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Updated: May 18, 2025
My friend, Miss S , came and paid me a long visit, during which my play of "Francis I." and Knowles's play of "The Hunchback" were produced, and it was finally settled that Covent Garden should be let to the French manager and entrepreneur, Laporte, and that my father and myself should leave England, and go for two years to America.
Their conversation was not reassuring to the heart of a timid woman, alone in an isolated farmhouse on a dark spring evening, especially so near the anniversary of old Captain Knowles's death. Later in these rural lives by many years two aged women were crossing a wide field together, following a footpath such as one often finds between widely separated homes of the New England country.
Knowles's sharp eyes darted from one to the other; then, with a smothered growl, he shook himself, and rushed headlong into the old battle which he and the schoolmaster had been waging now, off and on, some six years. That was a fight, I can tell you! None of your shallow, polite clashing of modern theories, no talk of your Jeffersonian Democracy, your high-bred Federalism!
The management was not strict, and in case of a fire the mill was not insured: like Knowles's carelessness. It was Lois and her father, Joe Yare being feeder that night. They were in one of the great furnace-rooms in the cellar, a very comfortable place that stormy night.
After my riding lesson, went and sat in the library to hear Sheridan Knowles's play of "The Hunchback." Mr. Bartley and my father and mother were his only audience, and he read it himself to us. A real play, with real characters, individuals, human beings, it is a good deal after the fashion of our old playwrights, and does not disgrace its models.
"Stepping-stones lie low, as my reverend friend suggests; impudence ascends; merit and refinement scorn such dirty paths," with a mournful remembrance of the last dime in his waistcoat-pocket. "But do you," exclaimed the farmer, with sudden solemnity, "do you understand this scheme of Knowles's?
She led the way into the garden, and under the grape-trellis, where the tall lilac-hedge shut them from the sight of passers-by, she gave him old lady Knowles's great armchair, and took the little one that was hers when she came over to sit a while with her old friend. The talk went wandering back as if it sought the very sources of youth and life; but somehow it touched commonplaces only.
By degrees, however, he became curious as to the freedom of her actions, the ease with which she drifted from place to place Lane Cross's studio; Bliss Bridge's bachelor rooms, where he appeared always to be receiving his theatrical friends of the Garrick Players; Mr. Gardner Knowles's home on the near North Side, where he was frequently entertaining a party after the theater.
It was a simple matter of business, this transfer of Knowles's share in the mill to himself; to-day he was to decide whether he would conclude the bargain. If any dark history of wrong lay underneath, if this simple decision of his was to be the struggle for life and death with him, his cold, firm face told nothing of it.
"We can't spare old Knowles's brain or heart while he ruins himself. It's something of a Communist fraternity: I don't know the name, but I know the thing." Very hard common-sense shone out of his eyes just then at the clergyman, whom he suspected of being one of Knowles's abettors. "There's two ways for 'em to end.
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