CHAPTER V.
FATHER AND SON ARRANGE ACCOUNTS.
A LAMP was brightly burning in the sick-room, with a shade over it, and so placed as not to dazzle the invalid’s eyes. The Sister had left the room when Jerome entered; and there was a stillness as of death over everything. Jerome went up to the bedside, and stooped over the motionless figure lying back, nerveless and exhausted, after the agonies of pain which had shaken the already feeble frame. The face upon which the lamplight shone was, or had been, a fine one, as regarded features. These bore little resemblance to those of his son, though they, like Jerome’s, were finely cut, pale, and clear. Now, they were wasted and waxen in their languid weariness. A high, somewhat bald forehead, a long, slender, grey moustache gave a thoroughly un-English appearance to the whole countenance. As Jerome’s hands pressed the bedclothes, and he stooped without speaking over the pillow, the large closed eyelids were raised, and a pair of strange bright blue eyes were discovered, such eyes as are often the token of a cool, self-seeking disposition—eyes which contained a light and a life which not even this day of mortal pain had been able utterly to quench.
Face of father and face of son were near together; the one evidently near death, the other scarcely less pale, quite as still and composed, yet eloquent of health and strength, and early manhood’s pride and power.
‘Ah, Jerome, it is you?’ came in a feeble voice from the patient.
‘I am thankful to hear that you are out of pain, sir. My sister and I have passed some anxious hours.’
‘Yes; I feel easier now.’
He spoke so slowly, so languidly, and so faintly, that the voice was scarce audible.
‘You sent for me; at least, Dr. Reichhardt said you wished to see me.’
‘Yes; I have something to say to you. Sit down.’
Jerome seated himself on a chair which stood beside the bed, and waited. Since opening his eyes, and seeing his son stooping over him, Mr. Wellfield had not closed them again. They looked restlessly round—at the ceiling, the wall, the window—anywhere, except into his son’s face. It was some little time before he spoke again; what he had to say seemed to require a considerable effort of some kind. At last, in a voice which had suddenly gained strength, he said:
‘You don’t know what caused me to be so suddenly taken ill to-day.’
‘I had not thought of the cause. I was disturbed at the fact.’
‘I had a severe shock, after you went out this morning.’
‘Indeed!’ said Jerome, with some animation; ‘I hope no carelessness——’
‘None at all, except the carelessness of circumstances, which is apt to be astonishing sometimes, especially to those who suffer from it,’ he retorted, a sarcastic flavour in his voice. ‘I ought to have spoken to you long ago—long ago.’
Again he paused, and again Jerome waited. He had not the faintest, most conjectural idea of the subject upon which his father desired to speak to him. He was beginning now to wonder vaguely what it could be. They had no confidences, this father and son. Their tastes, habits, and dispositions had always been utterly dissimilar. The elder Wellfield had gone his own way, had led his life of aimless travel from place to place, generally from one fashionable foreign invalid colony to another, accompanied by his daughter and her maid, and by his own manservant. His son had enjoyed the fullest liberty to do the same; to live exactly as seemed good in his own eyes, only receiving long ago the curt recommendation to remember who he was, and that there were some things that a gentleman could never do. ‘No need to tell a gentleman what these things are,’ he had further been informed. ‘If he be a gentleman, he will very soon learn them for himself; if not, scorpions could not whip the knowledge into him.’
Furnished with such a formula, or creed, as the basis of his ethical system, Jerome Wellfield had been left to his own devices. Three times since his father’s second marriage, Jerome had met and stayed with that father. The first time Avice had been a baby, on the other occasions she had been visiting friends unknown to her brother. Jerome and his father had always agreed together perfectly well. Each was conscious that the other had tastes and habits and views of life which to himself would have been most distasteful. Each had had civilisation and savoir vivre enough to ignore that altogether during their brief glimpses of one another. They had never quarrelled—they had never been friends. Mr. Wellfield had enjoyed his life of idle valetudinarianism—his lazy days, his evenings at cards, or in reading-rooms, or lighted gardens. Jerome had enjoyed his life—his pleasant search after the harmonious and the beautiful in life, in art, in nature. He had gradually shut himself up in his own reserve; in his over-refined cultivation and fastidiousness; he had ‘built his soul a lordly pleasure-house, wherein at ease for aye to dwell,’ till now what was ugly and coarse made him shudder, and gave him pain that was almost physical. All this refinement, he often told himself, was not essential to him; he could do without it; poverty would not be anything to dread, for one could have simplicity therewith; the real bane of existence was common, rampant, triumphant philistinism. Wherever he went, he had been well received, and generally flattered: his beauty, his voice, the charm of his manner alone, would have made him the despair of prudent mothers, even as a detrimental; but when to those advantages was added the primary one, that he was an only son, heir to a fine estate, of unimpeachably good and ancient name and lineage, an impartial judge must confess that it was a great thing that Jerome Wellfield had come out of the ordeal, at least outwardly, unscathed, calm, unperturbed, unvulgarised.
Open admiration and adulation had revolted his fastidious soul. Till he met Sara Ford, he had never gone further than a mild flirtation with any girl, for he was hard to please. But, having met her, all was changed. Her beauty, her pride, her indifference, calm and smiling, to what other women so eagerly sought after—the fact that she was no easy prize, despite her loneliness and her poverty, had fired him. He had loved with a rapidity and a passion which showed the strange blending of north and south, of Italy and England, that was in him, and that made him what he was. And he, as little as anyone, knew what he was. In him there were two natures; he only knew one, for up to now his mother’s side alone had grown and flourished; he little knew the modifications of southern character which he inherited from that man beside whose bed he sat, waiting for the disclosure which he struggled to utter.
Born beneath southern skies, brought up in his very early childhood in Italian cities, these influences engraved themselves deeply, indelibly upon his nature. The mother’s blood streaked every thought, every impulse, with a mixture of passion and indolence, fire and superstition. That mother had been the beautiful daughter of an old, impoverished Sicilian house—a house which had never before married out of its own nation and its own sphere. To her son she bequeathed her own hereditary tendencies—she had had much of the indolence, all the superstition of that glorious, yet degraded race of Magna Græcia.
In after-days, when Jerome looked up into the murky skies of Lancashire—those skies which gloomed over the grey walls of his father’s house—those deep, unspeakably blue heavens whose glory bathed the marbles of Venice, the quays of Naples, the ruins of Rome, the pictures of Florence, whose glamour lent itself to the whispering, rustling grey of the olives on Mediterranean coast terraces, and made the yellow sand more yellow, the blue sea more deeply violet, the white sail more dazzling—this remembered heaven used to rush to his recollection with a light that was almost lurid, and scattered tones of a speech that was music seemed to ring melodiously in his ears. Italy had faded, yet her finger-mark remained ineffaceable upon his innermost heart, as his mother’s beauty remained upon earth, stamped in the beauty of his own face and the melody of his voice, which, so long as voice or feature remained, should visibly and audibly attest the presence upon earth of a land where skies are warmer, where love is fiercer, where passions run more quickly into white-hot rages than in this humid isle of ours.
Another influence had been almost as strong as that of Italy—as strong as any influence which is not already in a man’s natural tendencies can be—and that influence was Germany. After a brief stay in England, during which his father’s second marriage had taken place, he had been sent to the gymnasium of ——, where he had gone through all the courses, and, besides the regular school-training, had been trained also in the school of music.
In that land his voice and his musical powers formed a passport. By degrees, the Italian ditties, with their oily sweetness, slipped away, as they have the trick of doing, from his tongue, and the rougher, deeper songs of the Fatherland grew at home there. Casting himself with eagerness into the art, he grew more and more devoted to it, and but for one thing he often felt as if he would never care to leave this Deutschland, this home of mighty harmonies, this adopted country. That one thing was the remembrance of his home itself—of the weird, ancient Abbey, with its dark, quaint gardens, its cloisters beside the river; and the still more ancient church which he dimly remembered.
Since his love for Sara Ford had arisen, he had thought and dreamed still oftener of this ancient place. Now he knew—he had thought of it when he spoke to Avice that morning—that with her by his side there was no place he would so gladly go to, and stay there. What a life they might lead—she with her art, and he with his—and with their love! He felt a thrill—felt the blood course quickly on, as he pictured her—it was the first time he had seen the picture clearly—with him at Wellfield—his wife.
‘Perhaps, when you know, you may blame me; and yet—where would you have been all these years if I had acted differently? Did you know that Wellfield had ever been entailed?’
‘I think I have heard something about it,’ said Jerome, surprised at the abruptness of the question, and roused from his dream.
‘It was entailed until my father’s time. He and your great-grandfather agreed to cut it off.’
‘Did they? Why?’
‘Because the estate was thoroughly embarrassed, and deep in debt, and they wanted to restore it.’
‘Then they succeeded?’ asked Jerome, to whom this was news, but who concluded that they must have succeeded. Had there been embarrassments, surely he would have heard of them before now.
‘No; they did not. Neither of them had the faintest notion of business’—it is to be presumed that Mr. Wellfield was conscious of himself possessing business talents of a superior order. ‘They got money, but that wasn’t improving the estate. They did not retrench, and they spent nothing on improvements. When I came into possession, I was worse off than any Wellfield had ever been before.’
‘I had no idea of that,’ said Jerome.
‘Of course you had not. How could you have? It is a fact, nevertheless. I went through some bitter experiences. I had all their pride, and none of their resources. I saw no way out of it. Your mother once saw the place, and screamed at the very idea of living there. She said she would die if she had to live out of Italy. It was therefore impossible for me to live on my estate, and retrench, as almost any other man might have done under the circumstances. Knowing this, I kept you as much away from the place as possible, lest you should get fond of it. Things got worse and worse. After your sister’s mother died, my own health failed, and it became impossible for me to live in England. I saw ruin staring me in the face. I saw you, whom I wished never to be troubled with sordid cares and anxieties, growing up utterly unconscious of the kind of lot that was hanging over you. I seemed to see Avice, your sister, stinted of common comforts, and perhaps reduced, as she grew up, to earn her living as a governess, she—ordered about by strange people, and breaking her heart with fretting.’
‘Good God, sir! What must you have gone through! And why did you not confide in me? Anything in my power——’
‘But there was nothing in your power—that is exactly it. I did the only thing that could be done. I looked my circumstances full in the face, and the sight was not inspiriting. Presently came a man with what I wanted—money—any amount of money. I—I sold Wellfield.’
‘Sold it!’ echoed the young man, in a voice of horror and incredulity combined, as he started from his chair, and looked into his father’s face. ‘You are dreaming. You are delirious. Let me call Sister Ursula—you——’
‘Sit down again!’ said his father, turning upon him eyes so calm and lucid in their perfect reasonableness and self-possession, that Jerome felt his very heart give way within him.
This sin had been committed. He had dreamed no ugly dream. He dropped into his chair again, propped his head upon his hands, and tried to take in what his father went on to say.
‘I sold it for forty thousand pounds to a man called Bolton, who had a wild desire to have it. He had some odd crotchet about it. It was a dream of his to have the old place——’
‘But for you to dream of selling it,’ interrupted the young man, with suppressed passion.
‘Needs must when the devil drives. Had you been in my position—but there, I won’t argue. I did it. I sold it. I invested the money, and——’
‘If the money is there, all is well,’ interrupted Jerome, eagerly. ‘It can be bought back again. That is what you mean, I suppose. You want to explain why Avice and I shall be poor and straitened after you have gone. Never mind, sir; there will be a pittance, I daresay. I am young. I can work, and I will do so. When Wellfield is ours again, we shall be content with very little else. Do not reproach yourself.’
‘What are you talking about?’ retorted the other in a voice almost of anger, and the drops stood on his brow, for it was hard work to brave it out. ‘Do you suppose I should have made all this circumstance about it if the money had been there? I tell you the money is gone. It was invested—half in mortgages, and half in the Mutual Liability Bank of ——. The bank is gone—the newspaper—this morning. It was there I saw it—made me ill. The bank is limited, but the other half—liable—ah!’
His eyes closed; he sank back, his face very pale. For a moment Jerome did not move, but sat still, staring at the white face with a blank, stupid gaze. Then he said, quite audibly, for he had a vague impression that his father was unconscious:
‘Sold it! I would as soon have thought of selling my wife or my sister.’
‘Would you?’ replied his father, opening his eyes unexpectedly upon Jerome. ‘When misfortune has resulted from any course, it is the easiest thing in the world to say you would never have done it. Had I not done it, you would have been a beggar years ago. For purchasing you years of enjoyment and prosperity, you reproach me. I have my reward.’
There was a flash in this of the more than dissimilarity of tastes which had, au fond, existed always between father and son—the absolute antagonism—until now delicately glazed over into a semblance of indifference, but ready to burst forth the moment that really deep feelings were touched.
An angry, bitter retort was upon Jerome’s tongue—the retort that his father, in purchasing those ‘years of prosperity and enjoyment,’ of which he made such a merit, had incidentally purchased with them years of something else—which years the young man seemed to see now very clearly unrolling themselves before him—drear and bitter. But his father was about to leave the world—there could be little doubt of that—and there certainly was something in his manner of doing it very strongly suggestive of his having done the best for himself while he lived—denied himself no luxury, made no sacrifice, not even that very commonly necessary sacrifice of early avowing an unpleasant truth because it is right to do so—and of his then quietly slipping away, and leaving the son whom he had never accustomed to work, and the daughter whom he had taught to look upon luxury and refinement as matters of course, to battle as best they might with adverse circumstances. This view of the case certainly did rush very strongly over Jerome’s mind. His hot southern blood drove some very bitter, sarcastic comments to his lips; but suddenly another feeling prevailed over them—a feeling of cool, calm calculation; a sense that there must be some way out of all this coil, and a private resolve that this man who had the Abbey now, should not keep it very long. Mastering his hot and furious anger, he said coldly:
‘It would be useless to dispute the matter. The damage, it appears, is done. Wellfield has passed away from us, and the poor money you got for it has passed away too. But I suppose your affairs are in the hands of some man of business?’
‘Yes; Netley of Manchester knows all my concerns. No doubt there will be a letter from him immediately. He will have to give you information, and settle it all up.’
‘Netley of Manchester!’ said Jerome, deliberately making a note of it. ‘Where does he live?’
‘His offices are at 57, Canongate.’
Another note. Then Jerome said:
‘Have you any idea whether everything will go—whether not even a pittance will be left?—enough for Avice to live upon, while I try to find something to do?’
He spoke coldly and hardly, and in a matter-of-fact tone; but as he uttered the words, a vision rose before him of Sara Ford; of her eyes, as he had whispered to her, ‘And do you understand?’ He shivered a little. Mr. Wellfield, too, was moved by his words; by this stern bringing to reality and commonplace of the whole affair. He gave a slight groan as he turned his head restlessly, saying:
‘I don’t know. O God! I know nothing about it. But’—his voice grew almost fierce—‘remember, sir, as long as you have a penny, your sister remains with you.’
‘I hope I know my duty towards my sister, sir, as well as you appear to have known yours to your daughter,’ returned Jerome, in a voice of some astringency; ‘and——’
They had been parting words. The deathly expression upon his father’s face alarmed him. He rang the bell, and Sister Ursula answered it. Restoratives were applied, but in vain. The flame did not flicker up again. In a very short time Jerome knew that the face upon which he looked was dead—the eternal repose had settled upon the features. Clouds and tempests were over for him; rocks and shoals of life beset the path of him who was left. He who was taken had slipped comfortably away. The pain of want, of narrow circumstances, the smarting for the sins of his fathers, had never been his, nor the joy begotten of self-abnegation—the peace that comes to one weary with a burden gallantly borne.
Jerome went into the salon again. The lamp had been lighted. Avice sat on a couch, her hands folded before her, her eyes anxiously turned towards the door. She sprang up as he came in.
‘Jerome, is he better? Has he gone to sleep?’
‘He has gone to sleep, my love; but he will never awaken again. He died just now.’
‘Oh! is he dead?’
She clung to him, looking up into his face, in which she saw nothing but a pale, fixed calmness.
‘Dead, Avice. And you must brace yourself up, and prepare for a trial, and that a sore one. You asked me if we were rich, dear, and I told you we had ample means. It was not true, though I did not know it. We have now either nothing, or next to nothing. You asked me if we should go back to Wellfield, and I promised that you should soon go there. I cannot keep my promise. Wellfield is no longer ours. We have no home. To-morrow I will explain. To-night I can only tell you the facts. You said that your life had been happier since you knew me. What do you say to your brother and his kindness now?’
Her eyes were eloquent as she looked up at him, and said, gravely and calmly:
‘I love my brother for trusting in me. And he shall never hear a murmur from my lips if he will continue to trust me and guide me.’
As they stood together, they kissed one another with a kind of solemnity. Life was changed, but they still remained to sustain one another.