Flint and Roses Read Free

industrialists—most of them our relatives and friends—could oblige women and children to work in their weaving-sheds. He had laboured hard to prevent the introduction of the Bill forbidding the employment of children under the age of nine, arguing that tiny bodies were essential to the spinning trade, since only they could crawl under the machines to mend the broken threads, and that the parents of such child-operatives were in dire need of their wages. And on his last appearance in the House he had spoken out bitterly against the proposed introduction of a ten-hour working day, an unpardonable intrusion, he had declared, into the business affairs of his constituents, and no help at all to the labouring classes who would be thus obliged to exist on ten hours’pay.
    And so, as we drove at the head of his funeral procession on that chill January morning, up the steep cobbled streets that would take him to his final rest, the churchyard was surrounded by closed carriages, the church itself most flatteringly overcrowded with substantial, silk-hatted gentlemen and their ladies, come to pay him their parting respects.
    The worsted manufacturer Mr. Hobhouse of Nethercoats was there, with his wife and the eldest of their fourteen children; the banker Mr. Rawnsley, with whom my father’s credit had always been high; the worsted spinner Mr. Oldroyd of Fieldhead, a widower himself, who had already called at our house to offer his private sympathies to my mother; the foreign-born, exceedingly prosperous Mr. George Mandelbaum, whose wife, her emotions nurtured in a warmer climate than ours, actually shed a tear. There were manufacturers and professional men from Leeds and Bradford; the Members of Parliament of both those cities; a scattering of our local gentry, who although they had disapproved of my father’s politics were finding it expedient these days to cultivate the newly rich. And, as a final honour, there was a carriage bearing the coat of arms of Sir Giles Flood, lord of the manor of Cullingford, although that noble and decidedly disreputable gentleman did not come himself.
    â€˜What a sad loss!’ they said. ‘Poor fatherless children! Poor Elinor! No one could be surprised to see her follow him by the month end. Good heavens—only think of it—we must all of us come to this. How terrible!’ They lowered his coffin into the hard ground. ‘He was not a young man,’ they said, ‘older than me, at any rate.’ It was done, and I went home with Prudence and Celia to serve glasses of port and sherry to my father’s mourners, who had their own ideas as to what he had been worth and—if they happened to be the parents of sons—couldn’t help wondering how much of it, besides that twenty thousand pounds apiece, he had left to us. He was gone, there was no doubt of it. I had seen him go. But throughout the whole dreary afternoon I failed to rid myself of the sensation of his eyes still upon me, that he would suddenly appear, his cold face pinched with disapproval, and demand to know what these people were doing here, cluttering up his drawing-room, setting down their glasses on his immaculately polished tables, their careless hands and wide skirts a danger to his porcelain; his presence so real that I wondered if my mother, sitting so very still, looking so very frail, was aware of him, too.
    But the Hobhouses and the Oldroyds, the Mandelbaums and the Rawnsleys, the gentlemen from Bradford and Leeds and Halifax, having done their duty, were not disposed to linger; and, approaching my mother one by one to mutter their self-conscious sympathy, were soon heading either for home or the Old Swan in Market Square, to drink hot punch and transact a little business so that the entire day should not be profitless. And soon there remained in my father’s drawing-room only my mother’s family, the Barforths, who had once been poor and now were very rich, my father