To him, save during these latter
days, she had always been associated with ideas of splendour and
success: his wife had always mentioned the Nixons with a tinge of
reverence; he had heard, many times, the epic of Mr. Nixon's struggles
and of his slow but triumphant rise. Mary had told the story as she had
received it from her parents, beginning with the flight to London from
some small, dull, and unprosperous town in the flattest of the Midlands,
long ago, when a young man from the country had great chances of
fortune. Robert Nixon's father had been a grocer in the High Street, and
in after days the successful coal merchant and builder loved to tell of
that dull provincial life, and while he glorified his own victories, he
gave his hearers to understand that he came of a race which had also
known how to achieve. That had been long ago, he would explain: in the
days when that rare citizen who desired to go to London or to York was
forced to rise in the dead of night, and make his way, somehow or other,
by ten miles of quagmirish, wandering lanes to the Great North Road,
there to meet the 'Lightning' coach, a vehicle which stood to all the
countryside as the visible and tangible embodiment of tremendous
speed--'and indeed,' as Nixon would add, 'it was always up to time,
which is more than can be said of the Dunham Branch Line nowadays!' It
was in this ancient Dunham that the Nixons had waged successful trade
for perhaps a hundred years, in a shop with bulging bay windows looking
on the market-place. There was no competition, and the townsfolk, and
well-to-do farmers, the clergy and the country families, looked upon the
house of Nixon as an institution fixed as the town hall (which stood on
Roman pillars) and the parish church. But the change came: the railway
crept nearer and nearer, the farmers and the country gentry became less
well-to-do; the tanning, which was the local industry, suffered from a
great business which had been established in a larger town, some twenty
miles away, and the profits of the Nixons grew less and less. Hence the
hegira of Robert, and he would dilate on the poorness of his beginnings,
how he saved, by little and little, from his sorry wage of City clerk,
and how he and a fellow clerk, 'who had come into a hundred pounds,' saw
an opening in the coal trade--and filled it. It was at this stage of
Robert's fortunes, still far from magnificent, that Miss Marian Reynolds
had encountered him, she being on a visit to friends in Gunnersbury. Afterwards, victory followed victory; Nixon's wharf became a landmark to
bargemen; his power stretched abroad, his dusky fleets went outwards to
the sea, and inward by all the far reaches of canals. Lime, cement, and
bricks were added to his merchandise, and at last he hit upon the great
stroke--that extensive taking up of land in the north of London. Nixon
himself ascribed this _coup_ to native sagacity, and the possession of
capital; and there were also obscure rumours to the effect that some one
or other had been 'done' in the course of the transaction. However that
might be, the Nixons grew wealthy to excess, and Mary had often told her
husband of the state in which they dwelt, of their liveried servants, of
the glories of their drawing-room, of their broad lawn, shadowed by a
splendid and ancient cedar. And so Darnell had somehow been led into
conceiving the lady of this demesne as a personage of no small pomp. He
saw her, tall, of dignified port and presence, inclining, it might be,
to some measure of obesity, such a measure as was not unbefitting in an
elderly lady of position, who lived well and lived at ease. He even
imagined a slight ruddiness of complexion, which went very well with
hair that was beginning to turn grey, and when he heard the door-bell
ring, as he sat under the mulberry on the Sunday afternoon, he bent
forward to catch sight of this stately figure, clad, of course, in the
richest, blackest silk, girt about with heavy chains of gold. He started with amazement when he saw the strange presence that followed
the servant into the garden. Mrs. Nixon was a little, thin old woman,
who bent as she feebly trotted after Alice; her eyes were on the ground,
and she did not lift them when the Darnells rose to greet her. She
glanced to the right, uneasily, as she shook hands with Darnell, to the
left when Mary kissed her, and when she was placed on the garden seat
with a cushion at her back, she looked away at the back of the houses in
the next street. She was dressed in black, it was true, but even Darnell
could see that her gown was old and shabby, that the fur trimming of her
cape and the fur boa which was twisted about her neck were dingy and
disconsolate, and had all the melancholy air which fur wears when it is
seen in a second-hand clothes-shop in a back street. And her
gloves--they were black kid, wrinkled with much wear, faded to a bluish
hue at the finger-tips, which showed signs of painful mending. Her hair,
plastered over her forehead, looked dull and colourless, though some
greasy matter had evidently been used with a view of producing a
becoming gloss, and on it perched an antique bonnet, adorned with black
pendants that rattled paralytically one against the other. And there was nothing in Mrs. Nixon's face to correspond with the
imaginary picture that Darnell had made of her. She was sallow,
wrinkled, pinched; her nose ran to a sharp point, and her red-rimmed
eyes were a queer water-grey, that seemed to shrink alike from the light
and from encounter with the eyes of others. As she sat beside his wife
on the green garden-seat, Darnell, who occupied a wicker-chair brought
out from the drawing-room, could not help feeling that this shadowy and
evasive figure, muttering replies to Mary's polite questions, was almost
impossibly remote from his conceptions of the rich and powerful aunt,
who could give away a hundred pounds as a mere birthday gift. She would
say little at first; yes, she was feeling rather tired, it had been so
hot all the way, and she had been afraid to put on lighter things as
one never knew at this time of year what it might be like in the
evenings; there were apt to be cold mists when the sun went down, and
she didn't care to risk bronchitis. 'I thought I should never get here,' she went on, raising her voice to
an odd querulous pipe. 'I'd no notion it was such an out-of-the-way
place, it's so many years since I was in this neighbourhood.' She wiped her eyes, no doubt thinking of the early days at Turnham
Green, when she married Nixon; and when the pocket-handkerchief had done
its office she replaced it in a shabby black bag which she clutched
rather than carried. Darnell noticed, as he watched her, that the bag
seemed full, almost to bursting, and he speculated idly as to the nature
of its contents: correspondence, perhaps, he thought, further proofs of
Uncle Robert's treacherous and wicked dealings.