Borderland

As the young men rode homewards, Michael again expressed his pleasure at Gilbert’s visit to Balder Hall. Gilbert, for his part, was meditative and rather silent during the first part of their ride, but was presently roused into animation by a remark of Michael’s. Some days before, Gilbert had been expounding to Michael, as he was now and then in the habit of doing, just so much as he thought fit for him to know of his financial arrangements and schemes for the future. He had informed his brother that the estate was being very gradually retrieved, that he, Gilbert, began to see daylight—a first glimmer, through the obscurity. All his plans, he said, were working well, except one, which, if he could only accomplish it, would give an impetus to everything else, and shorten his work by years; and that one was, of course, the sale or letting of the Townend factories. He could not sell them: he could not find any capitalist to work them.

Gilbert had been very much in earnest when he spoke—in his way of being in earnest, that is, not vehemently, but gently. He spoke of the mills, even of the trouble they gave him, with respect—a respect which he would have accorded to no other topic or kind of topic under the sun. Consequently, it had jarred on his mood when Michael, lightly flicking his boot with his riding-whip (for he had looked in at the Red Gables on his way from his daily round), and glancing round the room as he spoke with an absent look, asked—

‘Then, have we no capital now?’

Gilbert looked at him, almost sharply at first, and then with a patient expression, like that of a conscientious teacher trying to instil some branch of knowledge into a peculiarly dense pupil.

‘Not a quarter enough to set the mills agoing,’ he said. ‘And if we had, it is too risky a venture for capital like ours, that has been snatched, as it were, out of the gulf it had been flung into.’

‘But if it is too risky for our capital, surely it is too risky for that of a stranger.’

‘That does not follow at all, as any business man could tell you. It does not follow that because it would be risky for our capital, it would also be the same for that of a stranger; it would entirely depend upon who the stranger might be, and what the extent of his possessions.’

To this Michael had made very little reply. Gilbert imagined that he had forgotten it, but was undeceived as they now rode together in the winter moonlight. It was yet early, but dark, save for the clear, frosty-looking crescent in the sky.

‘I met Sir Thomas Winthrop this afternoon,’ observed Michael. ‘We rode together for a little while, and we were talking about those factories. Sir Thomas says he wonders my father does not pull them both down. The land would sell fast enough, without them, for building, and they are in want of cottages down there.’

There was a slight pause. Then—

‘I daresay Sir Thomas Winthrop does wonder,’ said Gilbert, going perfectly white with anger. ‘He would give the world to buy the plot himself and build cottages on it for his farm-labourers and people. Does he think I am a fool?’

‘He never mentioned your name at all. It was my father of whom he was speaking, to whom the property belongs,’ said Michael, a shade of reserve in his tone, for it was quite true, and had struck even him more than once, that Gilbert had a way of speaking of their estate as though it were not only managed, but owned, by himself. Michael trusted and believed in him implicitly, but was not prepared to be so sharply taken up.

‘He is a meddlesome old imbecile, and I would thank him to mind his own business,’ said Gilbert, who had somewhat recovered his composure. ‘Michael, do you trust me, or do you not?’

As he spoke, he almost pulled up, and looked his brother full in the face. Gilbert’s countenance, at this period, was an older countenance than that of Michael. His brow had already got the first coating, as it were, of the network of little fine wrinkles which afterwards completely covered it.

‘Trust you? why, of course,’ said Michael, almost impatiently.

‘Then, hearken to a word of advice. Do not let Sir Thomas Winthrop, or Sir Thomas anybody, even speak to you of our affairs. I know what I am about when I say so. Do you think I’d discuss with any outsider the way you treat a patient? I should know that you knew a hundred times more about such things than I did, even if I might not suppose you infallible. And if you trust me to be doing the best for us all, you must not discuss what I am doing or not doing, with any mortal soul.’

‘I tell you I was not discussing it,’ said Michael, his dark brows drawing together. ‘Sir Thomas began. I met him as I was riding from——’

‘Sir Thomas be d—d!’ said Gilbert, so heartily, and with such intense emphasis, that Michael stared at him. This anger, passion, and violent language, belonged to a phase in his brother’s character of which he had scarcely suspected the existence. This sudden display might have put a suspicious man on the alert, but Michael Langstroth was not suspicious; and, moreover, he was one of those who, while they can fight the world well enough, can oppose an iron front to their enemies, and treat their detractors with careless scorn, are very tender, very weak, very sensitive where their friends and those they love are concerned. He saw only that Gilbert was vexed, and felt only that he was sorry to have been the one to vex him. So to change the subject, he said—

‘Well, I should be glad enough to see the factories working again; but I must say I wish I had a couple of thousands to start with. I would be married to-morrow.’

Gilbert, who had other views for his thousands than, to use his own phrase, ‘to give them to Magdalen Wynter to buy furniture with,’ felt in his secret soul that love must make any man small; that it might make even a generous man selfish.

‘What interest could you pay?’ he asked.

Michael shrugged his shoulders, knowing no reply to that question; and Gilbert, in the tone of a tutor, who is master of his subject, haranguing a pupil who does not know its A B C, went on: ‘You are my brother, and, of course, I would like to help you first, if I could; but we cannot afford it, Michael. We must wait. It is our only course. Marriage must wait, and prosperity must wait. To hand you out a couple of thousands now, would mean to throw our affairs back for years; and as for my father and me——’

‘Oh, of course, I was joking,’ said Michael carelessly. ‘I know there is no royal road to that kind of thing, but only hard work, and plenty of it.’

He spoke as if he considered the subject at an end, and they rode the rest of the way in silence. Gilbert’s mind was busy, and his indignation active in that he had such a mean-minded brother.

‘I verily believe he would accept the situation of overseer to the parish pump, if it should give him fifty pounds a year, and bring him any nearer being married to that doll,’ he thought; and this sarcasm was, as it were, the froth or scum thrown to the surface by an anger, a fear, and an emotion which was at that time the deepest thing he could feel, and of which it was no more the adequate measure than a yard-stick would be adequate for measuring an ocean. And afterwards, when this first ebullition of feeling was over, he fell to brooding over the matter in a way which was inevitable from his nature and temperament, as well as from his upbringing, and the lines in which his life had been cast.

‘What will become of my work,’ he asked himself, as he often had asked himself lately, ‘if my father were to die, as he might, any day? If he were to die, and everything were to be divided! All that I have scraped together with such toil, for so many years. One half of it as good as flung into the gutter. Where would my wages be then? Michael is not fit to have control over money which has been earned by some one else. He does not understand the subject, and never will. He would take his share, marry that girl—if she would have him—and leave me with my life to begin over again. As for the factories, if he is fool enough to listen to Sir Thomas Winthrop, and repeat what he says, as if it were something worth thinking about—why, if he can do that, he is capable of following out Sir Thomas’s ideas too. It is enough to disgust any man, and discourage him from anything like real work,’ Gilbert went on to himself, ‘to think he has so precarious a hold as I have upon things which would not be existing now, but for his devotion. One ought to have some more secure prospect, if only to give one a little heart in one’s exertions.’

Long after they had parted and gone their separate ways, Gilbert was silent, revolving this problem in his mind; and the more he thought about it, the bigger and uglier it grew.

‘Michael cares for nothing but to gratify his own wishes and impulses,’ Gilbert thought, darkly, feeling that this tendency of Michael’s interfered disagreeably with certain plans and projects of his own, which he did not recognise as proceeding from the same source.

After that, the conversations between them on such matters grew ever rarer and less expansive. Michael did not dwell on the matter, and, if he had thought about it, would have been too proud to allude to it after Gilbert had asked him whether he trusted him; and something, whether pride or another feeling, hindered Gilbert from opening out. Every day he grew more sedate, and his brow became grayer and more covered with its network of little fine wrinkles.