Read Ebook: Sister Gertrude: A Tale of the West Riding by Sykes D F E

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Ebook has 801 lines and 50597 words, and 17 pages

"Well, I call myself a Christian and I rather flatter myself I am one, at least, an indifferent one," replied Sam. "I don't set up for a saint, of course."

"Look here, Beaumont;" Storth said, stretching his arms lazily and yawning long and loud, "I'm not going to be drawn into an argument on theology with you. I'd almost said another member of our illustrious family attends to that department. But I don't think you'd catch the Rev. Jacob arguing about it, either. He's far too downy for that. It pays better to treat matters you're paid to believe as beyond question, and a man who questions them as a moral leper. Now, I don't say you're a moral leper any more than I say I'm a saint. But I do say that, from a business point of view, it's just as bad to be thought one as to be one; worse, in fact, for you get damned as a sinner without the fun of the sin."

"Oh, Sam, you're just incorrigible. I've said in my haste you believe in nothing. But you do believe in Mrs. Grundy."

"I do," said Storth, devoutly. "Great is the Grundy of the British Philistine."

"Hang the fellow, with his affectation of being so superior to another fellow," he added to himself. "Mind you don't carry your head so high in the clouds, Master Edward, that you trip and fall over a very little obstacle, and if that obstacle's Sam Storth thank your own infernal folly. I'll back common-sense against ideals any day, and if you'll allow me the one. You're welcome to my share of the other."

The morning after the meeting in the Market Place Edward Beaumont was seated in a capacious easy chair in his own room in the office in Queen Street, smoking a well-seasoned meerschaum pipe, and reading the "Leeds Mercury" of the day. Edward felt a sort of proprietorship in the winged messenger from the fact, which he regarded with satisfaction, that his great-grandfather had purchased the first issue of the paper a hundred years before, and the subscription to that journal had been piously continued in the family down to his own day, though he flattered himself he had considerably overpast the cautious Liberalism but slightly differentiated from Whiggery, of the "Mercury." He had skimmed the local news, pshaw'd over the leading articles, and was enjoying the London Letter from our Own Correspondent, usually attributed to a rising publicist, when Storth bustled into the room.

"There's not much for Petty Sessions this morning, Beaumont; a couple of assaults, a profane and obscene, and a bastardy; but there's one case you'll have to put all you know into. You remember that girl we heard last night in the Market Place?"

"The Salvation Army girl?"

"That's the party. Well, she's in my room now."

"What's the trouble?"

"Well, here's the brief. It seems she was staying in Matt Duskin's Lodging House last night."

"In Matt Duskin's Lodging House in Kirkgate?"

"Nowhere else, as I'm a sinner, and a lively time of it she must have had before they settled down for the night and went to bed."

"I should imagine the lively time for a lodger at Matt's comes after he gets into bed," said Beaumont, smiling. "The place must be alive with vermin. But what's the case?"

"You remember Pat Sullivan that's been in trouble with the police so often and that they're so afraid of? They say it took three of them to get him to the station last night. Well, he's about half-killed another of Duskin's select assortment of lodgers, and all Kirkgate and his wife will be in Court this morning to see the last of Sullivan for a few months anyway. He's sure to be sent down. Ward will work for a committal without the option, and the constables on that beat will do their nightly prowl all the more serenely when they know Pat's comfortably snoring on a plank bed in Wakefield gaol."

"Miss--the Salvation Army girl's in your room, you say. What's she got to do with it?"

"There's her and Sullivan's wife in tears and a shawl and half-a-dozen more of the quality. They say Pat didn't begin it. But it'll be no good. Pat's booked this journey, you bet. Anyhow, here's your brief, and it's about time you were off to Court."

"I think I'll speak to the Young lady first. Ask her to come here, will you, Sam?"

When the speaker of the previous evening entered the large low room, with its walls lined with many rows of calf-bound volumes of statutes, reports, and precedents, its lettered pigeon-holes, its ponderous safe, and japanned deed boxes, it was evident she had lost for a time the calm serenity that had distinguished her at the Market Cross. Her face was pale, and her eyes looked as though they had lately wept. Her expression was anxious, and her manner agitated. As Beaumont rose from his chair he returned the respectful bow with which he greeted her, and took with some trembling the chair he placed for her. She waited for him to speak.

A crimson flush suffused the fair and beautiful features.

"I am called Sister Gertrude in the Army."

"H'm; I'm afraid the clerk will ask for your full name. I understand this is a serious case, and he may think it necessary to take depositions."

"My name is Gertrude Fairfax, but, if possible, I prefer that my surname should not appear. There are reasons."

"Fairfax is a name both known and honoured in Yorkshire," said Edward, with a courteous inclination towards the lady; "but I should not take you for a native of our county."

"Oh, no! my home is in Staffordshire, but my address is at the headquarters of the Army in London."

"Very well, Sister, I think we can manage that your name may not appear. I'll speak to the reporter; he'll work the oracle for a drink," he mentally added.

"Yes; I am a soldier in the Army, not an officer, and last night, after our meeting at the Market Cross, a poor frightened woman spoke to me. She was in great trouble, but almost afraid to address me. You see, she is a Catholic and the Catholics never care to do anything their priest might not like. She said she was living an awful life. Her husband, the man they are to try to-day, she said, is a good, true man, and a loving husband, but for the drink, and then he is like one possessed. She said he earned good wages, under the Corporation, I fancy, as a navvy; but he spent so much in drink they were always in sore straits, and now had broken up their home and were living in vile lodgings. I was moved by Nellie's story, and asked how I could help her. She begged me to go speak with her husband, plead and pray with him to give up the drink. Of course I went....

"Oh! yes. Why should I fear? No one would injure me, and if they did, what matter? So she took me to the lodging-house in which they live. Her husband, Pat, was in a long room, where there were several men and women and some children. At first the man was very surly, would not speak to me. But he is Irish, from the county Cork; and I happen to have spent some time with friends in the neighbourhood of Cork, between the city and Queenstown, on the Lea. But perhaps you don't know the Lea?"

"Only the lines: '...those bells of Shandon, That sound so grand on, The pleasant waters of the river Lea,'" confessed Edward.

"Ah! you read Father Prout," said the girl, and looked at the grim law books as though to say they did not look suggestive of the warblings of a poet. "Well, when he got to speak of his home in the ould country, and the good mother he had left in the village he was born in, and of the days of boyhood, I led him on to speak of the glad springtime, when he courted Ellen as a sweet colleen, as he called her, and so the man was melted, and he heard me patiently. Then I asked Mr. Duskin if I might say a few words to the others, and offer a prayer, and as he didn't say me nay, why I did."

"Was this man, what's his name, the complainant, I mean, there then?"

"Oh, no! I was just about to leave, for it was near eleven o'clock, and I feared the friends with whom I stayed would be anxious about me."

"Oh! you weren't staying at Duskin's yourself, then? Mr. Storth must have misunderstood you."

"Oh, no! I was saying a few parting words to one or two of the women, who seemed glad that I should speak to them. Then the door was thrust open violently, and the man Graham almost fell into the room. He was very much under the influence of drink. One of the women was his wife, and he accused me of wanting to make a Black Protestant of her, and threatened me. But I did not mind him, for he was not himself and was moving to the door. But he stood in my way, and made as though to prevent my going, and Ellen came between us, and made to push him on one side, and he called her a foul name and struck her in the face. Then Patrick Sullivan jumped to his feet with a wild cry, and before one could think or speak the two men were fighting, and then it seemed as though all the house began to scream and shout and yell and swear, and the street filled even at that late hour, and then the police came and seized Sullivan. Graham was on the floor with a nasty wound in his head, and poor Ellen almost in hysterics blaming herself bitterly for taking me to the house at all."

"You are sure Graham struck Nelly?"

"Oh, yes! And now this morning what could I do but come with the poor woman to see her through the trouble. I had much ado to prevent her pawning her wedding-ring to pay your fee, but we managed without that."

"Oh! Nelly had her wedding-ring? Then Pat hadn't been drinking long. It's the last thing that goes. When that's gone the husband starts working again. It's the last thing in and the first thing out."

"Can you get Sullivan off, Mr. Beaumont? If it is only a question of a fine, perhaps that can be arranged."

"In the same way, I supose as my fee was arranged?"

"Well, yes; that way or some other. But I hope he may not be sent to prison. Perhaps he may turn over a new leaf, and give up the drink and mend his ways. I'm sure there's much more of good than bad in him, and prison will only foster the bad and dwarf the good."

"Oh! we'll pull him through, Sister Gertrude, if you tell the Bench your story as you have told it to me. I'm sure, if you will permit me to say so, you behaved very pluckily in going unprotected to that horrid hole. But I'm afraid you wasted your time in trying to save Pat Sullivan. He's always in trouble with the police."

Beaumont bowed silently. He had had his own opinion of ecstatic young ladies who take to Slumming as a diversion; but Sister Gertrude did not harmonise with his preconceived ideas. He would have liked to ask many questions, but he resented prying inquisitiveness in his own affairs, and was careful to respect the reserve of others. He looked at his watch.

"Jove! we must be off. May I have the pleasure of showing you the way to Court?"

"Thank you. Nelly will be waiting for me. I will go with her."

As Beaumont entered the Court and made his way to the solicitors' well, he glanced at the Bench and noted with satisfaction that the Mayor, Thomas Hoyleham, presided. Mr. Hoyleham was a weak, worthy man of venerable appearance, with a long, flowing, white beard, and of pallid, bloodless complexion. He was a draper by trade, and one of the pillars of the Independent Church at Lowfield. He had signalised his accession to the Chief Magistracy by treating the members of the Town Council to a Temperance Banquet, zoedone, phospherade, and other effervescent and phosphorescent cordials supplanting the wines of France and Spain; much to the discontent of his guests.

Beaumont, however, had tossed off a bumper of the beady and gaseous compound with a flourish to the health of the Mayor, and whilst questioning convictions that forced a man to prefer zoedone to champagne, vowed he admired the Mayor's pluck and consistency, and protested that it was worth while to run the risk of being poisoned to sit at table with a man of principle. Of course, this sentiment had reached the Mayor's ears, and had not only greatly comforted him and sustained him in presence of the rueful countenances of his guests, but had led him ever after to entertain a high opinion of Beaumont's discrimination. And though he mourned over the young councillor's infidelity, he was not without hopes some Christian Church might win him to its bosom, and lost no opportunity of speaking a word in season to his young colleague; and had even ventured to give him a Temperance Tract in an apologetic manner, assuring him that the passages marked by the Mayor's own hand were not to be taken by Edward as offensively personal. Beaumont had taken all in good part, and when ribald members of the Council poked fun at the old gentleman, and called him an old woman, only fit to sit behind the urn at a tea-party, Beaumont had stoutly declared that beneath the mild and deferential, almost shrinking, manner of Mr. Hoyleham, lay a rare staunchness and fidelity to the right as he conceived it.

The case against Patrick Sullivan was not taken till the charge-sheet was cleared of all others. Mr. Ward the Chief Constable, was determined to have that redoubtable breaker of the law and terror of the police safe under lock and key for so long a spell as the law could ensure, and he, of course, had heard only the version of the fracas given by the police and by Graham. The strong, most damaging point against Pat was his resistance of the police in the discharge of their duty. It was an article of faith with the Borough Bench that the police must be supported, and it was equally a matter of faith with those who had been summoned before it, or who expected to be, and with their witnesses, that the sworn testimony of one policeman would be taken before that of all Kirkgate put together. Sullivan was looked upon as a doomed man, as good as done for, and his sympathisers only found consolation in the resolve to make the place too hot to hold the complainant. With these sympathisers the back benches of the Court were crowded. They were there, male and female, some scores of them, in all states of dress and undress and all degrees of cleanliness and sobriety. They were all to a man and also woman known to the police, and most of them had stood in the very dock now tenanted by the redoubtable Sullivan, and those who had not looked forward to their appearance in that unenviable rectangle as a natural and inevitable incident in their career. Needless to say, the sympathies of this section of the audience in Court were entirely with the prisoner, and when Edward entered with a light and springing step and bright smiling face, a subdued murmur ran through their ranks.

"Och! it's himself has the cometherin' way wid 'im," whispered a shawled and frowsy nymph of the pavement to another lady of the same nationality and facility of affection. "Fwat an eye's in de face of 'im; 't would melt a stone, an' the tongue of him for Blarney most wonderful."

The chief witness against Sullivan was, of course, the aggrieved Graham, who appeared in the box, his head all swathed in bandages and plasters. He told a piteous tale. He was a homeless, inoffensive man that lodged at Duskin's, and wouldn't harm a fly, so he said. He had been refreshing himself after the labours of the day at the house of a friend, and at an early hour had sought his humble lodgings and his virtuous couch. But he had no sooner entered the door of that sacred spot--where peace should reign, whatever broils disturb the street--than that cowardly brute, as strong as an ox and as raging as a lion, had leaped upon him, beaten down his feeble defence, and left him senseless on the ground. His wounds were there for their Worships and all the world to see, and so forth.

Unfortunately for Graham, Beaumont had a memory and Graham an unwary tongue. Looking at Beaumont's face as he rose to cross examine the witness, one would have read there nothing but compassion and sympathy with the complainant in his great and unmerited wrongs. Sister Gertrude confided to Ellen, when all was over, that her heart failed her at that moment, for she feared the plausible rogue's canting tongue had imposed on their chosen champion. "He is so young, you know," But Ellen had smiled superior.

"Let me see, Graham," Edward began, in an insinuating voice, "I think you did not tell us your age."

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