A Rich Man's Relatives Volume II Part 2

"But I mean to carry your music all the way, Miss Muriel. As I told you, I am going to look in on my three aunts at breakfast, and ask them for a cup of hot coffee. That will have a good effect on my aunt Judy, who I fear suspects me of being not very steady. She is a great promoter of coffee taverns. Tried to start one at St. Euphrase, I believe, and had to drink all the coffee herself because the _habitants_ would not buy it. She will say I am an improving character if I ask for a cup of coffee."

When Muriel had finished her music lesson and was resuming her gloves and cloud, she found herself caught from behind by a pair of short fat arms in a sort of hug, accompanied by a little scream of enthusiasm.

"Muriel! And were you going away without ever asking to see me?"

Muriel turned in surprise. "Betsey Bunce! But I did not know you were in town till an hour ago. You know you never wrote."

"Wrote! What is there to write about at St. Euphrase?--unless I were to walk up to the farm and ask Bruneau about your cows and chickens.

But you knew an hour ago, you say, and yet you were going away without asking for me. I call it real unkind."

"It is only ten o'clock, you know--far too early an hour for calling."

"You are so particular! Just like an old woman--and a stiff old-country woman, too--Miss Penelope all over."

"I hope so. Aunt Penelope is always right."

"Come in now, anyway, and take off your things. I am dying for somebody to talk to, after sitting round the stove for three days with three old women. What with Mr. Selby's bandages, and embrocations, and Miss Susan's neuralgia, and Mrs. Selby's poor health, this house is worse than a hospital. Auntie likes it first-rate; she enjoys giving people physic, and says it was a Providence which brought her here at this time; but I find it real lonesome. I have read through the only two novels I can find, and I declare my back aches with sitting still and doing nothing. Couldn't we go down town by-and-by and look at the shops? Let me help you off with your jacket. Fur-lined, I do declare!

Cost twenty dollars, I dare say. Thirty was it? You're the lucky girl! Never mind fixing up before the gla.s.s, you're all right--here's a pin if you want one. Wherever did you pick up that cunning neck-ribbon?--lady bugs and gra.s.shoppers--I call it sweet. It would just suit my geranium-coloured poplin! By-the-way, do you think that will do for evening wear, if I am asked anywhere? It is made with a tablier--looked scrumptious the night they gave charades at Madame Podevin's boarding-house. Mdlle. Ciseau cut it out for me, and I run it on the machine myself--fits like a glove. But your city fashions are so different, one never can be sure. We will go upstairs and look at it; but first you must come into the Snuggery and see the old ladies."

The "Snuggery" was at the back of the house, a sort of family room in which strangers were not received. It had been the chief apartment of the old log homestead which preceded the existing dwelling. The logs had been found so sound and the chamber so desirable that it had been suffered to remain, and been incorporated with the "frame" building erected in front, which it promised to survive, and last on in solid stability when the lighter structure of posts and boards should have fallen to pieces. It was cooler than the rest of the house in warm weather, and warmer in cold; built of twelve inch logs carefully jointed together, plastered on the outside, panelled and ceiled within with red pine highly varnished, and floored with parquetry of different native woods. It had a window on each of three sides, flanked by heavy curtains. There was no fire-place, but in the centre an old-fashioned box-stove, capable of holding billets from two to three feet long, and whose great black smoke-pipe pierced the roof like a pivot for the family life to revolve on.

A bear skin and rugs lay about the floor, sofas and tables stood by the walls, and round the domestic altar, the blazing stove, were the rocking-chairs of the three sisters, gently oscillating like pendulums in a clockmaker's shop, and making the wooden chamber feel like the cabin of a ship, heaving and swinging on a restless tide.

Muriel was greeted effusively by Mrs. Bunce, who looked more fidgety and alert than ever in that reposeful place, and then she was presented to the sisters. Miss Susan, swathed in quilted silk and webs of knitting, a bundle rather than a person, and immersed in her own misery far too deeply to feel or to excite interest in a stranger, merely bowed and shuddered at the breath of cooler air which entered from without; but to the other, Mrs. Selby, Muriel felt strongly drawn, and pleased in a strange and restful way to feel the gentle eyes of the sick and rather silent lady dwelling on her with wistful kindness. She was tall and pale, and in the cross light of windows admitting the dazzling reflections from the snow, and among the browns and yellows of the wainscoting, there was a lambent whiteness which a.s.sociated itself in Muriel's mind with those "shining ones" she had read of when a child in the "Pilgrim's Progress," and filled her with pleasant reverence.

The lady scarcely spoke, spoke only the necessary words of welcome to a stranger, and then withdrew from the hurry of Betsey's and Judith's eager talk, sitting silently by and looking on the new comer with gentle earnest eyes. In the focus of streaming daylight and backed by russet shadows she sat and looked, wrapped in her white knitted shawl, and with hair like frosted silver, features and hands delicate, transparent, and colourless like wax, and eyes which had the weary faded look which comes of sleepless nights and many tears. She found it pleasant to sit and rest her eyes on Muriel, so elastic and freshly bright, as she chatted with the others; she felt as when a breath of spring comes rustling through the dead and wintry woods, through sapless withered twigs and fallen leaves, whispering of good to come, and sweet with springing gra.s.s and opening buds.

She scanned the girl's face and guessed her age, and then her thoughts went back across the years, the weary sunless years which had come and gone since her joys had withered, and she could not but think that had her own lost daughter been spared, she would have been nearly of that age now, and perhaps she would have been gay and bright and sweet as this one was before her. Her eyes grew moist, but it was with a softer, less harrowing regret than she had hitherto known, more plaintive and almost soothing in its sadness. The girl looked so innocent and free of care, with low sweet laughter coming from a heart that had never known sorrow or unkindness. It did her good to watch, and made her feel more patient in her long and weary grief.

For the others, they had their own affairs to make busy with, and it was not every day they came to town. What interest, either, for them, could there be in the emotional variations of their silent and always sorrowful hostess? She had suffered--though it was fourteen years since then--and of course they "felt" for her; but there is a limit to sympathy as to all things human--if there were not, life would be unbearable--and to see her after so many years still cherishing the olden sorrow had grown tedious, if yet touching after a sort, and the family had grown to disregard it as a settled melancholy or monomania, to be pitied and pa.s.sed over, like the deafness, old age, or palsy of family friends. So Betsey and her aunt had settled themselves one on either side of Muriel "for a good old talk," as Betsey said, and they talked accordingly.

"I shall come round to-morrow morning to see your aunts," said Mrs.

Bunce, "and spend a long forenoon with them," and so on _ad infinitum_.

A letter was brought in while the talk was in full swing.

"An invitation!" cried Judith. "Mrs. Jordan--requests the pleasure--a juvenile party. Well--I declare!--Betsey, we forgot to bring your pinafores--or should it have been a certificate of the date of your birth? A very strange way to pay attention to their rector's wife and niece! I thought Mrs. Jordan would have known better."

"Aunt Matilda and I are going," said Muriel in astonishment. "It was very nice last time. More than a hundred, big and little. They had the band, a splendid supper and lots of fun. Indeed, Aunt Penelope was almost unwilling I should go this time; it was so late when we got home."

"Very proper, my dear; I quite approve. Young people should keep early hours; but, you know, Betsey is a little older than you are. Not much," she added, as prudence pointed to the day, only a year or two ahead, when it would suit Betsey, if still a young lady, to be no older than Muriel--"still she is in long dresses, and it seems odd to invite her the first time to a child's party."

"They are not all children. Tilly Martindale, for instance, is as old as Betsey. So is Randolph Jordan himself and Gerald Herkimer."

"Will _they_ be there?" cried Betsey kindling into interest. "We'd better go, auntie, there's no slight. I see the sort of thing it is; there are a few little girls--_big_ little girls though, all the same--to give it the name of juvenile and take off the stiffness. Just like the candy pulling we had at Farmer Belmore's. You know Farmer Belmore's, Muriel? He lives just across the river and down below the island at St. Euphrase. His son's family from Michigan were with him in the fall, and his wife and daughters are too _devotes_ to meet their neighbours, and are only waiting his death to go off to the convent. However, the old man--and a good Protestant he is--was determined the children should have a good time, so he gave--a candy pulling and invited everybody for miles round--said it was for the children. So we all went--drove across the river on the first ice of the season--whether we knew Mrs. Belmore or no. And, Muriel, we had just the most too-too time you can imagine. The daughters sat in the back-room with one or two old French women, away from everybody, and the eldest granddaughter received the guests. There was a fiddle, and, oh, just a lovely time! Joe Webb and I pulled the whitest hank of candy in the room, and we danced eight-hand reels and country dances, till one of my shoes gave way and I had to sit out with Joe Webb. It was something beyond, I tell you!"

"Tush, Betsey!" said her aunt. "You are in the city now and must not go into raptures over rustic frolics, or people will think you know no better. I shall ask the Miss Stanleys about this, when I see them to-morrow. They will be able to tell me if we had better go, and how you should dress."

"Dress! Haven't I my geranium poplin?"

"But this is _town_, my dear, which may make a difference; one never knows. In _my_ young days, now, I always wore white muslin and a blue sash! And you cannot think how many civil speeches I used to get"

added the old lady, bridling, with a spot of pink on either cheek and a toss which set the treacle-coloured curls quivering. The war-horse is never too old to prance and champ his bit at the sound of the trumpet, though he may be so old that no one can remember his ever having been in action.

"I do not remember ever seeing geranium poplin at a party," said Muriel, looking to Betsey; but her eyes fell before the glance of displeased superiority she met there.

"You have not seen my dress, or you would speak more guardedly.

Besides, you are not out yet, and cannot be expected to know what goes on at fashionable gatherings."

"No," said Muriel, meekly, "I am only a little girl, I know that.

Still, at the juvenile parties I go to--Mrs. Jordan's, Mrs.

Herkimer's, and the rest--and at our parties at home, though _they_ are not b.a.l.l.s by any means--quite small affairs--the people dress very nicely--velvet, satin, lace, and so on--but I never saw a geranium poplin."

"No! Poplin is only coming in! I know that from 'G.o.dey's Magazine.' It was just a mere chance Quiproquo of St. Euphrase having one dress piece. I bought it, and you cannot think how rich it looks. Cut square!--they are all cut square in the higher circles this year--with elbow sleeves and a fall of rich lace at twenty-five cents a yard."

Muriel held her breath at the catalogue of rustic splendour. She would have liked to say a word in mitigation of the fright she feared Betsey was intending to make of herself, but dreaded to have her youth flung in her face again. The young are so ashamed of their youth while they have it; it is only after it has fled, that, like flowers drooping in the midday heat, they sigh for the dried-up dews of morning which erewhile weighed down their heads with mistaken shame.

There followed more talk of millinery, and then it was time for Muriel to go, after effusive farewells and appointments for future meeting.

Mrs. Selby came forward last, when the more boisterous adieux were over. She would have liked to take this young girl in her arms; she felt so strongly drawn to her, and knew not why; but she restrained herself, and only begged her to come often while Betsey remained, and to be sure to come to the family room in pa.s.sing, next time she came for a music lesson. And Muriel, looking in the face of the whitened lady, so venerable and sweet, not only promised--as in good nature she could not avoid--but really intended to fulfil, promising herself pleasure in doing it.

CHAPTER III.

CONSIDINE.

A great rise in the world had come to Cornelius Jordan, Q C. They seem all to be Q.C.'s, my reader, those lawyers in Canada; or more than half of them. The Queen is so remote a centre, that the beams of her favour are very widely, if thinly, spread, and this especial t.i.tle of honour has come to be regarded as a polite and inexpensive attention which new prime ministers make haste to bestow upon their friends. And there are so many prime ministers, that at last it became a ground of dispute, between the minor premiers of the several provinces, and the premier-major at Ottawa, as to which should have the exclusive run of the alphabet for decorative purposes. Mr. Jordan, I repeat, had risen since we met him last at the Misses Stanley's garden tea. Then he was a rising man in his profession, doing well, and in comfortable circ.u.mstances; now, he was one risen--full head and shoulders above his fellows, living in a house of the very largest size, and with horses and servants to equal the most prosperous of his neighbours, and reported to be wealthy; not with the startling but evanescent opulence of the merchant prince, which to-day is, and to-morrow is nowhere; but with the reality which attaches to professional wealth in the popular mind, as money actually coined from a man's own brain--the golden fees raked in from grateful clients--without risk, and irrespective of rising and falling markets. His name was spoken with that slight involuntary pause before and after which carries more distinction than any t.i.tle; it is a form of respect so undefined.

"What a man he must be!" his neighbours said, "to have made so much money, and made it so quickly!" made it at his profession, too. n.o.body doubted that, for his name was never mixed up in other affairs.

It would have been hard guessing for a _quidnunc_ about the Court House, had he attempted to trace how all that prosperity had been built up out of the fairly good solicitor's and conveyancer's practice carried on at his chambers, or from his not unusually frequent or brilliant appearances in Court; though now that the fruits of success were so evident, these were vastly on the increase. "Ah!" those knowing ones would say, "he is not a brilliant speaker; but sound, sir, sound! What a head for Law the man must have! What clearness of understanding, to have realized such an income. What a style of living he keeps up! How many thousands a year does it take? Quite the leading counsel at our bar." And so clients multiplied, and the suitor whose case failed in his hands felt surer it had had the best presentment than he would have felt had it succeeded with any one else. "If Jordan could not win the suit, pray who could?"

Jordan was liked, too, as well as respected. How could he fail of that? At his dinners, given every week all through the winter, were found the choicest bills of fare and the best people, and every one else was invited to share the feast. It is manifest that one cannot talk unkindly of a man while the flavour of his wine still hovers about the palate--so long, that is, as there is prospect of another invitation. When the last dinner has been eaten, and the last bottle of wine drunk, then truth is apt to come up from the bottom of her well--disturbed, no doubt, by the pumping, when the family is forced to resume water as a beverage--and people's memories become wonderfully refreshed. They recollect--the women, that is--that really the man's wife was not a lady, that things were said at the time of the marriage, and there has been such levity and extravagance since; while the men shake their heads in cynical wisdom. They knew it from the first, and wonder how it has gone on so long, and how a fellow like that could have had the effrontery to entertain their high mightinesses so profusely.

For the present, however, if there was any unacceptable truth at the bottom of Jordan's well, she had the kindness to remain there, well out of sight. The hospitalities proceeded in a genial round; every one was proud to a.s.sist at them and spoke highly of the entertainer.

Considine was the only man who had a misgiving, and he kept his doubts and surmises to himself, hoping he was in error. He was a.s.sociated with this man in many ways; and nothing is gained by letting slip an insinuation against a friend, even if good feeling did not stamp the act as abominable. His own conscience, too, was not at rest in the matter, for the expansion appeared to him to date from very shortly after the change they had adopted in managing the Herkimer Estate. He reproached himself constantly for having consented to sell out the old man's investments, and wondered how he could have been tempted by those miserable brokerages to smirch the honest record of a lifetime.

No doubt there had been considerable gain on the new securities purchased with the moiety of the funds which he administered; but what of the other half? Jordan had displayed so implicit a confidence in his judgment, such complete beautiful and gentlemanlike faith in his probity, waiving explanations, motioning off statements with expressions of unbounded reliance in his ability to do what was best, while really "in the press of other matters he had no leisure for unnecessary examinations into matters on which he could not advise,"

that Considine was completely silenced, and was left no opening to claim reciprocal explanations as to how the moneys in Jordan's hands had been applied.

He heard on 'Change now and then of Jordan granting short loans at fancy rates, and of his "doing" paper which was far from being "gilt-edged," and he thought of that other moiety of the Herkimer fortune. Such operations are not the way in which trust moneys are used for the benefit of the trust; but rather one in which, while loss, if there be any, must needs fall on the trust, the extra profit accrues to the trustee. And what other funds could Jordan have to operate with? Considine knew of none but those which should have been otherwise employed, and for which, he himself would be held responsible if any misadventure were to befall them, and the sum was so large that in case of a catastrophe his own poor little fortune would go but a small way to make up the loss. He could contemplate that with comparative patience--though certainly it would be hard, after the labours and vicissitudes of a lifetime, to see the provision for his declining years swept into a pit, and one not of his own digging--but disgrace would accompany the ruin; that was the intolerable thought.

To finish a life in which he had striven to keep his hands unsoiled and his name without reproach as a defaulting trustee! How he had been wont to scorn such, when they crossed his path! And to think that he should end in being cla.s.sed with them! Who would stop to inquire into the merits? Had he ever himself stopped to sift the intricacies of a defalcation, before declaring the defaulter to be a rogue? Had not the money been confided to his care, and was he not responsible for it to the heirs? Many a night when he lay awake in the darkness, with nothing to break the stillness but the ticking of his watch at the bed-head, the misgiving and the dread would waken in his mind, and possess him with the restless misery of an aching tooth, which would not be dulled or forgotten, toss and stretch himself as he might; and he would vow in desperation to go down the first thing in the morning and have it out with Jordan; and so, at last, he would fall into a dose, as the grey twilight was stealing on the night.

In the morning his resolution would be with him still. All through dressing and shaving he would feel determined "to have it out with Jordan," and he would run over in his mind the points of his unanswerable argument on which his co-trustee must needs be caught, and compelled to the fullest explanation, clearing away another expected sophism in the defence, with each sc.r.a.pe of the razor on his chin. When he descended to breakfast, however, the morning papers, the smoke of the coffee, the greetings of his fellow-boarders in the hotel, would gradually lead him back to the tone of every-day life and its amenities, and then his intentions would grow less stern. The trenchant points in his argument would grow dim before his eyes, and he would recollect how many things there might be to say on the other side. Perhaps, too, he might have been misinformed as to something, or he might be under some misapprehension--for who, after all, can tell the true inwardness of his neighbour's affairs until death or bankruptcy overtake him?--and how very uncomfortable his position would then be! In what an ungenerous, nay, churlish light he would be exhibiting himself before this most open-hearted and genial of all his friends! Indeed the prospect was not pleasant; then why should he force an interview and place himself in a false position? Was it not a shame in one claiming to be "high-toned," a soldier and a Southern gentleman of _ante bellum_ times, to harbour injurious suspicions of a friend? "He must be bilious this morning--want of exercise. He would ride off his megrims in a two hours' gallop."

And so the days would pa.s.s in struggles to drive away the doubts which returned but the more persistently with darkness to spoil his sleep, till at length, in dread of their nightly upbraidings, he would nerve himself to the ungrateful task and stride down to Jordan's chambers, frowningly constraining himself to antic.i.p.ate the worst, if only to keep his courage from oozing away, as it sometimes would, when he reached the office door, leaving him to turn aside at the last moment and retreat ignominiously into his club, there to solace his drooping self-respect with brandy and soda. When, however, in sterner mood he persevered, it was still not always that the much-engaged lawyer could be seen. He was busy upon a case and could see no one; a client was with him, and two more were waiting their turn for an audience, or he was in court, and Considine--not altogether sorry at the respite--went home in comparative relief. He had done what he could, at least, and surely now the suspicions would leave him for a night or two and let him sleep in peace.