He was of that small and lonely minority of men who never know ambition, ardour, zeal, yearning, tears; whose convenient desires are capable of immediate satisfaction; of whom it may be said that they purchase a second-rate happiness cheap at the price of an incapacity for deep feeling.  In his seventh decade, Meshach Myatt could look back with calm satisfaction at a career of uninterrupted nonchalance and idleness.  The favourite of a stern father and of fate, he had never done a hard day’s work in his life.  When he and Hannah came into their inheritance, he realised everything except the house and invested the proceeds in Consols.  With a roof, four hundred a year from the British Empire, a tame capable sister, and notoriously good health, he took final leave of care at the age of thirty-two.  He wanted no more than he had.  Leisure was his chief luxury; he watched life between meals, and had time to think about what he saw.  Being gifted with a vigorous and original mind that by instinct held formulas in defiance, he soon developed a philosophy of his own; and his reputation as a ‘character’ sprang from the first diffident, wayward expressions of this philosophy.  Perceiving that the town not unadmiringly deemed him odd, he cultivated oddity.  Perceiving also that it was sometimes astonished at the extent of his information about hidden affairs, he cultivated mystery, the knowledge of other people’s business, and the trick of unexpected appearances.  At forty his fame was assured; at fifty he was an institution; at sixty an oracle.

‘Meshach’s a mixture,’ ran the local phrase; but in this mixture there was a less tedious posturing and a more massive intellect than usually go to the achievement of a provincial renown such as Meshach’s.  The man’s externals were deceptive, for he looked like a local curiosity who might never have been out of Bursley.  Meshach, however, travelled sometimes in the British Isles, and thereby kept his ideas from congealing.  And those who had met him in trains and hotels knew that porters, waiters, and drivers did not mistake his shrewdness for that of a simpleton determined not to be robbed; that he wanted the right things and had the art to get them; in short, that he was an expert in travel.  Like many old provincial bachelors, while frugal at home he could be profuse abroad, exercising the luxurious freedom of the bachelor.  In the course of years it grew slowly upon his fellow pew-holders at the big Sytch Chapel that he was worldly-minded and possibly contemptuous of their codes; some, who made a specialty of smelling rats, accused him of gaiety.

‘You’d happen better get something extra for tea, sister,’ said Meshach, rousing himself.

‘Why, brother?’ demanded Hannah.

‘Some sausage, happen,’ Meshach proceeded.

‘Is any one coming?’ she asked.

‘Or a bit of fish,’ said Meshach, gazing meditatively at the fire.

Hannah rose and interrogated his face.  ’You ought to have told me before, brother.  It’s past three now, and Saturday afternoon too!’ So saying, she hurried anxiously into the kitchen and told the servant to put her hat on.