Part 50 (1/2)
How is it that you are become so formal all on a sudden, leaving cards, instead of awaiting our return? Fie for shame! If you had seen the faces of disappointment that I did when the horrid little bits of pasteboard were displayed to our view, you would not have borne malice against me so long; for it is really punis.h.i.+ng others as well as my naughty self. If you will come to-morrow--as early as you like--and lunch with us, I'll own I was cross, and acknowledge myself a penitent.--Yours ever,
HYACINTH C. K. GIBSON.
There was no resisting this, even if there had not been strong inclination to back up the pretty words. Roger went, and Mrs. Gibson caressed and petted him in her sweetest, silkiest manner. Cynthia looked lovelier than ever to him for the slight restriction that had been laid for a time on their intercourse. She might be gay and sparkling with Osborne; with Roger she was soft and grave.
Instinctively she knew her men. She saw that Osborne was only interested in her because of her position in a family with whom he was intimate; that his friends.h.i.+p was without the least touch of sentiment; and that his admiration was only the warm criticism of an artist for unusual beauty. But she felt how different Roger's relation to her was. To him she was _the_ one, alone, peerless. If his love was prohibited, it would be long years before he could sink down into tepid friends.h.i.+p; and to him her personal loveliness was only one of the many charms that made him tremble into pa.s.sion.
Cynthia was not capable of returning such feelings; she had had too little true love in her life, and perhaps too much admiration to do so; but she appreciated this honest ardour, this loyal wors.h.i.+p that was new to her experience. Such appreciation, and such respect for his true and affectionate nature, gave a serious tenderness to her manner to Roger, which allured him with a fresh and separate grace.
Molly sate by, and wondered how it would all end, or, rather, how soon it would all end, for she thought that no girl could resist such reverent pa.s.sion; and on Roger's side there could be no doubt--alas!
there could be no doubt. An older spectator might have looked far ahead, and thought of the question of pounds, s.h.i.+llings, and pence.
Where was the necessary income for a marriage to come from? Roger had his Fellows.h.i.+p now, it is true; but the income of that would be lost if he married; he had no profession, and the life interest of the two or three thousand pounds that he inherited from his mother, belonged to his father. This older spectator might have been a little surprised at the _empress.e.m.e.nt_ of Mrs. Gibson's manner to a younger son, always supposing this said spectator to have read to the depths of her worldly heart. Never had she tried to be more agreeable to Osborne; and though her attempt was a great failure when practised upon Roger, and he did not know what to say in reply to the delicate flatteries which he felt to be insincere, he saw that she intended him to consider himself henceforward free of the house; and he was too glad to avail himself of this privilege to examine over-closely into what might be her motives for her change of manner. He shut his eyes, and chose to believe that she was now desirous of making up for her little burst of temper on his previous visit.
The result of Osborne's conference with the two doctors had been certain prescriptions which appeared to have done him much good, and which would in all probability have done him yet more, could he have been free of the recollection of the little patient wife in her solitude near Winchester. He went to her whenever he could; and, thanks to Roger, money was far more plentiful with him now than it had been. But he still shrank, and perhaps even more and more, from telling his father of his marriage. Some bodily instinct made him dread all agitation inexpressibly. If he had not had this money from Roger, he might have been compelled to tell his father all, and to ask for the necessary funds to provide for the wife and the coming child. But with enough in hand, and a secret, though remorseful, conviction that as long as Roger had a penny his brother was sure to have half of it, made him more reluctant than ever to irritate his father by a revelation of his secret. ”Not just yet, not just at present,” he kept saying both to Roger and to himself. ”By-and-by, if we have a boy, I will call it Roger”--and then visions of poetical and romantic reconciliations brought about between father and son, through the medium of a child, the offspring of a forbidden marriage, became still more vividly possible to him, and at any rate it was a staving-off of an unpleasant thing. He atoned to himself for taking so much of Roger's Fellows.h.i.+p money by reflecting that, if Roger married, he would lose this source of revenue; yet Osborne was throwing no impediment in the way of this event, rather forwarding it by promoting every possible means of his brother's seeing the lady of his love. Osborne ended his reflections by convincing himself of his own generosity.
CHAPTER x.x.x.
OLD WAYS AND NEW WAYS.
[Ill.u.s.tration (unt.i.tled)]
Mr. Preston was now installed in his new house at Hollingford; Mr.
Sheepshanks having entered into dignified idleness at the house of his married daughter, who lived in the county town. His successor had plunged with energy into all manner of improvements; and among others, he fell to draining a piece of outlying waste and unreclaimed land of Lord c.u.mnor's, which was close to Squire Hamley's property--that very piece for which he had had the Government grant, but which now lay neglected, and only half drained, with stacks of mossy tiles, and lines of upturned furrows telling of abortive plans.
It was not often that the Squire rode in this direction now-a-days; but the cottage of a man who had been the squire's gamekeeper in those more prosperous days when the Hamleys could afford to ”preserve,” was close to the rush-grown ground. This old servant and tenant was ill, and had sent a message up to the Hall, asking to see the Squire: not to reveal any secret, or to say anything particular, but only from the feudal loyalty, which made it seem to the dying man as if it would be a comfort to shake the hand, and look once more into the eyes of the lord and master whom he had served, and whose ancestors his own forbears had served for so many generations. And the Squire was as fully alive as old Silas to the claims of the tie that existed between them. Though he hated the thought, and still more, should hate the sight of the piece of land, on the side of which Silas's cottage stood, the Squire ordered his horse, and rode off within half-an-hour of receiving the message. As he drew near the spot he thought he heard the sound of tools, and the hum of many voices, just as he used to hear them a year or two before. He listened with surprise. Yes! Instead of the still solitude he had expected, there was the clink of iron, the heavy gradual thud of the fall of barrows-ful of soil--the cry and shout of labourers. But not on his land--better worth expense and trouble by far than the reedy clay common on which the men were, in fact, employed. He knew it was Lord c.u.mnor's property; and he knew Lord c.u.mnor and his family had gone up in the world (”the Whig rascals!”), both in wealth and in station, as the Hamleys had gone down. But all the same--in spite of long known facts, and in spite of reason--the Squire's ready anger rose high at the sight of his neighbour doing what he had been unable to do, and he a Whig, and his family only in the county since Queen Anne's time. He went so far as to wonder whether they might not--the labourers he meant--avail themselves of his tiles, lying so conveniently close to hand. All these thoughts, regrets, and wonders were in his mind as he rode up to the cottage he was bound to, and gave his horse in charge to a little lad, who had hitherto found his morning's business and amus.e.m.e.nt in playing at ”houses” with a still younger sister, with some of the Squire's neglected tiles. But he was old Silas's grandson, and he might have battered the rude red earthenware to pieces--a whole stack--one by one, and the Squire would have said little or nothing. It was only that he would not spare one to a labourer of Lord c.u.mnor's. No! not one.
Old Silas lay in a sort of closet, opening out of the family living-room. The small window that gave it light looked right on to the ”moor,” as it was called; and by day the check curtain was drawn aside so that he might watch the progress of the labour. Everything about the old man was clean, if coa.r.s.e; and, with Death, the leveller, so close at hand, it was the labourer who made the first advances, and put out his h.o.r.n.y hand to the Squire.
”I thought you'd come, Squire. Your father came for to see my father as he lay a-dying.”
”Come, come, my man!” said the Squire, easily affected, as he always was. ”Don't talk of dying, we shall soon have you out, never fear.
They've sent you up some soup from the Hall, as I bade 'em, haven't they?”
”Ay, ay, I've had all as I could want for to eat and to drink. The young squire and Master Roger was here yesterday.”
”Yes, I know.”
”But I'm a deal nearer Heaven to-day, I am. I should like you to look after th' covers in th' West Spinney, Squire; them gorse, you know, where th' old fox had her hole--her as give 'em so many a run. You'll mind it, Squire, though you was but a lad. I could laugh to think on her tricks yet.” And, with a weak attempt at a laugh, he got himself into a violent fit of coughing, which alarmed the squire, who thought he would never get his breath again. His daughter-in-law came in at the sound, and told the Squire that he had these coughing-bouts very frequently, and that she thought he would go off in one of them before long. This opinion of hers was spoken simply out before the old man, who now lay gasping and exhausted upon his pillow. Poor people acknowledge the inevitableness and the approach of death in a much more straightforward manner than is customary among more educated folk. The Squire was shocked at her hard-heartedness, as he considered it; but the old man himself had received much tender kindness from his daughter-in-law; and what she had just said was no more news to him than the fact that the sun would rise to-morrow. He was more anxious to go on with his story.
”Them navvies--I call 'em navvies because some on 'em is strangers, though some on 'em is th' men as was turned off your own works, squire, when there came orders to stop 'em last fall--they're a-pulling up gorse and brush to light their fire for warming up their messes. It's a long way off to their homes, and they mostly dine here; and there'll be nothing of a cover left, if you don't see after 'em. I thought I should like to tell ye afore I died. Parson's been here; but I did na tell him. He's all for the earl's folk, and he'd not ha' heeded. It's the earl as put him into his church, I reckon, for he said what a fine thing it were for to see so much employment a-given to the poor, and he never said nought o' th' sort when your works were agait, Squire.”
This long speech had been interrupted by many a cough and gasp for breath; and having delivered himself of what was on his mind, he turned his face to the wall, and appeared to be going to sleep.
Presently he roused himself with a start:--
”I know I flogged him well, I did. But he were after pheasants' eggs, and I didn't know he were an orphan. Lord, forgive me!”
”He's thinking on David Morton, the cripple, as used to go about trapping vermin,” whispered the woman.
”Why, he died long ago--twenty year, I should think,” replied the Squire.