ssociated 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 fo