Part 25 (1/2)
Nothing but the great strait they were in could ever have driven her to consent that Mr. Ascott should be applied to at all; but since it must be done, she felt that she had better do it herself. Was it from some lurking doubt or dread that Ascott might not speak the entire truth, as she had insisted upon its being spoken, before Mr. Ascott was asked for any thing? since whatever he gave must be given with a full knowledge on his part of the whole pitiable state of affairs.
It was with a strange, sad feeling--the sadder because he never seemed to suspect it, but talked and laughed with her as usual--that she took her nephew's arm and walked silently through the dark squares, perfectly well aware that he only asked her to go with him in order to do an unpleasant thing which he did not like to do himself, and that she only went with him in the character of watch, or supervisor, to try and save him from doing something which she herself would be ashamed should be done.
Yet he was ostensibly the head, hope, and stay of the family. Alas!
many a family has to submit to, and smile under an equally melancholy and fatal sham.
CHAPTER XVII.
Mr. Ascott was sitting half asleep in his solitary dining room, his face rosy with wine, his heart warmed also, probably from the same cause. Not that he was in the least ”tipsy”--that low-word applicable only to low people, and not men of property, who have a right to enjoy all the good things of this life. He was scarcely even ”merry,” merely ”comfortable,” in that cozy, benevolent state which middle aged or elderly gentlemen are apt to fall into after a good dinner and good wine, when they have no mental resources, and the said good dinner and good wine const.i.tutes their best notion of felicity.
Yet wealth and comfort are not things to be despised. Hilary herself was not insensible to the pleasantness of this warm, well-lit, crimson-atmosphered apartment. She as well as her neighbors liked pretty things about her, soft, harmonious colors to look at and wear, well-cooked food to eat, cheerful rooms to live in. If she could have had all these luxuries with those she loved to share them, no doubt she would have been much happier. But yet she felt to the full that solemn truth that ”a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things that he possesses;” and though hers was outwardly so dark, so full of poverty, anxiety, and pain, still she knew that inwardly it owned many things, one thing especially, which no money could buy, and without which fine houses, fine furniture, and fine clothes--indeed, all the comforts and splendors of existence, would be worse that valueless, actual torment. So as she looked around her she felt not the slightest envy of her sister Selina.
Nor of honest Peter, who rose up from his arm-chair, pulling the yellow silk handkerchief from his sleepy face, and, it must be confessed, receiving his future connections very willingly, and even kindly.
Now how was he to be told? How when she and Ascott sat over the wine and desert he had ordered for them, listening to the rich man's complaisant pomposities, were they to explain that they had come a begging, asking him, as the climax to his liberalities, to advance a few pounds in order to keep the young man whom he had for years generously and sufficiently maintained out of prison? This, smooth it over as one might, was, Hilary felt, the plain English of the matter, and as minute after minute lengthened, and nothing was said of their errand, she sat upon thorns.
But Ascott drank his wine and ate his walnuts quite composedly.
At last Hilary said, in a sort of desperation, ”Mr. Ascott, I want to speak to you.”
”With pleasure, my dear young lady. Will you come to my study?--I have a most elegantly furnished study, I a.s.sure you. And any affair of yours--”
”Thank you, but it is not mine; it concerns my nephew here.”
And then she braced up all her courage, and while Ascott busied himself over his walnuts--he had the grace to look excessively uncomfortable--she told, as briefly as possible, the bitter truth.
Mr. Ascott listened, apparently without surprise, and any how, without comment. His self-important loquacity ceased, and his condescending smile pa.s.sed into a sharp, reticent, business look. He knitted his s.h.a.ggy brows, contracted that coa.r.s.ely-hung, but resolute mouth, in which lay the secret of his success in life, b.u.t.toned up his coat, and stuck his hands behind him over his coat-tails. As he stood there on his own hearth, with all his comfortable splendors about him--a man who had made his own money, hardly and honestly, who from the days when he was a poor errand-lad had had no one to trust to but himself, yet had managed always to help himself, ay, and others too--Hilary's stern sense of justice contrasted him with the graceful young man who sat opposite to him, so much his inferior, and so much his debtor. She owned that Peter Ascott had a right to look both contemptuously and displeased.
”A very pretty story, but I almost expected it,” said he.
And there he stopped. In his business capacity he was too acute a man to be a man of many words, and his feelings, if they existed, were kept to himself.
”It all comes to this, young man,” he continued, after an uncomfortable pause, in which Hilary could have counted every beat of her heart, and even Ascott played with his wine gla.s.s in a nervous kind of way--”you want money, and you think I'm sure to give it, because it wouldn't be pleasant just now to have discreditable stories going about concerning the future Mrs. Ascott's relatives.
You're quite right, it wouldn't. But I'm too old a bird to be caught with chaff for all that. You must rise very early in the morning to take me in.”
Hilary started up in an agony of shame. ”That's not fair, Mr. Ascott.
We do not take you in. Have we not told you the whole truth? I was determined you should know it before we asked you for one farthing of your money. If there were the smallest shadow of a chance for Ascott in any other way, we never would have come to you at all. It is a horrible, horrible humiliation!”
It might be that Peter Ascott had a soft place in his heart, or that this time, just before his marriage, was the one crisis which sometimes occurs in a hard man's life, when, if the right touch comes, he becomes malleable ever after; but he looked kindly at the poor girl, and said, in quite a gentle way, ”Don't vex yourself, my dear. I shall give the young fellow what he wants: n.o.body ever called Peter Ascott stingy. But he has cost me enough already: he must s.h.i.+ft for himself now. Hand me over that check-book, Ascott; but remember this is the last you'll ever see of my money.”
He wrote the memorandum of the check inside the page, then tore off the check itself, and proceeded to write the words ”Twenty pounds,”
date it, and sign it, lingering over the signature, as if he had a certain pride in the honest name ”Peter Ascott,” and was well aware of its monetary value on Change and elsewhere.
”There, Miss Halary, I flatter myself that's not a bad signature, nor would be easily forged. One can not be too careful over-- What's that? a letter, John?”
By his extreme eagerness, almost s.n.a.t.c.hing it from his footman's hands, it was one of importance. He made some sort of rough apology, drew the writing materials to him, wrote one or two business-looking letters, and made out one or two more checks.
”Here's yours Ascott; take it, and let me have done with it,” said he, throwing it across the table folded up. ”Can't waste time on such small transactions. Ma'am, excuse me, but five thousand pounds depends on my getting these letters written and sent off within a quarter of an hour.”