Mistress and Maid Part 25

Nothing but the great strait they were in could ever have driven her to consent that Mr. Ascott should be applied to at all; but since it must be done, she felt that she had better do it herself. Was it from some lurking doubt or dread that Ascott might not speak the entire truth, as she had insisted upon its being spoken, before Mr. Ascott was asked for any thing? since whatever he gave must be given with a full knowledge on his part of the whole pitiable state of affairs.

It was with a strange, sad feeling--the sadder because he never seemed to suspect it, but talked and laughed with her as usual--that she took her nephew's arm and walked silently through the dark squares, perfectly well aware that he only asked her to go with him in order to do an unpleasant thing which he did not like to do himself, and that she only went with him in the character of watch, or supervisor, to try and save him from doing something which she herself would be ashamed should be done.

Yet he was ostensibly the head, hope, and stay of the family. Alas!

many a family has to submit to, and smile under an equally melancholy and fatal sham.

CHAPTER XVII.

Mr. Ascott was sitting half asleep in his solitary dining room, his face rosy with wine, his heart warmed also, probably from the same cause. Not that he was in the least "tipsy"--that low-word applicable only to low people, and not men of property, who have a right to enjoy all the good things of this life. He was scarcely even "merry," merely "comfortable," in that cozy, benevolent state which middle aged or elderly gentlemen are apt to fall into after a good dinner and good wine, when they have no mental resources, and the said good dinner and good wine const.i.tutes their best notion of felicity.

Yet wealth and comfort are not things to be despised. Hilary herself was not insensible to the pleasantness of this warm, well-lit, crimson-atmosphered apartment. She as well as her neighbors liked pretty things about her, soft, harmonious colors to look at and wear, well-cooked food to eat, cheerful rooms to live in. If she could have had all these luxuries with those she loved to share them, no doubt she would have been much happier. But yet she felt to the full that solemn truth that "a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things that he possesses;" and though hers was outwardly so dark, so full of poverty, anxiety, and pain, still she knew that inwardly it owned many things, one thing especially, which no money could buy, and without which fine houses, fine furniture, and fine clothes--indeed, all the comforts and splendors of existence, would be worse that valueless, actual torment. So as she looked around her she felt not the slightest envy of her sister Selina.

Nor of honest Peter, who rose up from his arm-chair, pulling the yellow silk handkerchief from his sleepy face, and, it must be confessed, receiving his future connections very willingly, and even kindly.

Now how was he to be told? How when she and Ascott sat over the wine and desert he had ordered for them, listening to the rich man's complaisant pomposities, were they to explain that they had come a begging, asking him, as the climax to his liberalities, to advance a few pounds in order to keep the young man whom he had for years generously and sufficiently maintained out of prison? This, smooth it over as one might, was, Hilary felt, the plain English of the matter, and as minute after minute lengthened, and nothing was said of their errand, she sat upon thorns.

But Ascott drank his wine and ate his walnuts quite composedly.

At last Hilary said, in a sort of desperation, "Mr. Ascott, I want to speak to you."

"With pleasure, my dear young lady. Will you come to my study?--I have a most elegantly furnished study, I a.s.sure you. And any affair of yours--"

"Thank you, but it is not mine; it concerns my nephew here."

And then she braced up all her courage, and while Ascott busied himself over his walnuts--he had the grace to look excessively uncomfortable--she told, as briefly as possible, the bitter truth.

Mr. Ascott listened, apparently without surprise, and any how, without comment. His self-important loquacity ceased, and his condescending smile pa.s.sed into a sharp, reticent, business look. He knitted his s.h.a.ggy brows, contracted that coa.r.s.ely-hung, but resolute mouth, in which lay the secret of his success in life, b.u.t.toned up his coat, and stuck his hands behind him over his coat-tails. As he stood there on his own hearth, with all his comfortable splendors about him--a man who had made his own money, hardly and honestly, who from the days when he was a poor errand-lad had had no one to trust to but himself, yet had managed always to help himself, ay, and others too--Hilary's stern sense of justice contrasted him with the graceful young man who sat opposite to him, so much his inferior, and so much his debtor. She owned that Peter Ascott had a right to look both contemptuously and displeased.

"A very pretty story, but I almost expected it," said he.

And there he stopped. In his business capacity he was too acute a man to be a man of many words, and his feelings, if they existed, were kept to himself.

"It all comes to this, young man," he continued, after an uncomfortable pause, in which Hilary could have counted every beat of her heart, and even Ascott played with his wine gla.s.s in a nervous kind of way--"you want money, and you think I'm sure to give it, because it wouldn't be pleasant just now to have discreditable stories going about concerning the future Mrs. Ascott's relatives.

You're quite right, it wouldn't. But I'm too old a bird to be caught with chaff for all that. You must rise very early in the morning to take me in."

Hilary started up in an agony of shame. "That's not fair, Mr. Ascott.

We do not take you in. Have we not told you the whole truth? I was determined you should know it before we asked you for one farthing of your money. If there were the smallest shadow of a chance for Ascott in any other way, we never would have come to you at all. It is a horrible, horrible humiliation!"

It might be that Peter Ascott had a soft place in his heart, or that this time, just before his marriage, was the one crisis which sometimes occurs in a hard man's life, when, if the right touch comes, he becomes malleable ever after; but he looked kindly at the poor girl, and said, in quite a gentle way, "Don't vex yourself, my dear. I shall give the young fellow what he wants: n.o.body ever called Peter Ascott stingy. But he has cost me enough already: he must shift for himself now. Hand me over that check-book, Ascott; but remember this is the last you'll ever see of my money."

He wrote the memorandum of the check inside the page, then tore off the check itself, and proceeded to write the words "Twenty pounds,"

date it, and sign it, lingering over the signature, as if he had a certain pride in the honest name "Peter Ascott," and was well aware of its monetary value on Change and elsewhere.

"There, Miss Halary, I flatter myself that's not a bad signature, nor would be easily forged. One can not be too careful over-- What's that? a letter, John?"

By his extreme eagerness, almost s.n.a.t.c.hing it from his footman's hands, it was one of importance. He made some sort of rough apology, drew the writing materials to him, wrote one or two business-looking letters, and made out one or two more checks.

"Here's yours Ascott; take it, and let me have done with it," said he, throwing it across the table folded up. "Can't waste time on such small transactions. Ma'am, excuse me, but five thousand pounds depends on my getting these letters written and sent off within a quarter of an hour."

Hilary bent her head, and sat watching the pen scratch, and the clock tick on the mantle-piece; thinking if this really was to be the last of his G.o.dfather's allowance, what on earth would become of Ascott?

For Ascott himself, he said not a word. Not even when, the letters dispatched, Mr. Ascott rose, and administering a short, sharp homily, tacitly dismissed his visitors: Whether this silence was sullenness, cowardice, or shame, Hilary could not guess.

She quitted the house with a sense of grinding humiliation almost intolerable. But still the worst was over; the money had been begged and given--there was no fear of a prison. And spite of every thing, Hilary felt a certain relief that this was the last time Ascott would be indebted to his G.o.dfather. Perhaps this total cessation of extraneous help might force the young man upon his own resources, compel his easy temperament into active energy, and bring out in him those dormant qualities that his aunts still fondly hoped existed in him.

"Don't be down-hearted, Ascott," she said: "we will manage to get on somehow till you bear of a practice, and then you must work--work like a 'brick,' as you call it. You will, I know."

He answered nothing.

"I won't let you give in, my boy," she went on, kindly. "Who would ever dream of giving in at your age, with health and strength, a good education, and no enc.u.mbrances whatever--not even aunts! for we will not stand in your way, be sure of that. If you can not settle here, you shall try to get out abroad, as you have sometimes wished, as an army surgeon or a ship's doctor; you say these appointments are easy enough to be had. Why not try? Any thing; we will consent to any thing, if only we can see your life busy and useful and happy."

Thus she talked, feeling far more tenderly to him in his forlorn despondency than when they had quitted the house two hours before.

But Ascott took not the slightest notice. A strange fit of sullenness or depression seemed to have come over him, which, when they reached home and met Aunt Johanna's silently-questioning face, changed into devil-may-care indifference.

"Oh yes, aunt, we've done it; we've got the money, and now I may go to the dogs as soon as I like."

"No," said Aunt Hilary, "it is nothing of the sort: it is only that Ascott must now depend upon himself, and not upon his G.o.dfather. Take courage," she added, and went up to him and kissed him on the forehead; "we'll never let our boy go to the dogs! and as for this disappointment, or any disappointment, why it's just like a cold bath, it takes away your breath for the time, and then you rise up out of it brisker and fresher than ever."

But Ascott shook his head with a fierce denial. "Why should that old fellow be as rich as Croesus and I as poor as a rat? Why should I be put into the world to enjoy myself, and can't? Why was I made like what I am, and then punished for it? Whose fault is it?"

Ay, whose? The eternal, unsolvable problem rose up before Hilary's imagination. The ghastly spectre of that everlasting doubt, which haunts even the firmest faith sometimes--and which all the nonsense written about that mystery which,

"Binding nature fate to fate, Leaves free the human will,"

only makes darker than before--oppressed her for the time being with an inexpressible dread.

Ay, why was it that the boy was what he was? From his inherited nature, his temperament, or his circ.u.mstances? What, or more awful question still, who was to blame?

But as Hilary's thoughts went deeper down the question answered itself--at least as far as it ever can be answered in this narrow, finite stage of being. Whose will--we dare not say whose blame--is it that evil must inevitably generate evil? that the smallest wrong-doing in any human being rouses a chain of results which may fatally involve other human beings in an almost incalculable circle of misery? The wages of sin is death. Were it not so sin would cease to be sin, and holiness, holiness. If He, the All-holy, who for some inscrutable purpose saw fit to allow the existence of evil, allowed any other law than this, in either the spiritual or material world, would He not be denying Himself, counteracting the necessities of His own righteous essence, to which evil is so antagonistic, that we can not doubt it must be in the end cast into total annihilation--into the allegorical lake of fire and brimstone, which is the "second death?" Nay, do they not in reality deny Him and His holiness almost as much as Atheists do, who preach that the one great salvation which He has sent into the world is a salvation from punishment--a keeping out of h.e.l.l and getting into heaven--instead of a salvation from sin, from the power and love of sin, through the love of G.o.d in Christ?

I tell these thoughts, because like lighting they pa.s.sed through Hilary's mind, as sometimes a whole chain of thoughts do, link after link, and because they helped her to answer her nephew quietly and briefly, for she saw he was in no state of mind to be argued with.

"I can not explain, Ascott, why it is that any of us are what we are, and why things happen to us as they do; it is a question we none of us understand, and in this world never shall. But if we know what we ought to be, and how we may make the best of every thing, good or bad, that happens to us, surely that is enough without perplexing ourselves about any thing more."

Ascott smiled, half contemptuously, half carelessly: he was not a young fellow likely to perplex himself long or deeply about these sort of things.

"Any how, I've got 20 in my pocket, so I can't starve for a day or two. Let's see; where is it to be cashed? Hillo! who would have thought the old fellow would have been so stupid? Look there, Aunt Hilary!"

She was so unfamiliar with checks for 20, poor little woman! that she did not at first recognize the omission of the figures "20" at the left-hand corner. Otherwise the check was correct.

"Ho, ho!" laughed Ascott, exceedingly amused, so easily was the current of his mind changed. "It must have been the 5000 pending that muddled the 'cute old fellow's brains. I wonder whether he will remember it afterward, and come posting up to see that I've taken no ill-advantage of his blunder; changed this 'Twenty' into 'Seventy.' I easily could, and put the figures 70 here. What a good joke!"

"Had ye not better go to him at once, and have the matter put right?"

"Rubbish! I can put it right myself. It makes no difference who fills up a check, so that it is signed all correct. A deal you women know of business!"

But still Hilary, with a certain womanish uneasiness about money matters, and an anxiety to have the thing settled beyond doubt, urged him to go.