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Give us a look-up one Sunday afternoon, suggested Solomon. Bring the youngster with you. Solomon Appleyard and Hezekiah Grindley had started life within a few months of one another some five-and-thirty years before. Likewise within a few hundred yards of one another, Solomon at his fathers bookselling and printing establishment on the east side of the High Street of a small Yorkshire town; Hezekiah at his fathers grocery shop upon the west side, opposite. Both had married farmers daughters. Solomons natural bent towards gaiety Fate had corrected by directing his affections to a partner instinct with Yorkshire shrewdness; and with shrewdness go other qualities that make for success rather than for happiness. Hezekiah, had circumstances been equal, might have been his friends rival for Janets capable and saving hand, had not sweet-tempered, laughing Annie Glossopdirected by Providence to her moral welfare, one must presumefallen in love with him. Between Janets virtues and Annies three hundred golden sovereigns Hezekiah had not hesitated a moment. Golden sovereigns were solid facts; wifely virtues, by a serious-minded and strong-willed husband, could be instilledat all events, light-heartedness suppressed. The two men, Hezekiah urged by his own ambition, Solomon by his wifes, had arrived in London within a year of one another: Hezekiah to open a grocers shop in Kensington, which those who should have known assured him was a hopeless neighbourhood. But Hezekiah had the instinct of the money maker. Solomon, after looking about him, had fixed upon the roomy, substantial house in Nevills Court as a promising foundation for a printers business. That was ten years ago. The two friends, scorning delights, living laborious days, had seen but little of one another. Light-hearted Annie had borne to her dour partner two children who had died. Nathaniel George, with the luck supposed to wait on number three, had lived on, and, inheriting fotunately the temperament of his mother, had brought sunshine into the gloomy rooms above the shop in High Street, Kensington. Mrs. Grindley, grown weak and fretful, had rested from her labours. Mrs. Appleyards guardian angel, prudent like his protégé, had waited till Solomons business was well established before despatching the stork to Nevills Court, with a little girl. Later had sent a boy, who, not finding the close air of St. Dunstan to his liking, had found his way back again; thus passing out of this story and all others. And there remained to carry on the legend of the Grindleys and the Appleyards only Nathaniel George, now aged five, and Janet Helvetia, quite a beginner, who took life seriously. There are no such things as facts. Narrowminded folksurveyors, auctioneers, and such likewould have insisted that the garden between the old Georgian house and Nevills Court was a strip of land one hundred and eighteen feet by ninety-two, containing a laburnum tree, six laurel bushes, and a dwarf deodora. To Nathaniel George and Janet Helvetia it was the land of Thule, the furthest boundaries of which no man has reached. On rainy Sunday afternoons they played in the great, gloomy pressroom, where silent ogres, standing motionless, stretched out iron arms to seize them as they ran. Then just when Nathaniel George was eight, and Janet Helvetia four and a half, Hezekiah launched the celebrated Grindleys Sauce. It added a relish to chops and steaks, transformed cold mutton into a luxury, and swelled the head of Hezekiah Grindleywhich was big enough in all conscience as it wasand shrivelled up his little hard heart. The Grindleys and the Appleyards visited no more. As a sensible fellow ought to have seen for himself, so thought Hezekiah, the Sauce had altered all things. The possibility of a marriage between their children, things having remained equal, might have been a pretty fancy; but the son of the great Grindley, whose name in three-foot letters faced the world from every hoarding, would have to look higher than a printers daughter. Solomon, a sudden and vehement convert to the principles of mediæval feudalism, would rather see his only child, granddaughter of the author of The History of Kettlewell and other works, dead and buried than married to a grocers son, even though he might inherit a fortune made out of poisoning the public with a mixture of mustard and sour beer. It was many years before Nathaniel George and Janet Helvetia met one another again, and when they did they had forgotten one another. Hezekiah S. Grindley, a short, stout, and pompous gentleman, sat under a palm in the gorgeously furnished drawing-room of his big house at Notting Hill. Mrs. Grindley, a thin, faded woman, the despair of her dressmaker, sat as near to the fire as its massive and imposing copper outworks would permit, and |
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