CHAPTER VII.
UNCLE HENRY.
MR. HENRY JOSCELYN came down stairs at nine o’clock to breakfast as he always did. No clock was ever more regular. He was not like the present family of Joscelyns. He had taken after his mother, who was the grandmother of Ralph Joscelyn of the White House. The family had been one of greater pretensions and more gentility in his day. The heir at that time was educated in Oxford, and the Joscelyns still belonged, though gradually falling away from it, to the higher level, and counted themselves county people. Henry had been sent off early to business; but he had never lost the sentiment which so often remains to an “old family” when more substantial possessions are gone. In the case of the present representative of the name this sentiment was mere pride with a bitter edge to it, and resentful sense of downfall; but with Mr. Henry Joscelyn it was a real consciousness of superiority to the common persons round him. Noblesse oblige: perhaps he did not understand these words in their highest sense. The noblesse was small. And the behaviour it exacted was not of a princely or magnanimous character; but still there were many things which, being a Joscelyn, he felt it incumbent upon him both to do and not to do. He would not allow himself to drop. He looked with indignation and contempt at the rudeness and roughness of his nephew’s house. Even what was best in it was, he felt, beneath him. He had never married at all, not feeling able to aspire to the only kind of wife he ever could have been content with; but to marry a parson’s daughter was an expedient Henry Joscelyn would have scorned. It would have better befitted the reigning head of so good and old a race to have followed the example of King Cophetua—a beautiful beggar-maid is a possibility always, but an insipid parson’s daughter! Mr. Henry Joscelyn had not cut his nephew—that would have been impossible too; but he looked upon him with a fierce contempt; and though he allowed Mrs. Joscelyn to be “a worthy person,” and probably quite good enough, nay, even too good, for Ralph Joscelyn as he was, still Mr. Henry could not meet her on grounds of equality—notwithstanding the fact that there was a baronet in her family, which at first had staggered him. It did not seem to him that these high claims of his were at all injured by the fact that he himself had been engaged in, and had made all his money by, trade. “I was a younger son,” he would say, with a gentle shrug of his shoulders, and his godson Harry was also a younger son. Mr. Henry believed that there was a certain amount of self-sacrifice necessary in a family. If it was a right and good thing to keep it up, then it was quite right that the younger children should have their part in sustaining its honour. Its importance, its prestige, belonged to them as well as to the heir, and it was their interest as well as their duty to make an exertion and keep it up.
His own exertions had not succeeded badly; he had been able to come back to his own county, while he was still not an old man, and to settle himself according to his pleasure. Now Mr. Henry’s opinion was that you could not live absolutely in the country unless you had “a place” in the country, and all the consequence that brings. His notions, it will be seen, were a great deal higher than his real position; he thought of the Joscelyns as if they had been a ducal house. And without “a place” he considered a country life impossible. He did not choose to live in a small house in the shadow of a great one. Had the White House really been a great ducal establishment he might have done so; but as he could not so much as look at the White House without a sense of its discrepancy with the pretensions of the family, and unlikeness to everything that the mansion of the Joscelyns ought to be; and as the society there, when there was any society, was distinctly below, not above, his own level, he did not hesitate a moment as to his place of abode. He bought a house in Wyburgh, the county town; a modest house—but he did not want very much—where he was served most comfortably and carefully by Mrs. Eadie, the most excellent of managers, with the assistance of one small aid, and compensated himself for the smallness of his establishment within doors by keeping a groom and a couple of horses, which were his personal luxuries. No horses in the country were more carefully groomed, and no groom presented a more neat and spruce appearance; and Mr. Henry still rode across country, though not with the daring which once sat so oddly on his prim little person. For he was little and light-coloured, exactly the reverse of the Joscelyns, like his mother, the small pale woman, whose over-masterfulness and tyrannical control of her sons, was said to have turned her grandson, the present man, and his father before him, to evil courses. She had wanted to make them good, to perfect their characters, whether they would or not; and the strong restraint she had exercised had made the re-action all the more vehement. So people said: except in the case of Henry, who took after his mother in every way, and had all her intolerance of useless people and indolent minds. He lived a life which was very satisfactory to himself in his little house in Wyburgh. He had besides a little bit of land in his native parish with an old house upon it, uninhabitable, but yet a creditable sort of possession in a corner of which Isaac Oliver—who was, in a very lowly manner his bailiff—lived with his family. Mr. Henry was a much respected member of the county club which had its seat in Wyburgh, and to which his nephew of the White House might have sought admittance in vain. The duke himself treated old Henry, as he was called, with the utmost condescension. His position was never contended or doubted. He was as good a gentleman as the king. He knew more about the county than anyone else did, and called cousins remotely with many of the great people, who were most courteously ready to allow the kindred so far as Mr. Henry Joscelyn went; and he was an active magistrate, and took a certain interest in the town itself, where most people believed in him, and wondered how the Joscelyns could have gone off so completely since Mr. Henry’s time—which was like the period before the deluge to the young people. And Mr. Henry was a man of the most regular habits. It might have been known what hour it was, had the town clock stopped in Wyburgh, by his appearance at the window, after he had breakfasted, with the newspaper in his hand, by the sound of his step as he went to the Club regular as the sun himself, and by his return to his dinner. These were the three departures, so to speak, of his day. In the evening he dined out sometimes, at the Rectory, at Dr. Peregrine’s, or with Mr. Despond, the solicitor: and now and then with some of the greater people about, where he drove in his own little brougham, which he kept expressly for such occasions. At other times one or two old inhabitants of the better class would drop in in the evening to make up his rubber. He looked very well after his money, and gave his neighbours excellent advice about their investments; and a more admirable member of society, a more respected townsman, could not be.
It may be supposed that to such a man, with such a life, the existence of a schoolboy under his roof had not been an unmixed pleasure. Still Mr. Henry Joscelyn was not a man to fail in his duties when they were pointed out to him. Though nobody but Mrs. Joscelyn guessed it, it was to the housekeeper that his family were indebted for Harry’s preferment. Mrs. Eadie was just then greatly in want of somebody to be kind to. Her master, though he required the most scrupulous attention, did not come within this category, and the good woman had long sighed for a bairn in the house. When Harry was in the house he did not see much of his uncle—their hours (thank heaven! Mr. Henry said, devoutly), being quite incompatible. The boy was off to school in the morning, long before Mr. Henry was up. He had his dinner in the middle of the day, when Mr. Henry was engaged in magisterial or county business, or in the Club. So they got on very well, and the old man was actually sorry when the boy set out in his turn for Liverpool to get an insight into “the business” in which his uncle had grown moderately rich; but this did not affect his methodical life, which flowed on just as before. Mr. Henry was growing old; even he himself acknowledged this, with cheerful readiness to other people, with a little impatience to himself. He spoke of his age with great equanimity in society when the subject was mooted, but he did not think of it when he could help it, nor did he like the thought. High and dry above all mortal loss and gain, quite safe from the agitations of life, very comfortable in all its circumstances, having succeeded in working out just the perfection of detail, the harmony of movement that satisfied him, it was a vexing and unpleasant reflection that this life was to be disturbed, broken in upon, brought to a conclusion by illness and death. Sometimes the thought made him almost angry. Why? He was not, to be sure, so strong as he once was, but he was strong enough for all reasonable purposes, as strong as he required to be; and he had all his wits about him. Never had he been more clear-headed; and every sort of inclination to do things that were not good for him, whether in the way of eating or drinking, or other practices of a more strictly moral or immoral character had died out of his mind. He knew how to take care of himself exactly, and he did take the greatest care of himself. Why should he die? It was an idea that annoyed him. It seemed so unnecessary: he was not weary of life, nor had he the least desire to give it up. In such circumstances there had been a lurking feeling in his mind that Providence should know how to discriminate. But there was no telling how long Providence might choose to discriminate: and this recollection was about the only disturbing influence in a life so comfortable and well proportioned, and altogether satisfactory, that there seemed no reason whatever that it should ever come to an end.
“Mr. Harry here? How did he get here at such an hour in the morning? Why, he must have started in the middle of the night.”
“I make no doubt of that,” said the housekeeper. She had brought up a second kidney, piping hot, and tender as a baby, upon a piece of toast, so crisp yet so melting, so brown and savoury, so penetrated by generous juices that it was in itself a luxury; “and for that and other things I have made him lie down upon his bed. He’s not been in a bed this night, that’s clear to see; he’s sleeping like a babe in a cradle; it does the heart good to see him.”
“I don’t think it would do my heart good,” said Mr. Henry, “the young fellow must have been up to some mischief. Did he give you any idea of what was the matter? or is it mere nonsense, perhaps a bet, or a brag, or something of that sort?”
“Mere nonsense—nay, nay, Sir, it’s not that. He’s got a look on his face—a look I have seen on your own face, Sir, when you are put out.”
“I’ve told you a hundred times, Mrs. Eadie, there is not the slightest resemblance between Mr. Harry and me.”
“And how are you to tell that, Sir, that canna see the two together? You are far more clever than me in most things; but my eyesight I must trust to.” Mrs. Eadie made a little curtsey when she opposed her master. She had a conviction that it gave him a secret pleasure, though he would never confess it, to hear that Harry was like him; and perhaps she was right.
“Have your own way,” he said; “but that makes no difference to the question. What’s wrong? has he said nothing to you? You used to be great friends.”
“I’m his true friend; and stiddy well-wisher, as much good as I could do him; and Mr. Harry has always been very kind,” said the housekeeper, putting her master’s sentiment in her own softest words; “but he has said nothing to me. I did not look for it. He would not, being one of the proud Joscelyns, saving your presence, Sir, take a servant into his confidence. Though he’s aye been very kind.”
“We are proud, are we?” said her master, with a half smile; “well, perhaps that is a fault of the Joscelyns, Mrs. Eadie. You can send him to me when he wakes. Of course now that he is here I must listen to what he has to say.”
But Mr. Henry sighed. He ate that delicious kidney with an internal sense of annoyance which took half the savour out of it. He said to himself that it was always the case: when he came down in the morning with any unusual sentiment of comfort and well-being, something always happened to put him out. As sure as that light-heartedness came, something would follow to pull him down, something would go wrong in the Club, or his conduct in some petty session case would be aspersed in the “Wyburgh Gazette,” or some old friend of his boyhood would send him a begging letter, or—still more annoying, something about the White House family would interfere with his digestion. “I might have known,” he said to himself. He had got up at peace with all men; with absolutely no care which he could think of when he woke and swept the mental horizon for causes of inconvenience, as it is one of the privileges of humanity to do—absolutely nothing to bring him any vexation or annoyance. He had believed that he was going to have a comfortable day. A little uneasiness which he had felt in his foot (he did not say, even to himself, in his toe), had gone off; a stiffness which he had been conscious of had disappeared; the wind had changed, going round to the southward, and the morning was quite warm for the time of the year. He had not been buffeted about by the night wind, as Harry had, and at six in the morning, when poor Harry was so cold, he had been as warm as he could desire in bed. When he came down stairs the fire was just as he liked it, the newspaper with the chill taken off it, neatly cut, and folded, and a letter from the Duke, with a seal as big as a penny, was lying by his plate. It was an invitation, and Mr. Henry was much pleased. Never had a day begun more auspiciously. He had sat down, opened his napkin, poured out for himself an aromatic cup of coffee, laid the newspaper before him conveniently, so as to be able to glance his eye over the news, while he addressed himself to the more solid part of the meal. And it was while he was thus beginning the day, in peace with himself and all about him, that “the woman,” as he called his housekeeper when anything went wrong, appeared with that kidney, and the cloud which was to overshadow the whole day. Of course it must be something wrong. Why could not the woman have recommended that boy to go back again, and make it up with his father, and not bother another person with his troubles? Had not every man troubles enough of his own? But he had been too comfortable. It was just as it always happened—whenever he felt particularly at his ease, something, some annoyance or other, was certain to come. He sighed impatiently as Mrs. Eadie withdrew. But then he felt it to be his duty to himself to put all anxiety out of his thoughts, and to address himself seriously, if not with such a sensation of comfort, to his breakfast; it would do no good to himself or anyone if he put his digestion out of order for the rest of the day.
He had finished his breakfast and read his paper, and done some trifling businesses such as were of importance in his easy life, before Harry appeared. When a man or woman lives at perfect ease, with nothing to do, there are always some solemnities of supposed duty which they go through for their own comfort, to give a semblance of serious occupation to their day. With some people it is their correspondence, with others the rain-gauge and the thermometer, which they register with as grave a countenance as if the comfort of the country depended upon it. Mr. Henry’s duty was the Club. He was looking over the accounts of the last half year with serious devotion. He spread this over a long time, doing a little every day, comparing all the items with their respective vouchers, and with the expenditure of the previous half year. All had been perfectly satisfactory till this morning; but to-day he discovered that the sale of the waste-paper was not entered in the previous month, which made a difference of some seven shillings and sixpence, or thereabouts, in the half year’s accounts, a difference such as ought not to have occurred. He could scarcely help feeling that this would not have happened had it not been for the very inopportune arrival of Harry, and introduction of the troubles of a family, things he had systematically kept clear of, into his comfortable and self-sufficing life.
He had just made this discovery—which obliged him to refer to the expenditure in the corresponding quarters of last year, and several years before, and make close investigation into what had then become of the waste-paper, and who had bought it, and what price it had brought; and had made a careful note in his pocket-book of various questions to be put to the butler at the Club, who had the practical management of affairs—when the door opened and Harry appeared. Mr. Joscelyn looked up and made an instant mental estimate of his nephew, whom he had not seen for some time, on not very just grounds. Harry had been immensely refreshed and restored by his breakfast, and the consciousness of having a roof over his head, and a legitimate right to be here; but his sleep perhaps had not done him so much good. At five-and-twenty a man can do without a night’s rest with no very great inconvenience; but to have a snatch of insufficient sleep is of little advantage to him. It had made his eyes red, and given him an inclination to yawn, and confused his head. He had the look of a man who has been sleeping illegitimately, sleeping in daytime when other men are awake; and he was unshaven, and he had on a shirt of his uncle’s, which was too tight at the throat, and otherwise of a fashion not adapted to a young man. His dusty coat had been brushed, and he was not really travel-soiled or slovenly, much the reverse indeed, for his appearance had been the cause of much more searchings of the heart both to himself and kind Mrs. Eadie than was at all usual in respect to Harry’s simple toilette; but that air of suppressed fatigue and premature awakening, and altogether wrong-sidedness, was strong upon him. And he was deeply conscious of it. He knew exactly how he looked, with his eyes rather red, and that blueness on his chin, and Uncle Henry’s collar cutting his throat; and a great many doubts as to his reception by Uncle Henry—doubts which had not entered his mind before, arose within him in that first moment when, opening the door, he met the startled eyes of Mr. Joscelyn over the top of his spectacles, lifted to him with an alarmed and inquiring look. Harry saw that in a moment he was weighed in the balance and found wanting. This did not give him more ease in his manner, or a less painful sense of being on his trial.
“Good morning, Harry. I hear that you were a surprisingly early visitor this morning; but you keep early hours in the country. I hope there is nothing amiss at the White House.”
Mr. Joscelyn held out a hand, of which he was rather proud to be shaken by his grand-nephew. It was, he flattered himself, a hand that was in itself a guarantee of blue blood. Harry embraced it in the grasp of a powerful member with none of these qualities, and gave it a squeeze much more energetic than he had intended.
“There is a good deal amiss with me,” he said. Harry had been debating the point with himself for the last half-hour, whether he should fully confide in his uncle or not. He could not but feel that it would be wiser to deal lightly with the fact of his exclusion from his father’s house; but he was so angry that he could not be prudent, and the moment that he had an opportunity of speech his temper broke out.
“I was not in bed all last night,” he said; “I was on the road like a tramp, Uncle Henry. My father turned me out of the house—”
Three lines came across Mr. Henry Joscelyn’s brow—three horizontal, well-marked lines. These were two too many. When he was sympathetic a slight indentation over his eyebrows was all that appeared. The second meant doubt, the third annoyance.
“Dear me!” he said, “how did that happen? I fear you must have been doing something to displease your father.”
“Who can help displeasing my father?” cried Harry. “I am sure, Uncle Henry, you know him well enough. I had been doing nothing wrong. I had been trying to get him to interest himself in my affairs. He has never done anything for me, it is you that have done everything for me. I laid before him a chance I’ve got. I meant at any rate to come and talk it all over with you; but in the first place I thought it was as well to ask a question about my mother’s money—”
“Ah—that was not quite an ingratiating way of opening the matter, I fear,” Uncle Henry said.
“Why not?” cried Harry, forgetting all the prudential rules he had been trying to impose upon himself. “My mother was willing, and when it would have advanced my interests—and of course I should have paid as good a per-centage as anybody else. Surety if there is anything a man can have a claim upon,” he added, argumentatively, “it must be his mother’s money. I mayn’t have any right to touch the family property, as I am only a younger son, and all that—and especially as there are such a lot of us; but my mother’s money—when it is doing nothing, only lying at interest. Surely a man has a claim upon that.”
“The man that has a claim upon that is your father, I should say. I never knew a man yet that liked any questions about his wife’s money,” said Mr. Joscelyn; “whether it’s in her own power or in his, its not a nice thing to interfere with. You have your own ways of looking at things, you young fellows; but in your place I would have said nothing about that. I didn’t know your mother had any money,” he added, in an indifferent tone.
“It is only—a thousand pounds, Uncle Henry: not what you would call a fortune—”
Mr. Henry Joscelyn smiled, and waved his hand. Impossible to have waved away a trifle, a nothing, with a more complete representation of its nothingness. “Ah—that!—” he said, “I thought I never had heard anything about money. Well, I can’t flatter you that your claim on your father was made in a very judicious way. And he would not hear of it? That is easy enough to understand; but why did he turn you out of doors?”
“I can’t tell you,” cried Harry, “I can tell you no more than that. I laid it all before him. It is a good opportunity, an opportunity that may never occur again. I have been in the office for three years, long enough to be a mere clerk.”
“I have known very good men, Harry, who were clerks all their lives.”
“Yes, yes,” cried Harry, impatiently, “one knows that. There’s an excellent fellow now in our office: but I don’t suppose, Uncle Henry, that was what you intended for me.”
“Well, my boy: I intended that you should earn your living and be off the hands of your family. I am not aware that I went much further. Of course, if your own talents and industry pushed you on, one would have been very glad to hear of it; otherwise, in your circumstances, the fifth son, I should not be disposed to turn up my nose at the position of a mere clerk.”
Harry gazed at his uncle while he spoke with an impatient reluctance and protest against every word. He could scarcely bear to hear him out; he had his mouth open to reply before Uncle Henry was half done: but when the old gentleman ended his speech, Harry, with a gasp as of baffled utterance, remained silent. He did not know what reply to make, he felt the ground cut from under his feet; how was he to ask his uncle to place himself in the breach, to do what his father would not do, when this was how his representation was received? He gazed at him with a hard breath and said nothing; for the moment his very utterance was taken away.
And then there was a pause. Mr. Joscelyn sat quietly with his gold spectacles between his fingers and thumb, looking at his nephew. The lines were gone from his forehead, he was quite bland and amiable, but demonstratively indifferent, with an air of having nothing whatever to do with the question, which, to Harry, was exasperating beyond description. He kept his other hand upon the Club papers, which were his business. The young fellow who had so suddenly come down upon him in vehement wrath and offence, yet expectation, was manifestly nothing but an interruption to Uncle Henry. He was thinking of his waste-paper, not of the future prospects of any foolish young man. After a pause he spoke again.
“And when are you going back to business, Harry? I hope, now that you are here, that you will stay a day or two and renew your acquaintance with your old friends. Mrs. Eadie will make you very comfortable. I am sorry to say I am dining out both to-day and to-morrow, but if you like to have young Pilgrim, or Gus Grey, or any of your former acquaintances, my housekeeper is really equal to a very nice little dinner, as you know. I think I heard there was a dance getting up somewhere. Stay till the end of the week, if your leave lasts so long.”
“Uncle Henry,” said Harry, with an air of tragedy, which he was quite unconscious of, “you may suppose that a man who has been turned out of his father’s house, and has thrown off all connection with his native soil——”
“No, no, my boy, no, no,” said Mr. Joscelyn, with a half laugh, “not so bad as that.”
“I say,” continued Harry, with increasing solemnity, “who has parted from his family for ever, and cut off all connection with his native soil—you may suppose that he hasn’t much heart to pay visits or take up old acquaintances. What is there likely to be between me and Jack Pilgrim, who is stepping into his father’s business, and as settled as the Fells? or Gus Grey, who is kept up and set forward at the Bar, though he is not earning a penny, by relations that think all the world of him? what can there be in common, I should like to know, between them and me? I’m only the fifth son, as you say, to start with, therefore I’m of no consequence; and, by Jove!” cried Harry, striking the table with his clenched fist, “if ever I enter that house while Ralph Joscelyn’s the master of it—if ever I go back to knock at the door that was locked upon me, locked upon me in the middle of the night——”
Uncle Henry’s brow contracted when that blow came down upon his neat writing-table; it shook the inkstand, which perhaps was overfull, and spilt a drop or two of ink, which of all things in the world was the thing which annoyed him most. He mopped it up hurriedly with his blotting-paper, but his brow became dark, and his mouth drew up at the corners in a way that meant mischief.
“Pardon me,” he said, with exquisite civility, “but to spoil my table will not do your affairs any good. It is a pity that you take such a very tragical view of the matter, but in your present state of mind nothing that I could say, I fear, would be of much use. Thick! thick! I don’t think this spot is likely to come out.”
“I am dreadfully sorry, uncle——” poor Harry began.
“Sorrow, so far as I am aware, does not take out ink-spots,” said the old gentleman, testily; “perhaps you will do me the favour to ring for Eadie. If things are so very serious the less we say about them the better—heated discussions are never any good. I can only say that if you like to stay a day or two you are quite welcome, Harry. Mrs. Eadie, look here; the ink-bottle has been filled too full, perhaps you know something that will take it out.”
“Dear, dear me!” Mrs. Eadie cried, with an anxious look from the old gentleman with his crisped lips to the young fellow standing much abashed beside him, “it’s that little lass again; but I take the blame to myself; I should never have trusted it out of my hands. Dear! dear! milk will may be do it. I wouldn’t like to try benzine or salts of lemon.”
“Try what you like, but get it out,” said Mr. Joscelyn. “I’ll see you, Harry, when I come back from the Club.”
“Oh, my bonnie young gentleman!” cried Mrs. Eadie, when they were left alone, “you have said something that’s gone against him! you have turned him the wrong way!”
“I think everything is turning the wrong way,” said Harry, throwing himself into his uncle’s easy-chair. He was still so young and unaccustomed to trouble that the tears came hot to his eyes. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Eadie, I’ll be off before he comes back; I’ll go straight off to my work, there’s nobody will turn the cold shoulder upon me there.”
“No, no, Mr. Harry, no, no, my canny lad, you must not be so hasty. Besides, you know as well as I do there’s no train. It’s coming out just with blotting-paper; look! see! When he comes back he’ll have forgotten all about it, and I’ll make you up a nice little bit of something for your lunch, and you’ll ’gree again, and get his advice. He’s grand with his advice, and he’s awfu’ fond of giving it. Just you ask him for his advice, Mr. Harry, and you’ll ’gree like two birds in a nest. It’s aye how I come round the maister when he has cast out with me.”
CHAPTER VIII.
UNCLE HARRY’S ADVICE.
MR. JOSCELYN returned from the Club to lunch, which was not very usual for him. After all, at the bottom of his heart, there was a vein of kindness in him for the boy whom he had trained. After his little anger wore off, Harry’s face, so tragical in its expression, came back to his mind with a mixture of amusement and compassion. It was tragic-comic to Mr. Henry; but there was no comic element in it to the young man. He came home by no means intending to put himself in the breach, and replace for Harry’s benefit that thousand pounds of his mother’s money, which the young fellow had calculated upon; but still with an impulse of kindness. A thousand pounds! That was a pretty sort of fortune for the woman who married Joscelyn of White House. It made him laugh with angry scorn. Little insignificant woman, whose pretty face even was nothing out of the way, a kind of prettiness that faded, a sort of parson’s daughter’s gentility, not even anything that could be called beauty, or that would last. Mr. Henry Joscelyn had been absent from the district, he had not yet retired from “the world,” as he called it, when his nephew married, and he had never known before exactly how bad a match it was. Ralph was a clown to be sure, in himself worthy no better fate; but the head of the Joscelyns, Mr. Henry reflected with a bitter smile, might certainly have been worth something more than a thousand pounds. It was ridiculous, it was exasperating; he did not wonder that Ralph had been angry when his son had asked for this paltry thousand pounds. Considered as a fee for the privilege of entering the Joscelyn family, it was ridiculously inadequate—and as a fortune! He laughed aloud as he crossed the street to the Club, an angry laugh. After all it was not much wonder that Ralph had deteriorated. A wife with a faded face, no ancestors, and a thousand pounds—poor Ralph! if he had not been so insufferable his uncle would have been sorry for him. And now here was the boy asserting a claim to this enormous fortune; probably Mrs. Joscelyn herself thought it a great sum of money, enough to set up Harry in business, and do a great deal for him. Tck-tck! how mean and petty it all was, not like the old ways of the house, which were not small whatever they were. The Joscelyns in their day had gone into debt in a princely manner; and they had married money in their day; but to come to such a point that the mother’s great fortune of a thousand pounds was worth fighting about, between father and son! Tck-tck, tck-tck, what a wonderful thing it was!
Nevertheless as Harry, poor boy, had been brought up within that limited horizon, he could not help being sorry for him. It was sad for a young man. He was rather fond of the boy; so far as he did give in to the prejudice that because a boy was your grand-nephew you ought to be fond of him, Harry, it certainly was, that was the object of his affections. After all he was a Joscelyn, and, as Joscelyns went in the present generation, as good a specimen as any. This was not saying very much, but still it was something to say; for though the Joscelyns of a former generation were in every way superior, yet it was clear that it was impossible to go back to them. However much we may prefer the past we must all have, it is evident, to put up with the present. Mr. Joscelyn transacted his Club business, and went very closely into that question about the waste-paper. The waste-paper at the Club was of a very superior kind. It was chiefly made up of letters and circulars printed on fine paper, and the brouillons of replies, which even the rural magnates, who frequented the place, liked to write out once before they actually produced the autograph which was to go to their correspondents; it brought a far better price than the usual refuse of a house. But this the present major-domo had failed to grasp; he had treated these choice scraps as if they had been old newspapers. Mr. Joscelyn fully proved his mistake to the reluctant functionary, who was disposed to sneer at the whole business.
“After all, Sir, it is only five shillings difference—and I don’t mind if I paid that out of my own pocket, sooner than make a fuss;” said the flippant official. Mr. Joscelyn looked at him with eyes from which the finest London butler, much less a trifling person in the country, might have shrunk.
“My man,” he said, “the difference is seven and sixpence, and I don’t know what your pocket has to do with it. The state of your pocket is a matter of perfect indifference to the Club; but it is my business to see that our property is not wasted. I hope I shall not have to make a complaint on this subject again.” When he had said this he went home, with some little complacency to see Harry, feeling that his time had not been wasted, and that the property of the Club was not likely to be neglected in this manner again. As for Harry he had not left the house. He had resisted all Mrs. Eadie’s exhortations to send a note to his mother, telling her where he was, or even to send for his luggage, declaring that he would have nothing to do with them, that he would take nothing out of the house, nor ever return to it. And since he could not show himself in Uncle Henry’s high collars, Mrs. Eadie had gone out to the best shop there was in Wyburgh to get some linen for him, and a few necessary articles; while he himself sat in the tranquil house, the peaceful old man’s habitation, where everything was adapted for comfort, every chair an easy-chair, every passage and stair carpeted and noiseless, and the atmosphere kept up to one regular warmth by the thermometer. Harry sat in his uncle’s snuggery, half stifled by the want of air, half asleep in the drowse of warmth and comfort. He had rarely entered these rooms when he was a school-boy—in those days he had been much more at home with Eadie than with her master—and to sit there now had a strange sort of Sunday feeling, a suggestion of silent ease and contemplative leisure. He could understand Uncle Henry liking it. If you were an old man with ever so much to look back upon, it would, no doubt (he thought) be pleasant to sit in these arm-chairs for hours together, and review the past, turning everything over, and living it through once more; but at Harry’s age, with so little to look back upon, and so much to look forward to, this slumbrous calm would have been intolerable but for the strange feverish weariedness of that nuit blanche which he had spent in wandering over the dark country, and which made the present warmth and quiet at once oppressive and luxurious. He dropped asleep half-a-dozen times in the course of the morning, waking up more uncomfortable and feverish than ever, and ashamed of himself to boot. What would have done him more good would have been to go out and walk off his drowse; but then the thought of the high collar, which cut his cheek, and of all the acquaintances to whom this masquerade would have to be explained, made the idea of going out still more insupportable; while on the other hand to think that he was here under a kind of hiding, skulking indoors, not wishing to be seen, was terrible to the unsophisticated youth, who had never before known what it was to shrink from the eye of day.
All these things worked bitterly in Harry’s mind as he sat and turned them over, falling into vague feverish moments of forgetfulness, rousing up again to more angry and uncomfortable consciousness than before. Of course, he could not think of any other subject. He took up the newspaper and tried to read it, but after he had gone over a sentence or two, some scene from the last twenty-four hours would glide in over the page and obliterate everything—his father’s furious face lowering upon him, or that pale glare in the window of the house which was now shut up and closed to him for ever; or the confused darkness of the shed in which Joan (old Joan, a kind soul after all, as he said, in his boyish jargon) had tried to comfort him—or it might be merely an incident of his night’s walk, the sound of the water running below him as he stopped on the bridge, only its sound betraying it in the darkness, or the sudden graze of his hand against a wall as he made his way through the gloom, or the dogs barking, baying against him on all sides. These scenes came flashing before him one by one; and then his young cheeks would grow red and hot as he remembered how he shrank from the policeman’s lantern, and avoided the eye of the carter driving his cabbages to the market in the grey of the morning. He had done nothing to be ashamed of, and yet he had been made to feel guilty and ashamed; what greater wrong could be done to a youth in the beginning of his career?
All this went through his mind, not in any formal succession—now one scene, now another touching his sore and angry soul to sudden exasperation. That he should have to remain all the long day inactive after this convulsion which had changed his life, was an additional irritation to him. Since Uncle Henry had failed to show him any sympathy, what he would have liked would have been to rush out on the moment and post away somewhere out of reach, he did not mind where. In old days, or in primitive places, when a man could hire a horse or a carriage and set out at once, there must have been a wonderful solace in that possibility of instant action; but to wait for a train is a terrible aggravation of the impatience of an angry or anxious mind, even though the train arrives much sooner at its destination than the other could do. The long hours of daylight which must pass ere that train came up seemed to be years to him. He longed for the clang and the movement as for the only comfort that remained to him. After, he did not know what would happen. He would go back to Liverpool; he could realise the arrival there, but he did not know what would follow. Was he to accept his defeat quietly, to sit down upon his stool and continue his work, and see some one else, unfamiliar to the office, enter and pay his money, and take the place which Harry was to have had? All this made the blood mount to his cheeks again in successive waves. Could he bear it? could he put up with it? Sometimes the blood seemed to boil in his veins and swell as if they would burst; and there came upon him, as upon so many others, that wild sudden burst of longing—oh! to have wings like a dove, to fly away! It is not always an elevating or noble longing; it is the natural outcry of that sense of the intolerable which is in all unaccustomed to trouble. To escape from it is the first impulse of the undisciplined mind. Even when experience has taught us that we cannot escape from it, nature still suggests that cry, that desire. Oh to have wings like a dove! oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness! oh to turn our backs upon our pain and all its circumstances, and flee away! And the less this impulse is spiritual and visionary, the less it is restrained by that deeper knowledge so soon acquired that we can rarely escape from our troubles by any summary road, seeing that we can never escape from ourselves. Harry began to get bewildered by the rising fever in his heart of this longing to escape. Why should not he escape? cut all the bonds of which so many had already been rent asunder for him, throw family, and home (which had rejected him), and duty, and custom, and the life he knew, and the circumstances which had hitherto shaped it, all away with one effort, and emancipate himself?
He had roused a little under the influence of this suggestion when his uncle returned. Mr. Joscelyn had a compunction in his mind which made him very conciliatory to Harry. To give him what he seemed to want, to subtract so much, even if not very much, from his own possessions in order to give to Harry, was an idea which he would not contemplate. If Harry waited long enough he would get it; but in the meantime, a demand upon him was like a warning that he had lived long enough, and that his money was wanted for a new generation, which was as intolerable to Uncle Henry as young Harry’s troubles were to him. He would not take upon himself the burden of setting his grand-nephew up in life, but at the same time he felt it was a hardship that the young fellow should not have some one to set him up in life, and was conciliatory and soothing by a kind of generous instinct, an instinct not generous enough to go further. He came in in a mood which was much more agreeable to Harry than that in which he had gone out, and which raised Mrs. Eadie’s hopes high, who knew that her master did not often come back in this way, or show himself so amiable. Mr. Joscelyn told Harry all the story of the waste-paper, and gave him great insight into the workings of the Club.
“If you are faithful to your native county, as I have been, I daresay you will end by being a member of it,” he said.
“It is not very likely, Sir,” said Harry. “I don’t care if I were never to see the old place again.”
“That is nonsense,” said his uncle, promptly. “That’s a question of age entirely. At your time of life you think that all that is to be desired is to be in the world, and you don’t understand that the world is not in one place as much as another, not the grand world in London, or the business world in Liverpool, but is just your world wherever you may happen to be.”
This was above Harry, who gaped slightly, and opened his eyes with curiosity and wonder.
“You will scarcely say that this is the world like London,” he said, with that smile of youthful comment upon the mysterious obtuseness of their elders which is general to every new generation.
“But this is just what I do say, my boy; you have your little world round about you, and neither is it bigger in the noise of a big place, nor smaller in the quiet of a little one. We are capable just of so much, and that we get wherever we are.”
Harry opened his eyes a little more; but he thought it just as well to say nothing. He thought no doubt this was a kind of dotage; but resorted quickly to his own concerns, which were so much more important than any philosophy of his uncle’s.
“I don’t think,” he said, “if I were once out of it that I should want to come back.”
“Ah, well, I should probably have said the same thing at your age. One’s ideas change from twenty to seventy,” said Mr. Henry, feeling that perhaps after all it was expedient to steer clear of generalities. “Let us see what Eadie has sent us for luncheon. I don’t often eat lunch myself; when one breakfasts rather late, as I do, it is as well to reserve one’s self till dinner; but you were a great deal earlier, Harry, and besides at your age you are always hungry—blessed provision of nature.”
“I don’t think I’m always hungry; in the office one can’t indulge in much eating,” said Harry, a little resentful.
“When I was like you we used to go out to a little tavern. I daresay it’s gone now. I could show you the place—I could go there blindfold, I believe—where they made the most excellent chops. Ah! there are no such chops now. Mrs. Eadie sends us very nice cutlets, but it is not the same thing. We made our dinner of them, and when we got back to our lodgings, in my time, we had tea.”
“So most of us have now,” said Harry, “it saves a great deal of trouble; it’s a big dining place now, there’s a grill-room as big as the Market—”
Mr. Henry held up his hands in anxious deprecation.
“Don’t tell me anything about it. I know; a place like a railway-station; the very railway-station itself has been invented since my time. Your world has become a great deal busier and more hurried; but it is not so comfortable, Harry. I am fond of good cookery, but I never got anything better than those chops. As for the tea it always appeared to me about the worst thing in the shape of a meal that a depraved imagination could invent—very bad for the digestion, and neither nourishing nor nice.”
“But you can’t get your people in your lodgings to cook dinner for you,” said Harry, entering into this question with feeling, “they don’t know how—and then they won’t—they are dreadfully independent. So we have to do the best we can. And I am not like you, Uncle Henry; in your time I suppose the Joscelyns were swells? but they never were, you know, in my day. I was brought up like that.”
“The Joscelyns of my time, Harry, would never have recognized themselves in your description. They would not have known what swells meant,” said Mr. Henry, rather severely; but he did not enter into details, for indeed, though they were “swells,” the living had always been very plain at the White House.
Then there was a little pause, and Harry felt better after two or three of Mrs. Eadie’s cutlets. He said in a moment of repose,
“I am going off, Uncle Harry, by the train to-night.”
“Are you so? but what are you to do about your luggage? you can’t go without your luggage.”
“But I shall—I’ll ask nothing. I’ll take nothing out of that house.”
“This is foolish, Harry. You should rather take everything you can get; but, however, I hope I know better than to argue with an angry man—or boy. You are quite right to get back to your work.”
“It is about the only thing I have got left,” said Harry, somewhat tragically.
“And you could not have a better thing. But you will not always feel like that. If you would like it, though I don’t know that it is a very hopeful office, I would see your father, Harry.”
“Nobody need see my father on my account,” cried Harry; his lips quivered a little, but nothing save wrath was in his face; “that’s all over. For my part I shouldn’t mind if it were all over together. I hate Liverpool just as I hate Cumberland. I have a great mind to go clean off—”
“Abroad? and the very best thing you could do. Show yourself fit to keep up the credit of your employers abroad, and it’s the best stepping stone to advancement at home. I am very glad to hear you have such an enlightened notion.”
Harry was not pleased to have the ground thus cut from under his feet. To be told, when you hint at what seems a desperate resolution, that it is the best thing you can do, is exasperating. He withdrew with dignity from the field and proffered no more confidence. The cutlets gave him a safer outlet, for though he was in trouble he was hungry. It was a long time since six o’clock; he had resisted Eadie’s offers of a “snack” between, and the cutlets, though very nice, were not more than a mouthful to Harry. Mr. Joscelyn trifled with one on his plate; but he supplied his nephew with a liberal hand.
“I shan’t be here, I am afraid, to see you away. I am dining out, as I told you—it is unfortunate. But you are used to looking after yourself.”
“I would need to be,” said Harry, bitterly, and then he added, “I’ll say goodbye to you now, Uncle Henry. Very likely I’ll never see you again. I don’t know what I’m going to do, or where I may be going. You’ve always been very kind to me; a fellow does not think anything of that at the time—it seems all just a matter of course, you know. But I see now you’ve always been very kind. I shall remember it as long as I live. I said last night, he had never done anything for me, it was all Uncle Henry. So it is, though I’m not sure that I ever thought of it before.”
Mr. Joscelyn smiled, but he was touched.
“Well, well, Harry,” he said; “that was natural; but now you show a very nice feeling. And I always was glad to do what I could for you. As schoolboys go you were not at all objectionable, and though you are a little out of temper now things will come round. Put that in your pocket. It’s only a trifle; but I daresay you may want some little things, especially if you’re going abroad. That’s all. Let me hear how you are going on from time to time. I shall always be glad to hear.”
And then he began to talk of the news, and what the Duke was going to do in the prospect of a new election for the county. “If Lord Charles does not get in, it will be ridiculous—worse than wrong, absurd, considering the stake they have in the county.” But it may be supposed that, in the present crisis of his affairs, Harry Joscelyn cared very little for Lord Charles. He replied civilly to his uncle’s talk; but as a matter of fact he was very anxious to see what was in the envelope which Mr. Joscelyn had insisted he should put in his pocket. It was not likely it would be anything of an exciting character; but yet there was no telling. When, however, Uncle Henry was gone, and Harry was free to examine this envelope, it proved to contain two crisp ten pound notes—no more. He was very much disappointed at first, thinking (foolishly) that it might even be the capital he wanted—the thousand pounds to set him up. But after a while, and somewhat grudgingly, Harry allowed to himself that it was kind. Sometimes there is more pleasure to be got out of twenty pounds than out of a thousand. Uncle Henry meant it very kindly. The young man’s heart was a little softened and warmed, almost against his will, by the gift.
And when evening came, and with it the train which roars along between that deep cutting under the fells, between two high walls of living stone, to “the South” and the world, Harry, with a little portmanteau, in which Mrs. Eadie had packed the things she had bought for him, walked down to the station, boldly passing both lamps and policemen, and went away. The little portmanteau was not half full; but Eadie thought it was “more respectable.” He felt so himself. To have gone without any luggage at all would have given him a thrill of shame. It was with a strange forlorn feeling that he lounged about the station, looking at everything as if he might never see it again. Strangely enough he seemed to find out features in the place which he had never noticed before, in that last look round, things which his indifferent eye had seen, without noticing, ever so often; but which now at last he perceived, and would recollect as part of Wyburgh, should he never see it again. He was glad that it was dark when the train swept through the valley in which the White House was. Though he could not see anything, yet he went to the other side of the carriage, and so plunged along, passing all those familiar places without seeing them, yet more vividly conscious of them than, he thought, he had ever been before. What were they thinking, he wondered? Would they have any suspicion that he was passing, going away—for ever. For ever! something else seemed to say this in the air about him, not his own voice. Was it possible that he might never pass this way again?
CHAPTER IX.
WAITING.
JOAN did not sleep much on that eventful night. She lay down in her bed after the uncomfortable sleep which she had snatched among the wash-tubs, but it was more as a matter of form than for any good there was in it. She was secretly very anxious about Harry. Though she had taken upon her so cheerfully to affirm that he had gone to the “Red Lion,” she had not any confidence in this suggestion. She lay staring at the window as it slowly grew a glimmering square, in the cold blue of the dawning, wondering what had become of him. She had no great imagination, and therefore there did not rush upon her mind a crowd of visionary dangers such as would have besieged her mother, but she lay with her face turned up to the ceiling and her eyes wide open, asking herself what he was likely to have done; what he would be doing now? He might fall into bad company, she thought, with a distinct identification of one house in the village which did not bear a very good reputation, and of which, as it happened, Harry was entirely ignorant; or he might go straight off to the office, which, on the whole, was the best thing he could do. That was all very well for the future; but where was he to-night? where was he now?
This was a question which Joan could not answer to herself. She thought over a great many things during the unaccustomed vigil. Never before had her mother’s anxieties and “fuss” appeared as they now did to Joan with a certain amount of reason in them. Certainly father was getting beyond bearing, she said to herself. He was worse the older he grew. She had told him that she was the best servant he had in the house, though she got no wages, and it was true. If she liked “to take a situation” she could earn excellent wages, and get praise instead of abuse for what she did. She was not a person to be put upon in any way, and yet there were times when he “put upon” even her. The contemplation of all this did not move her to any impulses of furious indignation, as Harry was moved, but she thought, lying there in the grey dawn, that it would have to be put a stop to somehow. As for taking a situation, that was out of the question. Joan was a very homely woman, not much better educated than the dairy-maid, and accustomed to none of the softnesses of life, but yet she was Miss Joscelyn of the White House, and nothing could have obliterated from her mind the consciousness of this dignity which gave her nothing, and yet was everything to her. Possessing this rank, it was impossible for her to “take a situation.” She did not mind what she did in her father’s house, but to earn money would have been a degradation. She regretted it even, for she knew very well that she was a capable person, able to “put her hand” to many things; but it was as indisputable as if she had been Princess Royal of an ancient kingdom. Could she have done this, and taken her mother away, and supported her by the work of her own hands, she would have been now wound up to do it; but, as it was impossible, she cast about in her mind what else she could do to mend matters. Father was too bad, there was no denying that; he had gone a great deal too far, and it would not be possible to put up with him much longer. She concocted several speeches to be made to him, but none of them seemed to her sufficient. To be sure, on the other hand, mother would make a fuss. She would not take anything easily. To see her excitement and anxiety over the smallest matters was enough to provoke even a patient temper. She could not take things as they came; that was a kind of excuse, perhaps, for father’s violence. Joan turned over all these things in her mind, as if her parents stood before the bar and it was her business to judge them. A woman of thirty cannot go on with those childish fictions of reverence which make criticism a sin. Indeed, even a child, the youngest, unconsciously criticises as soon as it is able to think, and we are all standing before the most awful of tribunals unawares when we live our lives and show forth our motives before our babies; and Joan had long ceased to be a baby. She saw her father and mother all round, and estimated them calmly. He had not many qualities which were good, perhaps not any at all; she had a great many amiable and tender graces of character of which her daughter was vaguely aware, but she was of a nature which is very provoking to a calm and judicious spirit. Thus Joan saw them as they were, with the clearest impartial vision. What a pity that two such people had married to make each other unhappy! Joan had a sort of impatient feeling that, if she had only been in the world then, she certainly would have done something to prevent the union which had brought her into the world. This was the amusing side of her judicial impartiality. It went the length sometimes of a comical impatience that she had not been there to keep matters straight between them.
All this glanced through her mind as she lay staring at the ceiling, or at the blue square of the window gradually growing more visible. There was no sleep for her that night. The first part of it she had found uncomfortable enough, but sleep had been strong upon her. Now she was comfortable, but had thoroughly shaken off sleep. She thought over all the turmoil of the family, and its agitations. He had never done anything so bad as this before. There had been storms in the house without number, but he had always let the mother smooth things down. He had never shut out any of “the boys,” which was what she called even her brothers who were married and had boys of their own. And Harry was the one most like his mother; most likely to make a fuss and take such an accident in the worst way. Where had Harry gone? What was he doing? Where could he go in the middle of the night?
When she had come back to this subject, Joan felt almost too restless to stay in bed. If she had but thought of it at the time she would have gone after him; she would have prevented him from going away. To think she should have been so overcome by sleep as not to know when Harry had disappeared, or to be aware that he was gone! She turned and twisted about in the self-annoyance caused by this, and could not rest. If she had not been so sleepy, she might have stopped Harry and averted the catastrophe, for she felt vaguely that a catastrophe it was. And what would become of his mother if anything had happened to him? “Tut,” said Joan, to herself, “I am getting as bad as mother herself. There is a bit of mother in me, though I did not think it. What should have happened to him? He’s sound asleep now while I’m moidering myself about him. To be sure he must have knocked somebody up and got a bed somewhere; but in the morning he’ll go over to Will’s, or Tom’s, or even Uncle Henry’s. Things are bad enough as they are. Father’s getting that bad that even me, I can’t put up with him; and mother’s life’s a trouble to her:—and to other folks too,” she added involuntarily, with a quaint, comic twist of her upper lip. But notwithstanding this strong sense in her mind that her mother’s example was not one to follow, and that there was in its pathos a faint touch of the ridiculous, she yet could not succeed in divesting her own mind of uneasiness. As soon as there was light enough to see by she got up, and roused the maids, who were tolerably early risers, but yet were now and then subjected to the ignominy of being called by Miss Joan. “You would sleep if it was the day of judgment,” she cried, standing at the door of the room in which two of them were hastily jumping up, rubbing their eyes. “Why didn’t you get up and let me in last night?”
“Get oop and let ye in?” the women cried aghast.
“I pulled the door upon me when I thought I had left it on the jar,” said Joan, with prompt and unblushing falsehood, “and then I knocked till I thought I should have brought down the house; but not a soul of you stirred—till my poor mother, that is so delicate, got out of her warm bed and opened to me. I would have died of cold but for the copper you lighted last night; and here you are at five o’clock in the morning snoring like all the seven sleepers, and a big washing in hand. Do you mean me to do it myself?”
“But Lord, Miss Joan, what were ye doin’ oot o’ t’ house at night?” said the eldest of the maids.
“That’s none of your business,” said Joan, “and unless you want to see me at the washingtub you had better hurry. What you want with all that sleep, and all that meat, is more than I can tell. I’ll do a better day’s work than the best of you upon half of it. Get up to your washing, ye lazy hussies.” Joan clapped the door with a little noise behind her, so as to obliterate this word, which her grandmother would have used with the greatest openness, but which the progress of civilisation has made less possible even in the free-speaking north; but it relieved her mind to say it, though she took pains that it should not be heard. As for the two women, they laughed with little sound, but much demonstration, when the door was closed; one of them throwing herself upon a chair in convulsions of suppressed mirth. “Auld Joan, t’auld toad, has gotten a lad at last,” they said. The idea that she had been shut out in the cold in this very unusual courtship was such a joke to them as no wit could have equalled. “T’auld Joan!” who was always so much wiser than everybody else, and repressed “lads” with the strong hand. But notwithstanding the excellency of the joke, they made haste to their washing, as Joan was not a person to be trifled with, and soon the scene of her disturbed slumber was full of noise, and bustle, and steam, and all the commotion of a big washing, which always carries with it some features of a Saturnalia. As the big pairs of red arms played in and out of the steam and froth, a continued tempest of talk accompanied the operations; but there were lulls now and then, especially when any new-comer appeared, when the event of the night was communicated in loud whispers, with peals of accompanying laughter. “T’auld Joan’s gotten a lad at last.” “What’s the joke?” she said, on one occasion, coming in abruptly; but this merely threw the company, which was in full enjoyment of the witticism, into wilder convulsions of laughter. Perhaps Joan guessed what it was. “You can have your fun for me, as long as you do your work,” she said. She was not troubled by uneasy suggestions of amour-propre. The maid who did the indoor work did not get off so easily. She made a kind of confession. “I heard t’ master aboot. I durstn’t get oop, and him there; and, Miss Joan, I dunno if you ken—Master Harry’s been oot aw night. His bed’s just as t’was.”
“Mr. Harry’s gone over to his brother’s. He made up his mind only last night,” said Joan, without a wince. When there are domestic strifes going on, the women of the family, always the most anxious to keep scandal silent, have to lie with a composure invincible. Joan was a woman who was true as steel, and would not have told a falsehood on any other occasion for a kingdom; but this kind of lie did not touch her conscience at all. She did not think of it as a falsehood. She was willing even to deliver over her own reputation to the discussion of her servants sooner than let in the light upon the family quarrel. Whether Betty believed her or not was a different matter; at all events here was an explanation. All the little bustle of getting the work of the household set a-going, through which she swept like a whirlwind, amused her mind for the moment, but did not lessen the anxiety, which came back like a flood after this was accomplished, and her own individual part of the morning’s work done. When she got through her dairy occupations the uneasiness overflowed. She took old Simon the cowman into a corner. He was a very old servant of the house and had seen all the children born, and was interested in every one of them and their concerns, and all that had happened to them—of which events he was a walking chronicle. “The year Master Will wan t’ race up at be’castle.” “The year Master Tom broke’s bones in t’ shindy election-time.” These were his dates. He was an old bachelor, and it was believed that he had not another thought but the house and what went on within it. Joan took him aside into a corner of the wealthy but not very tidy yard, which was his domain. “I want you to do a message for me, Simon, something I wouldn’t ask another man about the place to do.”
Simon gave her an acute, but slightly wondering, glance out of the old blue eyes, which kept their youthful hue, though they had lost their clearness, and which looked out of an old face, brightly tinted with fine hues of crimson and orange. The old man was, an æsthetic person would have said, a glorious bit of colour. The orange and the crimson were almost pure tints in his old weather-beaten countenance, and his eyes, though they were old, were of a kind of china-blue. He had a quantity of somewhat ragged, yet venerable white hair, and stooped a little, but trudged along with his stick as quickly as any younger man about, and was perfectly hale and vigorous. He had all his wits about him, though he was old. He looked at Joan keenly, yet with a dubious gleam in his eyes. He had heard already—who had not?—that Joan, Joan herself, the judge of everybody, had been out at the door courtin’, and had been shut out. His glance meant a question; was it possible that she meant to employ him as her messenger to the lover who was so mysterious and incredible a personage, and about whom already “aw t’ house” had been exercised to know who he could possibly be?
“I’ll do my best,” he said, taking off his hat with a rustic impulse to scratch his head, a process which seems to have been considered good for the brains since the world began.
“I’m a little anxious about Harry,” said Joan, “and so is mother—mother far more than me; you know she will never take things easy.”
Simon nodded his head a great many times in energetic assent; no doubt he knew—who better? had not he been sent off for the doctor a hundred times when there was not much need of the doctor, and seen the Mistress wringing her hands over what seemed to the household in general very small occasion a hundred times more? To be sure she took nothing easy. That was very well known.
“Harry,” said Joan, “walked over last night, I think, to Will’s; but it’s a long walk, and you know he’s used to towns now, not to country ways.”
To this Simon responded with his usual nod, but shook his head all the same, by way of protest against bringing up a Joscelyn in a town.
“It’s a pity? Well, it may be,” said Joan; “but it’s the fact, Simon. Now I think most likely he stopped at the ‘Red Lion,’ not to wake us up again or disturb my mother. She never sleeps but with one eye open, I believe, and hears like a hare. You heard what happened to me last night. The door blew to behind me when I was just out, looking what kind of a night it was. Ne’er a one heard in the house but mother. That’s just like her. Now Harry knows that, and he would think it would disturb her if he came back.”
Simon listened to all this with a perfectly stolid countenance; but he knew as well that his young mistress was romancing, and inventing as she went on—as well as the most fine critic could have done. He listened with his eye upon her, with a word now and then to show that his interest was fully kept up; but he saw through her, and Joan was partly aware of his scepticism.
“So we think—or I think,” said Joan, “that he may have stopped at the ‘Red Lion;’ and I want to know; but, Simon, I don’t want you to go like a lion roaring and ask, has Mr. Harry Joscelyn slept a’ night here? I want you to go warily and find out—find out, you understand?”
“Withoot askin’? ay, ay, Miss Joan, I ken what ye mean,” Simon said, with many nods of his white head.
“Then bless us, man, go!” said Joan, whose anxiety had little ebullitions from time to time, paroxysms which astounded her afterwards. She put her hand on Simon’s arm and almost shook him in her passion; then stopped and laughed at herself—“I have a deal of mother in me after all,” she said. “There, go as fast as your old legs will carry you, and bring me back word.”
Simon liked to be taken into the confidence of his masters. He was of the old fashion, not much unlike a slave or serf bound to the soil, not perhaps a desirable kind of human being, but very useful to the masters of him, and a much more picturesque figure than a modern servant. He arraigned the family before his tribunal, and judged them much as Joan did, knowing the weaknesses of each. He was of the kind of valet to whom his master is never a hero; he saw them as do children, exactly as they were, and knew all their fretfulness and pettiness as well as their larger faults. But this did not interfere with his faithfulness and devotion. He did not believe in them as perfect, nor in anything as perfect. He was such a cynic as imperfect gods must always make. The objects of his devotion were poor creatures enough, as he was well aware, but this rather made him certain that all men were poor creatures than that his “owners” were exceptionally petty. He gave them the first place in his universe all the same, and served them, and considered their interest before his own. Perhaps, however, this is rash to say. He had no special interests of his own; he was an old bachelor, without relations to whom he had attached himself. He had attached himself to “the family” instead of these ties, and though he did not contemplate the family in any ideal light, yet it had all the soul he possessed, and its interests were his first object. He nodded his head a great many times after Joan left him, as he prepared to go to the village. “I understand,” he said to himself. But it was very doubtful whether he did understand; he did not connect Joan’s supposed escapade with this curious mission; notwithstanding, as he was wily by nature, he set off with all the intention of accomplishing what he had to do with wile. He took a basket on his arm in which he packed the butter which was sold in the village. Joan making the discovery to her dismay, yet not without a smile, of more and more of her mother in her, could scarcely endure all his preparations, and had nearly rushed out of her dairy and pushed him out with her own hands; but she recollected in time that it was useless to interfere with Simon, who never did anything except in his own way.