CHAPTER XXVIII.
SQUIRE HERITAGE MAKES A WILL.
Old Squire Heritage had aged very rapidly after the abrupt departure of his son from the hall.
Of a naturally gloomy and austere disposition, and strongly biased towards the cold and uncompromising religious views which a large section of the English people have had transmitted to them through many generations from the old Puritans, the squire believed the blow which had fallen upon him was dealt by a Divine hand.
He had, in his unsympathetic way, been very proud of his son George. The harshness that the young man so bitterly resented was only the result of a mistaken idea of parental duty.
When his son showed a taste not only for the frivolities but also for what the squire considered the vices of the age, he felt that stern repression was necessary. In the old days of parental despotism he would have flung his son into prison; in the enlightened times which forbade the head of a family to declare his domestic circle in a state of siege and proclaim military law, he contented himself by reprimanding the prodigal, treating him with icy displeasure, and eventually renouncing all ties of kinship with him.
By an ordinarily constituted father George’s misdeeds would have been treated as youthful follies, and though the parental anger might have been fierce when the parental pocket was touched, it is probable far less drastic remedies would have been considered necessary.
When George, trembling with passion, left his father’s presence vowing to see his face no more, Squire Heritage did not reproach himself for having goaded the young man to such a frame of mind.
When that night the old lodge-keeper came to him and told him that the young squire had ordered his things to be sent after him to London, his master simply said, ‘Send them,’ in a tone which prohibited any further discussion.
But when, a fortnight later, Bess Marks disappeared, leaving a note for her father which pointed to only one conclusion, and the squire heard of it, he went to the grief-stricken man and took him kindly by the hand and comforted him.
Never was there a greater contrast than between the two fathers—the plebeian and the patrician.
The lodge-keeper, a prey to violent grief and heartbroken at his child’s conduct, never breathed a word of reproach against her. He only prayed that, however guilty she might be, no suffering might come near her, but that God would give her back again to his loving and protecting arms.
Squire Heritage spoke of his absent son coldly, almost cruelly. It was no secret among the people on the estate that Bess Marks had ‘run away’ with the young squire, and this added to the intensity of his father’s indignation and shame.
He felt humiliated, as he stood in the presence of his faithful old retainer, to think that this foul wrong should have been done him by one who bore his name, and his anger against the absent scapegrace was fed by the discovery, as flame is fed with oil.
For the mental torture which he endured he sought refuge in the consolations of religion—of a religion which was founded on the fierce moral code of the Old Testament, and ignored the gentler teaching of the New.
He became almost a recluse, and passed his days in the old library, building up around the natural instincts of his heart a wall of bigotry, against which the erring son might throw himself in vain.
With nothing else to occupy his mind or divert his attention, with no society now but that of the fierce old theologians, his favourite authors, he became a prey to religious monomania, and an intellect long threatened was submerged by a flood of fanaticism.
He believed that God called upon him to show his faith as Abraham showed his. His conscience told him that he must cast the erring son off for ever, and that if he shrank from the utmost extremity of punishment he was a weak vessel, who preferred his human affection to his duty to God and man.
When once a lonely, narrow-minded man yields to this morbid view, there is no limit to the sway it has over him. Every natural instinct, every human feeling, becomes subservient to it, and the cruellest and most heartless deeds, surrounded by a false religious glamour, seem to him but so many noble actions performed in the service of the Master.
It was not enough for Squire Heritage that he and his son had parted, and that he was in utter ignorance of the young man’s whereabouts. Such conduct called for the severest punishment it was in his power to inflict. In the first days of their separation, though he had renounced him, he had hesitated at disinheriting him.
That was a vengeance that would survive when the grave had closed over him. While he lived he would never call him son again, but when he was dead—no, he would not make up his mind to carry his just indignation to such a point as that.
But when Bess Marks disappeared, and it was known that George had been seen frequently with her ‘sweethearting,’ as the gossips called it, and when inquiry left no doubt that the girl had gone, and at her young master’s instigation, the old squire shattered his last scruple at a blow.
On the very day that he felt certain the old lodge-keeper’s daughter had been lured from home by his son, he sent to his solicitor in hot haste, and prepared and executed a new will.
His first impulse had been to leave the whole of his estate to charity, but the pride of race was strong upon him.
Since the days when Cromwell rewarded his bravest followers with the lands of the Royalists, the Heritages had been lords of the old hall and the land about it. If he left all to charity the estates would have to be sold. After a long and anxious consideration the squire determined on leaving his property to preserve the name, and yet to leave his fortune where it would be well used.
He had never renewed his old friendship with John Adrian, which had been interrupted when they both fell in love with the gentle lady Heritage afterwards married.
John had not broken his heart when pretty Ruth Patmore gave the preference to the wealthy young country squire. He had taken the defeat like a sensible fellow, and later on had himself married and been comparatively happy. But that a remembrance of the old romance survived was evident when he named his little daughter Ruth.
Though the Heritages and the Adrians never met, they heard of each other from mutual friends, and after his wife’s death the squire had once or twice inquired especially after Ruth.
He had heard that she had met with a disappointment in love, and also of her pure end noble life, her labours among the poor, and the extent to which she tried to do good with the means at her command.
There was something of sentiment in it, perhaps, but he could not help thinking how fortunate Adrian had been in his daughter and how unfortunate he had been in his son.
Brooding over the past, and comparing it with the present, it was not wonderful that the image of Ruth Adrian rose before him often as he thought of his ungrateful son.
When he was brooding over the scheme of the new will which he had determined to make, and had abandoned the idea of leaving his fortune to charitable institutions, again his mind reverted to Ruth Adrian.
Gradually a vague idea formed itself, which by degrees assumed a definite shape. There would be something of poetic justice in benefiting the daughter of his old rival, the girl who bore his dead wife’s name. Had God granted him a daughter he would have named her Ruth too—Ruth Heritage. The name lingered in his mind, and the sweet memories flowed ones more over the grave ox the buried years.
Ruth Heritage!
Why was this gentle girl not his daughter? How fortunate Adrian had been. His wife lived still, and his daughter was the comfort of his age. He, the successful rival, had no wife and no child.
Ruth Heritage!
He sat in the window-seat of the library, looking across the quiet park to the lodge-gates, watching for his solicitor to come, and thinking over the will he was to make.
And when, an hour later, his man of business was with him in close conference, his scheme was complete. There was an element of romance in it. The harshness to his own son was toned down by the halo of tenderness which it cast over an old love-story.
The solicitor took his client’s instructions with professional lack of emotion. Family solicitors assist in the disinheritance of sons, the revelation of delicate domestic secrets, and carefully calculated schemes of a revenge which is to survive after death, with no more concern than the prompter feels as he watches the progress of a sensation drama.
To him the scheme which may bring happiness or misery to hundreds represents so many folios of writing at so much a folio, and so many hours of professional work at so much an hour.
Mr. Baggs, of the firm of Baggs & Carter, expressed no surprise at the fact that young George Heritage was to be disinherited, and did not even venture on a suggestion. He listened to his client’s instructions, and took them away to put them in a legal form.
When the will was ready Squire Heritage signed it, sealed it, delivered it as his act and deed, and locked it up among his papers.
It was a very simple will. It gave and bequeathed to Ruth Adrian, the daughter of his old rival John Adrian, the whole of his property, subject to a few legacies to old servants. But it made this proviso: that the said Ruth Adrian should assume the name of Heritage; and that in the event of her being married when the will came into operation, her husband should assume the name of Heritage. By this means the old name would continue to be identified with the place.
Directly he had settled his worldly affairs, the squire relapsed once more into the gloomy inactivity from which he had only been aroused by the necessity of devising a scheme for the disposal of his property.
But in spite of himself he kept thinking of the will and then of his absent son. He found himself picturing the days that should be after he had passed away and had no power to revoke his decision.
When in his lonely walks round the estate he passed some wretched tramp on his way to the workhouse, he would fancy his son, reduced to such a position after a career of dissipation, perishing friendless and without hope.
Then he would shudder and ask himself if he were justified in thus ruining the worldly prospects of his only son for life, and giving his inheritance to a stranger.
But at night, with the Bible open before him, and the passionate Hebrew invective against the evildoer appealing to his narrowed vision, he cast these forebodings to the wind. Such thoughts were thoughts sent by the devil to weaken his determination. Were not all the servants of God tempted in like manner to swerve from the path of duty, and was it not always the natural impulses of the heart that were sought to be turned to their undoing? So the gloomy train of thought led him away, till he was prepared to listen to each chord of human sympathy which memory awoke in him as one struck by the tempter’s fingers.