heart of shipping, Sylvanus Heythorp had lived
at Liverpool twenty years, he was from the Eastern Counties, of a
family so old that it professed to despise the Conquest. Each of its
generations occupied nearly twice as long as those of less tenacious
men. Traditionally of Danish origin, its men folk had as a rule bright
reddish-brown hair, red cheeks, large round heads, excellent teeth and
poor morals. They had done their best for the population of any county
in which they had settled; their offshoots swarmed. Born in the
early twenties of the nineteenth century, Sylvanus Heythorp, after an
education broken by escapades both at school and college, had fetched
up in that simple London of the late forties, where claret, opera, and
eight per cent. for your money ruled a cheery roost. Made partner in his
shipping firm well before he was thirty, he had sailed with a wet sheet
and a flowing tide; dancers, claret, Cliquot, and piquet; a cab with a
tiger; some travel--all that delicious early-Victorian consciousness of
nothing save a golden time. It was all so full and mellow that he was
forty before he had his only love affair of any depth--with the daughter
of one of his own clerks, a liaison so awkward as to necessitate a
sedulous concealment. The death of that girl, after three years, leaving
him a natural son, had been the chief, perhaps the only real, sorrow
of his life. Five years later he married. What for? God only knew! as
he was in the habit of remarking. His wife had been a hard, worldly,
well-connected woman, who presented him with two unnatural children,
a girl and a boy, and grew harder, more worldly, less handsome, in the
process. The migration to Liverpool, which took place when he was sixty
and she forty-two, broke what she still had of heart, but she lingered
on twelve years, finding solace in bridge, and being haughty towards
Liverpool. Old Heythorp saw her to her rest without regret. He had
felt no love for her whatever, and practically none for her two
children--they were in his view colourless, pragmatical, very unexpected
characters. His son Ernest--in the Admiralty--he thought a poor, careful
stick. His daughter Adela, an excellent manager, delighting in spiritual
conversation and the society of tame men, rarely failed to show him that
she considered him a hopeless heathen. They saw as little as need be of
each other. She was provided for under that settlement he had made on
her mother fifteen years ago,