II.
Madam Heckmondwyke, the great-grandmother of the brothers Philip and Hezekiah, had been a personage in her day—a daughter of a small country Yorkshire squire, who had married a man beneath her in station, who owned a few looms and let out work to cottagers possessing looms of their own. In former days, in the dales of the western hills were whole colonies of weavers; every cottager aspired to own a loom, saved his wages to buy or build one, and when he possessed one, took contracts from bigger men. These bigger men took the great contracts and let out the work piece meal to the cottagers. Any one passing through a village heard the rattle of looms out of every door and window, and even on the wild moors, where a lonely hovel stood, there also sounded the busy shuttle.
It was thought a great disgrace to the family of the Holroyds when Penelope Lætitia married the manufacturer Heckmondwyke; but since that marriage the Holroyds had gone down and had disappeared, and the Heckmondwykes had gone up and gained consequence. Piece by piece had the encumbered estate of the Holroyds passed from them, and piece by piece had the fortune of the Heckmondwykes improved. Penelope Lætitia had brought with her no dower, nothing but herself, her Christian name, and her silk stockings, when she married Joseph Heckmondwyke, nevertheless her sons and grandson and great-grandsons looked back on that marriage as the making of them; they were able to give themselves some airs as not altogether new people, but a family with one root in the county soil, and therefore with a claim to position above their fellows.
Penelope Lætitia had possessed a pair of very beautiful purple silk stockings, with clocks of white at the sides, elaborate and delicate in pattern, and these stockings had somehow remained in the family after she herself had mouldered into dust. The Holroyd estates had been alienated and broken up; the Holroyd family portraits had been dispersed, but Miss Holroyd’s purple stockings remained a hundred years after she had worn them, very little the worse for wear, for they had been so choice and beautiful that she had only worn them on grand occasions, and as after she married Joe Heckmondwyke no grandeur came about, she wore them no more.
The family grew to regard this pair of stockings as an heirloom, an interesting relic of the family history, a link by which it attached itself to the Holroyds.
This pair of silk stockings it was which gave direction to the special manufacture of the Heckmondwyke house. Old Joe Heckmondwyke had not been a stocking maker, the stocking looms were introduced by his grandson, Philip Holroyd Heckmondwyke, the father of Philip and Hezekiah, and his firm ran hard some of the Nottingham houses.
Penelope Lætitia, Holroyd’s mother had been a Miss Lee, and the Lees prided themselves as having produced the inventor of the stocking loom.
When Penelope Lætitia was born, a Nottinghamshire Lee was invited to stand godfather to the child, and instead of presenting her with a silver mug or a coral, or a silver spoon and fork, he gave her a pair of purple stockings, a miracle of perfection, so fine was the texture and so delicate and beautiful the clocking, that the child might when grown up not forget that she descended from the Lees who invented and created the stocking loom and its industry.
Now the Heckmondwykes had come to think there was something aristocratic about the stocking loom as opposed to the plebeian common loom, and as they began to rise, they became ambitious to start a stocking manufacture in Yorkshire, and show that they also inherited something of Lees as well as those in Nottinghamshire.
Philip Holroyd Heckmondwyke obtained the requisite looms and induced some Nottingham weavers to come to him, and the Yorkshire manufacture took root and prospered, prospered so well that not even Nottingham stockings commanded such a sale as the Yorkshire stockings of Heckmondwyke and Sons.
We have said that the brothers Heckmondwyke were Philip and Hezekiah, but that was only their first names, as Heckmondwyke is so long a surname we spared the reader their names in full, but we must now give them, the elder was Philip Holroyd, like his father, and the younger was Hezekiah Lee, and because a Lee he considered it his right to keep possession of the stockings.
Philip was equally determined to keep them. On a certain occasion they met in Hezekiah’s house and came to strong words over the matter.
