The last had always been the real objection.
His father had not been able to believe that Cyril's desire to study art sprang purely from his love of art; he could not avoid suspecting that it was a plan to obtain freedom in the evenings-- that freedom which Samuel had invariably forbidden.
In all Cyril's suggestions Samuel had been ready to detect the same scheme lurking.
He had finally said that when Cyril left school and took to a vocation, then he could study art at night if he chose, but not before.
"You know what your father said!" Constance replied.
"But, mother!
That's all very well! I'm sure father would have agreed.
If I'm going to take up drawing I ought to do it at once.
That's what the drawing-master says, and I suppose he ought to know." He finished on a tone of insolence.
"I can't allow you to do it yet," said Constance, quietly. "It's quite out of the question.
Quite!"
He pouted and then he sulked.
It was war between them.
At times he was the image of his Aunt Sophia.
He would not leave the subject alone; but he would not listen to Constance's reasoning.
He openly accused her of harshness.
He asked her how she could expect him to get on if she thwarted him in his most earnest desires.
He pointed to other boys whose parents were wiser.
"It's all very fine of you to put it on father!" he observed sarcastically.
He gave up his drawing entirely.
When she hinted that if he attended the School of Art she would be condemned to solitary evenings, he looked at her as though saying:
"Well, and if you are--?"
He seemed to have no heart.
After several weeks of intense unhappiness she said:
"How many evenings do you want to go?"
The war was over.
He was charming again.
When she was alone she could cling to him again.
And she said to herself:
"If we can be happy together only when I give way to him, I must give way to him."
And there was ecstasy in her yielding.
"After all," she said to herself, "perhaps it's very important that he should go to the School of Art."
She solaced herself with such thoughts on three solitary evenings a week, waiting for him to come home.
CHAPTER VII
BRICKS AND MORTAR
I
In the summer of that year the occurrence of a white rash of posters on hoardings and on certain houses and shops, was symptomatic of organic change in the town.
The posters were iterations of a mysterious announcement and summons, which began with the august words:
"By Order of the Trustees of the late William Clews Mericarp, Esq."
Mericarp had been a considerable owner of property in Bursley.
After a prolonged residence at Southport, he had died, at the age of eighty-two, leaving his property behind.
For sixty years he had been a name, not a figure; and the news of his death, which was assuredly an event, incited the burgesses to gossip, for they had come to regard him as one of the invisible immortals.
Constance was shocked, though she had never seen Mericarp. ("Everybody dies nowadays!" she thought.) He owned the Baines-Povey shop, and also Mr. Critchlow's shop.
Constance knew not how often her father and, later, her husband, had renewed the lease of those premises that were now hers; but from her earliest recollections rose a vague memory of her father talking to her mother about 'Mericarp's rent,' which was and always had been a hundred a year.
Mericarp had earned the reputation of being 'a good landlord.'
Constance said sadly:
"We shall never have another as good!"
When a lawyer's clerk called and asked her to permit the exhibition of a poster in each of her shop-windows, she had misgivings for the future; she was worried; she decided that she would determine the lease next year, so as to be on the safe side; but immediately afterwards she decided that she could decide nothing.
The posters continued:
"To be sold by auction, at the Tiger Hotel at six-thirty for seven o'clock precisely."