Occasionally he was to be seen chained to a dog.
A reversion, conceivably, to a mediaeval type!
Yes, but also the exemplar of the excessively modern!
Externally he was a consequence of the fact that, years previously, the leading tailor in Bursley had permitted his son to be apprenticed in London.
The father died; the son had the wit to return and make a fortune while creating a new type in the town, a type of which multiple chains were but one feature, and that the least expensive if the most salient.
For instance, up to the historic year in which the young tailor created the type, any cap was a cap in Bursley, and any collar was a collar.
But thenceforward no cap was a cap, and no collar was a collar, which did not exactly conform in shape and material to certain sacred caps and collars guarded by the young tailor in his back shop.
None knew why these sacred caps and collars were sacred, but they were; their sacredness endured for about six months, and then suddenly--again none knew why--they fell from their estate and became lower than offal for dogs, and were supplanted on the altar.
The type brought into existence by the young tailor was to be recognized by its caps and collars, and in a similar manner by every other article of attire, except its boots.
Unfortunately the tailor did not sell boots, and so imposed on his creatures no mystical creed as to boots.
This was a pity, for the boot-makers of the town happened not to be inflamed by the type-creating passion as the tailor was, and thus the new type finished abruptly at the edges of the tailor's trousers.
The man at No.
4, St. Luke's Square had comparatively small and narrow feet, which gave him an advantage; and as he was endowed with a certain vague general physical distinction he managed, despite the eternal untidiness of his hair, to be eminent among the type.
Assuredly the frequent sight of him in her house flattered the pride of Constance's eye, which rested on him almost always with pleasure.
He had come into the house with startling abruptness soon after Cyril left school and was indentured to the head-designer at
"Peel's," that classic earthenware manufactory.
The presence of a man in her abode disconcerted Constance at the beginning; but she soon grew accustomed to it, perceiving that a man would behave as a man, and must be expected to do so.
This man, in truth, did what he liked in all things.
Cyril having always been regarded by both his parents as enormous, one would have anticipated a giant in the new man; but, queerly, he was slim, and little above the average height.
Neither in enormity nor in many other particulars did he resemble the Cyril whom he had supplanted.
His gestures were lighter and quicker; he had nothing of Cyril's ungainliness; he had not Cyril's limitless taste for sweets, nor Cyril's terrific hatred of gloves, barbers, and soap.
He was much more dreamy than Cyril, and much busier.
In fact, Constance only saw him at meal-times.
He was at Peel's in the day and at the School of Art every night.
He would dream during a meal, even; and, without actually saying so, he gave the impression that he was the busiest man in Bursley, wrapped in occupations and preoccupations as in a blanket--a blanket which Constance had difficulty in penetrating.
Constance wanted to please him; she lived for nothing but to please him; he was, however, exceedingly difficult to please, not in the least because he was hypercritical and exacting, but because he was indifferent.
Constance, in order to satisfy her desire of pleasing, had to make fifty efforts, in the hope that he might chance to notice one.
He was a good man, amazingly industrious--when once Constance had got him out of bed in the morning; with no vices; kind, save when Constance mistakenly tried to thwart him; charming, with a curious strain of humour that Constance only half understood.
Constance was unquestionably vain about him, and she could honestly find in him little to blame.
But whereas he was the whole of her universe, she was merely a dim figure in the background of his.
Every now and then, with his gentle, elegant raillery, he would apparently rediscover her, as though saying:
"Ah! You're still there, are you?"
Constance could not meet him on the plane where his interests lay, and he never knew the passionate intensity of her absorption in that minor part of his life which moved on her plane.
He never worried about her solitude, or guessed that in throwing her a smile and a word at supper he was paying her meagrely for three hours of lone rocking in a rocking-chair.
The worst of it was that she was quite incurable.
No experience would suffice to cure her trick of continually expecting him to notice things which he never did notice.
One day he said, in the midst of a silence:
"By the way, didn't father leave any boxes of cigars?"
She had the steps up into her bedroom and reached down from the dusty top of the wardrobe the box which she had put there after Samuel's funeral.
In handing him the box she was doing a great deed.
His age was nineteen and she was ratifying his precocious habit of smoking by this solemn gift.
He entirely ignored the box for several days.
She said timidly:
"Have you tried those cigars?"
"Not yet," he replied.
"I'll try 'em one of these days."
Ten days later, on a Sunday when he chanced not to have gone out with his aristocratic friend Matthew Peel- Swynnerton, he did at length open the box and take out a cigar.
"Now," he observed roguishly, cutting the cigar, "we shall see, Mrs. Plover!"
He often called her Mrs. Plover, for fun. Though she liked him to be sufficiently interested in her to tease her, she did not like being called Mrs. Plover, and she never failed to say:
"I'm not Mrs. Plover."