's flowers. Did you hear how he snapped at me just now?"

"Why should Mr. Gibbon be angry because of Reggie?"

"Oh, my dear innocent babe! Don't you know that men are sometimes jealous?"

"Yes. I know it. And I know another thing: and that is you were doing your best to make them jealous."

Bessie laughed delightedly as at a compliment: "I leave one of them to you. Try to get him into a better frame of mind before I come back," she said, and turned to run downstairs.

Deleah leaned over the railing of the tiny landing, lit by a single gas-jet above her head, to watch her go. She liked to see Bessie good-tempered and in good spirits, and if to believe that every man she knew was in love with her made her so, Deleah was willing to humour her. About the devotion of young Forcus for Bessie she had her doubts, but that of the lodger she took as a matter of course.

He was still seated at the table when she returned to him; the bread-and-butter she had cut for him untouched on his plate, his tea untasted.

"I thought perhaps you were not coming back," he said. He sighed, as if relieved from an anxiety which had been painful. "Miss Deleah, I wish very much to speak to you."

There were a few things in the matter of deportment he had learnt since living over the grocer's shop; one was that a man must not sit while a lady is standing. So he stood up in his place now, and waited till she had taken hers again behind the tea-urn.

"Oh, but, Mr. Gibbon, do eat your tea!"

He pushed his plate away: "I don't want to eat. I want to talk to you."

Glancing at him she saw that his face, ordinarily of a deep-diffused red, was as pale as it is possible for such a face to become. Often when she had felt his eyes upon her and had looked up frankly to meet them, she had noticed how quickly he had averted them, almost as if detected in a crime. Now she found them fixed upon her face.

"There is something I have made up my mind to tell you," he said.

"It won't take long, I hope? Because as Emily is at church I have to clear the tea-things."

She jumped up at once and began to do so. "He is going to tell me about Bessie," she said to herself. She did not particularly desire his confidence, and with a little more clatter and fussiness than was necessary to the task, she put the cups and plates on the tray.

In a preoccupied manner he helped her to do this, took the tray from her, when it was laden, to the kitchen, while she carried the eatables. Coming back, together they folded the tablecloth. A pleasant enough occupation to be shared with a pretty girl; but it was evident, although his trade had made his blunt fingers deft at the handling of material, and he was carefully observant of the practice which must be followed in the art, that he was thinking of other things than maintaining the creases in the tablecloth.

"There!" said Deleah, as an announcement that their light labours were finished. She had put the cloth away in the press, and turned to find the Honourable Charles, as she and Bessie to themselves always called their boarder, standing with his back to the little dresser at which Emily made her pastry, his arms crossed upon his chest.

"Now you can go and sit down in comfort, and smoke the pipe of peace on my special window-seat—I give you permission—and watch the good people going to church."

"That is, if you are coming."

"I think I'll go first and see what has become of mama."

"This will do, for a few minutes, Miss Deleah. We will stop here," he said.

So Deleah, there being no escape, perched herself on the corner of the table where the plates and tea-cups were collected until Emily should return to wash them, and waited for what he had to say.

He found some difficulty in beginning apparently, and frowned upon the matting covering the floor.

"It's about myself," at length he began with an effort painful to see; his hands seemed to be pulling tensely upon his folded arms, the blunt fingers of the broad red hands showed white upon the coat-sleeves, his face was still of the muddy pink which with him stood for pallor.

"I hope you won't think it intruding of me to talk about myself."

"Which in other words means about Bessie," said Deleah to herself, strung up, now that it was inevitable, for the revelation.

"It's about my prospects. Perhaps you think I haven't got any, Miss Deleah. Or any position, to speak of? I have not, I know. Not like your friend, Mr. Forcus. He's got this thousands a year, where at most I can hope for hundreds, I suppose."

Deleah divined the sore feeling in his mind and hastened to bring the balm: "Reggie Forcus might have millions where he will have thousands—and the more he had the less likely would he be to affect any of us. He has been here this afternoon, and if he remembers he may come again. But that is simply the whim of an idle young man who at the moment can think of nothing more amusing to do."

"I thought he seemed to take a good deal of interest. I caught him looking—"

"At Bessie? He likes her, of course, and there was once a great friendship. If—things—hadn't happened, I dare say it might have come to more than friendship. But they did happen, and—" She broke off. Never could she without suffering and difficulty allude to the tragedy which had cost them so dear.

"I assure you, Mr. Gibbon," she began again, and smiled encouragingly upon him, "you are of far more importance to us than Mr. Reginald Forcus is ever likely to be."

"I thank you for telling me that," he said, and his fingers strained tighter upon his coat-sleeves.

Then he lifted his eyes and looked at her as she sat, perched with ease and grace among the tea-cups on the kitchen table. Every movement of hers was made, every posture taken, with ease and grace. It happened, for Deleah's fortune, to be the day of the small woman; the day when she of inches was pronounced a gawk, and she of five feet and a little—slim of waist, of foot, of hand, of ankle—slid with ease and naturalness into a man's heart.

"Thank you for that," said the Manchester man again, with a kind of hoarse fervour in his voice. "You are always kind. I don't think the angels in heaven are kinder than you."

A statement at which Deleah among the tea-cups laughed light-heartedly.

"No. Don't laugh," he said almost fiercely. "It is true! I believe it with all my soul."

He looked from her to the floor at his feet again, frowning upon it, striving for the calmness to proceed with that which he had to say in the order he had taught himself to believe was best for his case.

"I'm getting two hundred a year," he said. "This year, come Christmas, I'm to have a rise to two hundred and fifty. Next year"—he paused, set his lips tightly—"next year I mean to ask for a share in the business."

"Do you?" said Deleah with polite interest. "Do you really think you will get it, Mr. Gibbon?"

"I shall get it, fast enough. I shall get it, for this reason: if Boult doesn't give it me I shall leave him. Boult can't afford to lose me. I don't want to boast, but it's true. He can't afford to lose me, and he knows it. Do you know," and he lifted his head, speaking more naturally and looking at her with pride in his achievement, "in the two years I have been in the concern I have doubled the takings in my department?"

"Really? How very clever of you, Mr. Gibbon! You must be pleased!"

He looked at her, and laughed hopelessly. "You don't understand these things, Miss Deleah. You don't realise that what I have done means much."

"Oh, but I do, Mr. Gibbon! I have always thought that you must be a quite wonderful business man; so quiet, so regular, thinking of nothing but your work."

"I do think of other things," he said fervidly. "I want to get on. I want to improve myself, and my position. There's an end I'm working for. If a man sets an end before him, and works for all he's worth to get it, does he get it, Miss Deleah?"

"He gets it. Never doubt it!"

"Well then, see! When I get my share of the business I shall work the whole show up as I have worked my own department. The other establishments in the same line can put their shutters up. It's the biggest drapery business in the town now—Boult is proud enough to ram that fact down your throat—but I shall make it the biggest drapery business in the Eastern Counties."

"How splendid of you, Mr. Gibbon! And supposing Mr. Boult won't give you the share?"

"I am not sure it would not be better. In that case I shall start on my own. Not in a shop. I shall open a warehouse for the sale of my goods, alone."

"Those calicoes, and prints, and 'drabbets,' you go to Manchester to buy?" put in Deleah, anxious to show that she understood.

"Manchester goods. I shall carry with me all the little customers who come to me now to take my advice what they shall buy, and a lot of shopkeepers of a better class, who will deal with a wholesale mean but will not buy their goods of Boult."

"Poor Mr. Boult!"

"He must look after hisself. I heard Miss Bessie say the other day that the wholesale line was genteeler than retail—." He broke off and looked questioningly at Deleah, who had formed no opinion on the subject.

"Bessie knows about these things," she assured him. "Then, you will become a very rich man, Mr. Gibbon. And will go away, and never help us to make mincemeat any more, or to clear the table after Sunday tea. You will drive your carriage with a pair of horses—not one miserable screw like Mr. Boult—and you will live in a fine house, and grow roses, and build conservatories; won't you?"

"Yes," he assented solemnly. Then he unfolded his arms and' stretching them sideways gripped with each hand the ledge of the dresser against which he leant. "I shall want you to come with me," he said.

"Me!" said Deleah. The shock of the surprise made her for a moment breathless. She sat and gazed at him with wide eyes for what seemed an age, saying nothing; and he also, for the moment incapable of further speech, gazed back. At last "Bessie?" Deleah got out. "You mean Bessie?"

"Why should I mean Bessie? Bessie!" he said, and flung the thought of her from him with scorn. "Why should I mean Bessie? I mean you—you—you!" he said, and endured her silence with eyes that clung desperately to her face.

"When I leave here, to go into that fine house—with the carriage and—conservatories—will you come too?"

"Oh, no!" Deleah said, whispering, with drooping head.

Then they sat opposite each other on table and dresser and were silent, while the blood sang loudly in Deleah's ears, and beat with such cruel throbbing in the man's temples that he did not know how to endure the agony, and thought that his head must burst.

When Deleah at last lifted her eyes and looked at him the change in his face frightened her, his breath came hard and noisily as if he had been running. Was it possible he could feel like that—this quiet, inoffensive, uninteresting, middle-aged boarder, who had never appeared to feel anything particularly before? About her?

"I am so sorry," she said in genuine distress, horribly grieved at and ashamed of her part in his pain. "I thought it was Bessie."

"You have refused me? You mean it—absolutely? There is no hope for me?"

Deleah shivered. It was the regulation phrase used by the rejected lover in the novel of the day. It had thrilled Deleah a hundred times as she had read it. There was nothing stilted or theatrical in the words as Charles Gibbon said them, but they brought home to her the unwelcome fact that he was in deadly earnest, that he loved her, and she was dealing him a cruel blow. She felt miserable, humiliated, ashamed. It was preposterous, out of all proportion, that he should have had to ask such a question, in such a tone, of little Deleah Day.

"I am so very sorry, Mr. Gibbon," she said again, and he heard in a silence that made her heart ache.

"Shall you go away?" she asked him presently. In books the lover being rejected removed himself for a time in order to recover from the blow. She was relieved to find in the boarder's case this was not considered necessary.

"Why should I go away?" he asked.

"It will be better to go on just the same," she advised eagerly. "Bessie need never know."

"Bessie!" he said again contemptuously; he loosed his grip of the dresser, and swung round, standing with his back to her, that she might not see his face. "You've crushed every hope I had; you've—broken me; and you talk to me of Bessie. What, in the name of heaven or hell, do you suppose I care for Bessie; or whether she knows or not?"

Deleah, keeping her place on the table, listened to the altered, choked voice of him with astonishment. Their unfailingly polite—too polite! and retiring boarder! Was it really he, standing with his back to her, speaking of Bessie—Bessie!—in such a tone!

"You see, I never knew! I never guessed," she excused herself helplessly.

"No. I don't suppose you gave me a thought. Morning, noon and night you were everything to me. There was nothing else. I have worked for you, lived for you—"

His back was towards her—the horrible thought that he was crying came to her; his voice was rough and broken.

"If I had only guessed—" she said in hideous distress and embarrassment. She had thought, as all girls do, of one day getting an offer of marriage; that it could ever be such a miserable experience as this she had not imagined. If it had only been a stranger, she thought foolishly; some one outside her life, of whom she had seen little! But Mr. Gibbon—their boarder! The sight of him in their home circle had become as familiar to her as might have been the sight of her brother: she could not reconcile herself to the thought that this man in the horribly unfamiliar guise was he. "If I had only guessed—!"

"And if you had?" he asked, but hopelessly, without turning round.

"I could have told you the sooner. There wouldn't have been such a—waste."

She slipped off the table, and stood beside it in a painful state of indecision. She longed to get away from the sight of him, to escape; but at the same time, being Deleah, she also longed to comfort.

"I shall not even tell mama," she promised. "We shall go on just as usual.
And soon—soon we shall forget it has happened."

"Shall we?"

"Oh, yes! It is astonishing how we can put things away, in the back of our minds, and go on as if they weren't there at all. Quite astonishing."

"We oughtn't to make a piece of work about our sorrows if we can get along with them as easily as that!"

"Oh, not our sorrows, of course." She remembered how the sorrow of her father's dreadful end was with her still and would be while she lived. "Our sorrow, of course, Mr. Gibbon, we cannot forget. But a little thing that goes amiss like this—a little disappointment—"

"I see," he said. Then he gave a sound, half choke, half hiccough, that was meant for a laugh; and presently he turned round. "Then, we will go on as before, Miss Deleah. You need not be afraid any one will learn of this—'little disappointment'—from me. I am pretty well used to hiding what I feel. It comes easy when you've once learnt that nobody cares."

"Oh, Mr. Gibbon. Don't please say that. I care."

"No, you don't. You don't care like I want you to. What's the good of anything else? Have we finished clearing away the tea-things, Miss Deleah? Anything more that I can help you with?"

She shook her head, looking at him with eyes which implored him not to be bitter or unhappy. And as she looked, seeing the familiar red face and squat strong figure of him in a new light an idea struck her.

"Mr. Gibbon," she said, "it was you who sent the concert tickets, and all the flowers and fruit, and the canary in its lovely cage. It was you—you!"

"No, no! Mr. Boult, of course, Miss Deleah. You found out who it was, long ago. Kind, generous Mr. Boult!"

"And I took them all, and never thanked you—!" She put out a hand to delay him as he walked past her to the door; but he took no heed, and without another word she let him go.

"What have you done with your roses?" Deleah asked. Bessie tucked in her plump chin and looked down upon the place beneath her jacket collar where they had been pinned. "I must have lost them coming out of church!" she said. "Pray do not let the Honourable Charles hear of it."

The three poor roses! Deleah's roses, the boarder had tramped the ten miles to get for her!