He turned savagely upon her where she stood by the corner of the mantelpiece. "What the devil did you send me on that fool's errand to Francis Forcus for?" he asked.

"_I_ send you, William?"

"I went because of the lying report you brought me."

"William, I--!"

"You led me to believe Bessie and young Forcus were engaged. Now did you or did you not lead me to believe it? Speak the truth if you can. Did you or did you not?"

"I only--"

"Did you lead me to believe it?"

"Yes, then; if you will have it so."

"And made me look a fool! I thought it was too good to be true--only you stuck to it. You were so d--d sure. You would have it so. Nothing would turn you."

"William, you must remember I advised you not to go."

"Did I ask your advice? Did I ever stoop to ask for it? I acted on information which you gave me. Went--and got kicked out."

"Kicked out? William!"

"Practically. I don't mean to say the man actually used his boot. If he had he couldn't have expressed plainer what he meant. Francis Forcus never had a civil word to fling at me in all his life. But for your infernal, silly cackle I'd as soon have gone to the devil as to him. If I'd only had myself and my own feeling to think about--Bessie or no Bessie--I'd have hanged myself sooner than have gone to him. But I'd got more than that."

His voice had fallen from its bullying key to a toneless melancholy. Mrs.

Day, who had been standing hitherto, seated herself in the chair by the chimney corner, and looked at her husband's blunt profile as he sat before the fire with a sick feeling of impending disaster, and a dismayed inquiry in her dark eyes.

"I'd got you and the children to think about," the man added.

"What could Sir Francis have said to you, William?"

Her husband turned savagely upon her. "Say? He said there was no engagement between his brother--his '_young_ brother'--and my daughter. That such an engagement would never receive his sanction. That he was not aware his '_young_ brother'--he's always sticking the word down your throat; the sanctimonious prig--I longed to kick him!--was on terms of intimacy with any one in my family."

"William!" Mrs. Day, cut to the quick, called protestingly upon her husband's name. "I hope you answered him there. I hope you did!"

"I said the young beggar was always hanging about my house. That he had danced half the night with my daughter--and--and made love to her."

"And then? And then, William?"

"He said, 'I wish all acquaintanceship to cease. I beg you not to invite my young brother to your house again.'"

"He said that?"

"d.a.m.n him! Yes."

"But that was an insult!" The poor woman was pale with surprise and dismay.

She stared breathlessly upon her husband. "Didn't you show him you felt it was an insult, William?"

William moved his huge shoulders. "What do you think?"

"Tell me what you said to him."

"I swore at him for ten minutes. He didn't know if he stood on his head or his heels when I'd done with him. Then I came away."

"I don't think that _swearing_ would improve matters."

"Perhaps you'll tell me what would improve them? It's what I want to hear, and more than I know."

"Poor Bessie! Oh, poor, poor Bessie!"

"Ah!" poor Bessie's father said, and his short-necked head fell upon his breast, and he gazed drearily at the fire again.

Mrs. Day got up and stood, her white hand glittering with its rings laid upon the black marble of the mantelpiece, thinking of Bessie.

"I would go to the club, William," presently she advised. "It can't make matters any better to sit at home and mope over them."

"Didn't I tell you I wasn't going to the club? D'you think I'm like a woman, and don't know my own mind?"

"I thought it would be pleasanter for you," she said; and then she left him. Her mind was full of Bessie, and the blow which must be given to Bessie's hopes.

"I don't know how I shall ever find the heart to tell her," she said to herself as she went from the room.

CHAPTER III

Forcus's Family Ale

It was the period when to rob a poor man--or a rich one, for that matter--of his beer would have been a crime to arouse to furious expression the popular sense of justice; when beer was on the master's table as well as in the servants' hall; when every cellar of the well-to-do held its great cask for family consumption, and no one had thought of attempting to convert the poor man from indulgence in his national beverage. It was the period when brewers made huge fortunes--and that in spite of the fact that they used good malt and hops in their brewings--nor dreamed, save, perhaps, in their worst nightmare, of the interference of Government in their monopoly. In Brockenham and its county the liquor brewed at the Hope Brewery was considered the best tipple procurable. Nothing slipped down the local throat so satisfactorily as Forcus and Son's Family Ale; and the present representatives of the firm were easily the wealthiest people in the town.

There were but two of them at the time: Francis Forcus--Sir Francis, for the last twelve months, he having been knighted in the second year of his mayoralty on the visit of a Royal Personage to his native town--and Reginald, his brother, born twenty years after himself of his father's second marriage, and now in his twenty-fourth year. Very good-looking, very good-natured, very gay and friendly and accessible the younger brother was.

Perhaps the most admired and popular young man in the town. His simple-minded pursuit of pleasure occupied a great deal of his time, and prevented his spending much of it at the Brewery where his brother made it a point of honour to pa.s.s three or four hours every day. But now and again Mr. Reginald appeared at the enormous pile of buildings, rising out of the slow-flowing river on which Brockenham stands, and where the famous Family Ale was composed. Now and then he would amuse himself for an hour, sauntering in the sunshine about the wide, brightly gravelled yards, inspecting the huge dray-horses in their stables, exchanging "the top of the morning," as he facetiously called it to them, with the draymen. He was seldom tempted to appear where the brewing operations were actually in process, but he never took his departure without looking in upon his brother in the s.p.a.cious and comfortable room overlooking the river in which that gentleman sat conscientiously for three or four hours a day to read the _Times_ and the local newspaper.

He paid his call upon the senior partner earlier than usual on the morning after Mrs. Day's New Year's Dance, but not so early that Sir Francis Forcus had not received a visitor before him. A visitor who had upset the equanimity of that always outwardly unruffled, and carefully self-contained person.

"You are up with the worm, this morning, Reggie," he said.

He was not at all a typical brewer in appearance, his tall, imposing figure being clothed in no superfluous flesh, his face, with its peculiarly set expression, being pale and handsome. His black hair, worn rather long, after the fashion of the day, was brushed smoothly from his temples; he was shaved but for the close-growing whiskers, which reached half-way down his cheeks.

"To what are we indebted for the honour of so early a call?" he inquired with a twist of his in-drawn lips.

"You were off before I was down this morning," the young man said. "I just looked in to tell you I was going out. That's all."

"You look in rather frequently on the same errand, I believe. Would it be indiscreet on my part to ask where you are going?"