The Rich Are with You Always (79 page)

  A sweat ran now from Charity's body. She shook like one with palsy and strange grunts came up from deep within her.

  "Do you feel him?" Arabella called.

  "Yes! Yes! Yes!" Charity cried. "Oh, yesss!"

  "And can you doubt His love?"

  "Oh, Jesus!" she called. "Sweetest Saviour!"

  "And now take one last look at the life you leave behind." Her trembling hand pointed at the fire. "Here! See how it glows! Be strong now, Charity!" She withdrew the poker, glowing white with the heat. "Be strong in Christ. Feel now for one brief agony the torment He has saved you from. For here you see approaching you the very fires of hell!" Charity, with glazed eyes, watched the poker as it came near. "Call on His name now, child. Offer Him this mortification of your vile flesh. Now!"

  The girl did not cry out or even move, as the searing iron bit, sizzling, into her flesh.

  "God in heaven!" Walter whispered, having crept up unheard even by John.

  He could answer nothing as he watched the poker pull away with a jerk from the body it had welded itself to.

  "Call on Him!" Arabella urged.

  The child gave one long ecstatic cry: "Je-e-e-sus!" and raised her arms to the heavens. Her face was radiant with joy.

  Arabella dropped to her knees too. The iron fell with a clatter at her side. "Dearest Lord," she prayed, "who desireth not the death of a sinner but rather that she may turn from her wickedness and live; and who hast taught us that there is more rejoicing in heaven at the return of one stray lamb than at the nine and ninety who were ever saved, rejoice now with us that this one lamb is returned. Enfold her this night and ever more in Thy tender care. Stay and comfort her when she is like to fall again. O Thou who seest into all our hearts and all their depths, and from whom we may thus have nothing hid." She reached out tenderly and touched the girl's ribs below the burn mark. "And through this wound, O Lord, take out her sin and cleanse her entirely. That she, being now truly penitent and truly Thy daughter, may daily heal and strengthen, as in body so in soul, becoming at last perfect in Thy service. I ask this, dear Lord, knowing well mine own imperfections, knowing that, in Thy perfect sight, what the world may call my virtue and this my dear sister's sin are as close"—she took Charity's hands in hers—"as these our fingers. And thus Thou seest before Thee not one but two sinners, alike in penitence and humility, alike in direst need of Thy love and guidance. Grant both to both, O Heavenly Father, for sweet Jesus' sake. Amen."

  "Amen. Amen!" Charity said desperately.

  She struggled to stand—and fainted.

  That and that alone galvanized the two men to action, and they shuffled unwillingly into the kitchen.

  Arabella stood again. "God is merciful," she said, fondly looking down at the exhausted and now mutilated girl. "I know that God is always in this house, but has He ever worked such wonders among us as this night?"

  "Please cover her, dear," Walter said.

  "There is no sin in her now. She is new born. She is a babe. As pure as a babe."

  "That burn!" John said, only now coming out of his trance.

  "It is where the spear of the centurion entered the side of our Lord. She will bear it as a holy scar."

  "Cover her, do," John said. "And let me carry her up."

John's visit to Bristol and his re-engagement with the nuts-and-bolts end of their business brought him back from his former state of lassitude. To all outward appearances he was his old self again. He did the round of all their workings, in England and Europe, usually being away three weeks, back for one. He went after new contracts with all his former zest, enjoying the skirmishing and backdoor dealing they involved.

  "All is as it was," he said, a hundred times.

  He went to Ireland to see the progress of their "model estate." It had been cleared of about a thousand tenants, not by the old system of evicting and harrying but by offering free passage and five pounds to any family to emigrate to North America, South Africa, or Australia. Some of the stronger men had come to work for Stevenson's in England. The people did not want to move, of course. Like all peasants, their love of the land went deep. But if there was ever to be any profitable development of the country, the landowners had to create a system in which thirty acres was looked upon as a normal size for a farm; there were still places where people petitioned even for five-acre farms to be divided—on the grounds that such "large" holdings were oppressive.

  As Sarah's trustee, he helped with her move to Bristol and it was he who negotiated the purchase of the Refuge, a secluded gentleman's residence in spacious, wooded grounds at the end of St. James's Place—the road parallel to Montague Parade, where the Thorntons lived. By buying three feet of garden from a neighbour, they were able to arrange a connecting path between the two properties. Sarah, when the time came, left Maran Hill in tears, but Nora knew that she was going for the best of all positive reasons and that she would find the work she and Arabella had undertaken was completely fulfilling to her. John said he hoped that would be so. Charity was being trained to be her lady's maid.

  When they went north for Christmas, he stayed up there and, with Livings and his mill manager, Paul Jacobs, planned and began the first big extension of Stevenstown and the works. "There's going to be a great expansion in manufactures as a result of this Exhibition next year," he promised. "We shall be ready for it."

  Toward the end of that winter, with the feeling but not the evidence of spring in the air, Flynn came once more to Maran Hill, this time to dine with them. He arrived in midafternoon. Nora was having her portrait taken by Llewellyn Roxby, a young painter in whose career she had always shown an interest. Verbally, he flattered her outrageously and without the slightest attempt to make it sound sincere. But he painted her with consummate honesty—in fact, too much honesty for Nora: He had included a little skin blemish she had near her left eye, a sort of small grey mole on a stalk of skin. She had made him paint it out again.

  "Is it all right if I talk?" she asked when Flynn came in.

  "Yes." He was always very short when he was painting.

  "You must have better manners, Rocks, when you paint the queen. Well, Flynn, and was I right last year? Didn't Bristol do him good! No more circuses or talk of retiring."

  "It did," Flynn agreed. "And yet…I don't know why I say 'and yet,' but there's just that feeling about the fella."

  Nora was silent.

  "Do ye not agree, ma'am?"

  "I was hoping you wouldn't say it," she answered. "I was hoping it was only myself had that feeling and that it was just my imagination."

  "I don't know what it is. There's a…"

  "I do. You can't put your finger on anything and say 'He wouldn't have done that before' or on anything he would've done and now doesn't. In a way it's
too
much
like he used to be. Don't you think?"

  "Ah!" Flynn shook his head. "You're right, of course, but it's more than that. You're right too, when you say you can't put your finger on it."

  "He's hit his head on the ceiling, whoever you're talking about," Roxby said.

  "What?" Nora laughed.

  "He's grown and grown and grown and now he's hit his head on the ceiling. He can only get fatter now, not taller. Unless he moves to a different room. It happens to me all the time."

  Nora laughed. "Help yourself to a drink, Flynn," she said.

  "Thank you, not before sundown."

  "We have the same rule here," Nora said. "But we break it when Roxby comes. It helps us survive the occasion. I'd introduce you except I know he'd only be rude."

  Roxby sprang to life behind his easel and came bounding over to Flynn, the picture of extravagant good manners. "My dear sir! Mr. Flynn! Llewellyn Roxby's the name. And may I say how very delighted I am to meet you."

  Flynn laughed in embarrassment and shook hands. He shrugged, bewildered, at Nora while Roxby returned to his place.

  "I really thought," Roxby said, talking to Nora's image on the canvas, "that when I came here to paint you, dear Nora"—here Flynn shot her a look of amazement—"I really and truly believed that I had come into a room with a very high ceiling. Nay, an infinite ceiling. The sky itself. I can paint, I thought, a picture of true honesty. No more corpulent mill owners' wives who want me to pry out the sylph that still lurks somewhere within those oceans of lard."

  Nora sighed wearily. She knew just what was coming.

  "Thus I painted a picture of supreme honesty. For twenty minutes I laboured to re-create an adorable, sweet, honey-grey mole on you
there
." He was still talking to his portrait. "And"—he ducked, miming a hard blow on the head—"I suddenly hit the ceiling! The infinite sky was no more than a piece of bad Tiepolo. A sham."

  "Shut up, Rocks!" she cried. "It's boring."

  "You are as bad as all of them," he said, pouting. "Worse. Because you have it in you to be so much better. Look!" He threw down his brushes on his studio palette. "I will show you." He tore three sheets of paper from the heart of his sketchbook, and, with a fine sable brush dipped in a pale, warm grey he placed a tiny mark, off-centre, on two of the sheets. One of these he leaned against the back of her portrait canvas; the other two he brought to her.

  "Which is the better portrait of that sheet of paper?" he asked, putting the two into her hands.

  Wearily, she lowered them into her lap and looked at him as a mother might look at a child grown too big to be scolded.

  He took up the challenge in her eyes. "You say to me, 'It's such a
little
thing, Rocks—so little. Paint it out. Just for me.' And now here, this grey paint is a little thing too. But see what a difference it makes."

  Nora chuckled and gave him back the papers. "I swear, Rocks," she said, "I swear. When the portrait is finished, I will take it to Professor Liston and say, 'There—make me like that.' The surgeon's blade shall force nature to imitate art for once. Does that satisfy you?"

  His dejected walk back to his easel was a parody of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. "I should know better," he said to himself. "After all these years."

  "And that's a fact!" Flynn added.

Later, it occurred to Nora that Roxby's insincere and self-serving analogy might be closer to the truth than anything she or Flynn had said. It was not that John had hit a ceiling—precisely the opposite. It was the firm that could no longer grow upward, only sideways. With the successful completion of the Britannia Bridge, it had taken part in the most challenging and difficult engineering feat of all time. There would be others, of course, and they in their turn would also be the most challenging—the most something—but, in a sense, it would be more of the same. And now that he had trained several people to do all that he could do, he was the one supernumerary person in the business. If he wanted to go on growing, he had to do it outside of Stevenson's. Perhaps her ruse with Flynn, getting John to go to Bristol, had been a blunder. Perhaps he had been on the point of making this discovery for himself. If so, to have driven him back into the firm had been the wrong thing to do.