Part 37 (1/2)
But you were brought into this house by a strange chance--you happen to suit me--to interest me. 'Provvy' as Bentham would say, seems to point to you. Here--in this drawer”--he brought his hand down strongly on the writing table--”is a will which I wrote last night. It leaves the whole of my property to you, subject to certain directions as to the works of art--to a provision for old Dixon, and so on. You can't witness it, of course, nor can Dixon; otherwise it might be signed to-night. But if we come to an understanding to-night, I can sign it to-morrow morning and get a couple of men from the farm to witness it. I think I can promise to live so long!”
There was silence. With an uncertain, swaying movement Melrose returned to his chair. The physical weakness betrayed by the action was strangely belied, however, by his imperious aspect, as of an embodied Will. His eyes never left Faversham, even while he rested heavily on the table before him for support.
Suddenly, Faversham, who had been sitting pale and motionless, looked up.
”Mr. Melrose--have you no natural heirs?”
Melrose could not altogether disguise the shock of the question. He threw himself back, however, with a smile.
”You have been listening I see to the stories that people tell.”
Faversham bent forward and spoke earnestly: ”I understand that your wife and child left you twenty years ago. Are they still living?”
Melrose shrugged his shoulders. ”Whether they are or not, really matters nothing at all either to you or me: Mrs. Melrose left this house of her own free will. That ended the connection between us. In any case, you need have no alarm. There is no entail--even were there a son, and there never was a son. I do what I will with my own. There is no claim on me--there would be no claim on you.”
”There must be--there would be--a moral claim!”
The colour rushed into Melrose's face. He drummed the table impatiently.
”We will not, if you please, argue the matter, which is for me a _chose jugee_. And no one who wishes to remain a friend of mine”--he spoke with emphasis--”will ever attempt to raise ghosts that are better left in their graves. I repeat--my property is unenc.u.mbered--my power to deal with it absolute. I propose to make you my heir--on conditions. The first is”--he looked sombrely and straight at his companion--”that I should not be hara.s.sed or distressed by any such references as those you have just made.”
Faversham made no sound. His chin was propped on his hand, and his eyes pursued the intricacies of a silver cup studded with precious stones which stood on the table beside him. He thought, ”The next condition will be--the gems.”
”The second,” Melrose resumed, after a somewhat long pause, and with a sarcastic intonation, ”is that you should resist the very natural temptation of exhibiting me to the world as a penitent and reformed character. In that doc.u.ment you have just read you suggest to me--first, that I should retire from three lawsuits in which, whatever other people may think, I conceive that I have a perfectly good case; second”--he ticked the items off on the long tapering finger of his left hand--”that I should rebuild a score or two of cottages it would not pay me to rebuild--in which I force no one to live--and which I shall pull down when it pleases me, just to teach a parcel of busybodies to mind their own business; third--that I should surrender, hands down, to a lot of trumpery complaints and grievances got up partly to spite a landlord, partly to get money out of him; and fourthly--with regard to the right of way--that I should let that young prig Tatham, a lad just out of the nursery, dictate to me, bring the whole country about my ears, and browbeat me out of my rights. Now--I warn you--I shall do none of these things!”
The speaker paused a moment, and then turned impetuously on his companion.
”Have you any reason so far to complain of my conduct toward you?”
”Complain? You have been only too amazingly, incredibly generous.”
Melrose's hand made a disdainful movement.
”I did what suited me. And I told you, to begin with, it would _not_ suit me to run my estate as though it were a University Settlement. Handle me gently--that's all. You've had your way about some of the farms--you'll get it no doubt with regard to others. But don't go about playing the reformer--on this dramatic scale!--at my expense. I don't believe in this modern wish-wash; and I don't intend to don the white sheet.”
He rose, and lighting another cigarette, he dropped a log on the fire, and stood with his back to it, quietly smoking. But his eyes were all fierce life under the dome of his forehead, and his hand shook a little.
Faversham sat absolutely still. Rus.h.i.+ng through his veins was the sense of something incredible and intoxicating. The word ”million” rang in his ears. He was conscious of the years behind him--their poverty, their thwarted ambitions, their impotent discontent. And suddenly the years before him lit up; all was possible; all was changed. Yet as he sat there his pulses hurrying, words coming to his lips which dropped away again, he became conscious of two or three extremely sharp visualizations.
A room in one of the Mainstairs cottages, containing a bed, and on it a paralyzed girl, paralyzed after diphtheria--the useless hands--the vacant, miserable look--other beds in the same room filling it up--the roof so low that it seemed to be crus.h.i.+ng down on the girl--holes in the thatch rudely mended.
Again--a corner in the Mainstairs churchyard, filled with small, crowded graves, barely gra.s.s-grown; the ”Innocents' Corner.”
And again, a wretched one-roomed cottage in the same row of hovels, kitchen, bedroom, and living-room in one, mud-floored, the outer door opening into it, the bed at the back, and an old husband and wife, crippled with rheumatism, sitting opposite each other on a day of pouring rain, s.h.i.+vering in the damp and the draughts.
Then, driving these out--the face of Colonel Barton with its blunt, stupid kindliness, and that whole group at Duddon, welcoming the new man, believing in him, ready to help him, with the instinctive trust of honest folk.
And last, but flas.h.i.+ng through all the rest, Lydia's eyes--the light in them--and the tones of her voice--”You'll do it!--you'll do it!--you'll set it all right!”
He perfectly realized at that moment--before the brain had begun to refine on the situation--what was asked of him. He was to be Melrose's tool and accomplice in all that Melrose's tyrannical caprice chose to do with the lives of human beings; he was to forfeit the respect of good men; he was to make an enemy of Harry Tatham; and he was to hurt--and possibly alienate--Lydia.