Sir Brook Fossbrooke Volume I Part 20

"Well!" said Tom, as he threw his napkin on the table, and pushed his chair back, "I 'll be shot if I know how I provoked that burst of anger, or to what I owe that very neat and candid appreciation of my character."

Lucy threw her arm around his neck, and, bending over his shoulder till her face touched his own, said, "Oh, my dearest Tom, if you only knew how nervous and susceptible he is, in part from his nature, but more, far more, from suffering and sorrow! Left to the solitude of his own bitter thoughts for years, without one creature to whisper a kind word or a hopeful thought, is it any wonder if his heart has begun to consume itself?"

"Devilish bitter diet it must find it! Pa.s.s me over the Madeira, Lucy.

I mean to have my last gla.s.s to the old gentleman's health and better temper."

"He has moments of n.o.ble generosity that would win all your love," said she, enthusiastically.

"You have a harder lot than ever I thought it, my poor Lucy," said he, looking into her eyes with an affectionate solicitude. "This is so unlike our old home."

"Oh, so unlike!" said she; and her lip quivered and her eyes grew glazy.

"And can you bear it, girl? Does it not seem to you like a servitude to put up with such causeless pa.s.sion, such capricious anger as this?"

She shook her head mournfully, but made no answer.

"If it be your woman's nature enables you to do it, all I can say is, I don't envy you your s.e.x."

"But, Tom, remember his years,--remember his age."

"By Jove, he took good care to remind me of my own!--not that he was so far wrong in what he said of me, Lucy. I felt all the while he had 'hit the blot,' and I would have owned it too, if he had n't taken himself off so quickly."

"If you had, Tom,--if you had said but one word to this purport,--you would have seen how n.o.bly forgiving he could be in an instant."

"Forgiving,--humph! I don't think the forgiveness was to have come from _him_."

"Sir William wishes to speak with you, Miss Lucy," said the butler, entering hastily.

"I must go, Tom,--good-bye. I will write to you tomorrow,--to-night, if I can,--good-bye, my dearest brother; be sure to come on Tuesday,--mind, Tuesday. You will be certain to find me alone."

CHAPTER XVIII. THE FIRST LETTER HOME.

The post of the morning after the events of our last chapter brought Lucy a letter from her father. It was the first since his departure.

What chapters in life are these first letters after absence! How do they open to us glimpses of not only new scenes and incidents, but of emotions and sentiments which, while we had relied upon them, we had never so palpably realized before! There is such ecstasy in thinking that time and s.p.a.ce are no barriers against love, and that, even as we read, the heart that sent the message is beating with affection for us.

Lendrick's letter to his daughter was full of fondness; her image had evidently gone with him through all the changes of the voyage, and their old home mingled in every thought of the new life before him. It was plain enough how unwillingly he turned from the past to the present, and how far rather he would revel in the scenes around the Shannon than turn to the solitary existence that awaited him beyond the seas.

"I console myself, dear Lucy," wrote he, "as well as I may, by thinking that in my great sacrifice I have earned the love of my father,--that love from which I have lived so long estranged, and for which my heart had never ceased to yearn; and I delight to think how by this time you must have grown into his heart, soothed many a care for him, and imparted to his solitary life the blessing of that bright hopefulness which gave even to my own dull existence a glow of glad sunshine. Out of my selfishness I cannot help asking you to remind him of all I have given him. And now that my egotism is so fully aroused, let me tell of myself. The voyage was less dreary than my fears had made it. I suffered at first, it is true; and when at last use had inured me to the sea, I fell into a sort of low feverish state, more the result of homesickness, perhaps, than real malady. It was a condition of rather depression than disease. Nothing could engage, nothing interest me. I could not read, neither could I partake in any of the various pastimes by which my fellow-voyagers beguiled the hours; and I found myself in that pitiable state of sinking daily lower and lower, without what I could call a cause for the depression.

"I have more than once in my experience as a doctor had to deal with such cases, and I own now that I have neither valued their intensity nor understood their importance. I did not, it is true, go to the vulgar extent of calling them hippishness; but I did the next worse thing,--I treated them as the offspring of an over-easy existence, of a placid frictionless life.

"With much shame do I recall how often I have rallied these poor sufferers on the vast s.p.a.ce that separated them from real sorrow. There is no unreality, dearest Lucy, in whatever so overcomes the brain that thought is all but madness, and so pains the heart that the whole wish is for death. There are subtler influences in our nature than those that work by the brain or the blood, and the maladies of these have but one physician.

"It was my great good-fortune to have a fellow-traveller who took the kindest interest in me. If he could not cure, he certainly did much to console me. He was a young man, lately gazetted on the commander-in-chief's staff, and who came on board of us in the Downs from a frigate bound for England. It was the merest accident that he did not miss us and lose his pa.s.sage.

"I am not a very attractive person, and it was with some astonishment that I heard he desired to make my acquaintance; and on meeting he said, 'Though you have forgotten me, Dr. Lendrick, I had the honor of being presented to you at Killaloe by my friend Sir Brook Fossbrooke;' and I then remembered all about it, and how it was his features were so familiar to me,--very good features, too, they were, with much candor and manliness in the expression,--altogether a handsome young fellow, and with an air of good birth about him just as distinctive as his good looks.

"I am so unused to being singled out by a stranger as the object of attentions, that I never fully got over the surprise which this young man's attachment to me inspired; and I am not using too strong a word, Lucy, when I call it attachment. There might have been, at least to his eyes, something in our respective fortunes that suggested this drawing towards me. Who knows whether he too might not have parted from a loved home and friends!

"When he first came on board, his manner was wild,--almost incoherent; he ran here and there, like one in search of something or of somebody, but whose name he had forgotten. Indeed he actually startled me by the eagerness with which he addressed me; and when I informed him that I was alone, quite alone, and as friendles as himself on board, I thought he would have fainted. In all this suffering and emotion I suspected that I found what led him to a companionship with one as sorrow-stricken as himself.

"As it was, there was no care he did not bestow on me. My own dear boy himself could not have nursed me more tenderly, nor tried to rally my spirits with more affectionate solicitude. He read for me, played chess with me, he even lent himself to the sort of reading I liked best, to become more companionable to me, withdrawing all this while from the gay and pleasant society of young fellows like himself. In a word, Lucy, by his devotion to me, he sent through my heart a lurking thought, almost like a hope, that I must somehow have certain qualities for which the world at large had not yet credited me, which could make me of interest to a young, bright-natured creature, fresh to life and all its enjoyments; and from the self-esteem of this notion I really believe I drew more encouragement than from any amount of more avowed approbation.

"I feel I am not wearying you, my darling Lucy, by dwelling even with prolixity on what beguiled the long hours of absence, the weary, weary days at sea.

"When we landed, for a time at least, I only met him now and then; he had his duties, and I had mine. I had to look out for a house. My predecessor's family are still occupying the official residence, and have begged of me leave to remain there a little longer. I had my visits of duty or compliment to make, and a whole round of little courtesies to perform, for which I well know I have all your sympathy. Every one was, however, kind and polite; some were even friendly. Indeed, my very want of manner, my awkward bashfulness and deficient tact, have, I can see, not injured me in the esteem of those whose worldly breeding and knowledge have taught them to be compa.s.sionate as well as courteous.

"Amongst the many persons to whom I was presented I made two acquaintances of more than common interest to me,--I will not go farther, and say of any great degree of gratification. In dining with the Governor, yesterday week, he said, 'You will meet a relation to-day, Dr. Lendrick. His ship has just put in to coal, and he and his wife dine with us.' Though quite persuaded the Governor was laboring under some mistake, I waited with anxiety as the different arrivals were announced, and at last came Colonel and Mrs. Sewell,--the Colonel being Lady Lendrick's son by her first marriage,--what relation to myself all my skill in genealogy is unable to p.r.o.nounce.

"We met, however, shook hands very cordially, and I had the honor to conduct Mrs. Sewell to table. I am unfortunately terribly p.r.o.ne to first impressions, and all those that I entertain regarding the Colonel are adverse. He is a tall, handsome man, easy in manner, and with the readiness in speech and address that shows familiarity with life. He however will never suffer your eyes to meet his, never exchange a frank look with you, and seems, from some cause or other, to be always laboring under an impatient anxiety to be somewhere else than where he stands at the moment.

"He asked about my father, and never waited for my reply; and he laughingly said, with a bad taste that shocked me, 'My mother and he never could hit it off together.'

"Mrs. Sewell interested me more than her husband. She is still very handsome; she must at one time have been perfectly beautiful. She is very gentle, low-voiced, and quiet, talking with a simplicity that even I can detect only covers a deep knowledge of life and the world. The dread of her husband seems, however, to pervade all she says or does.

She changes color when he looks at her, and if he addresses her, she sometimes seems about to faint. His slightest word is accepted as a command; and yet with all this terror--terror it was--I caught a look that once pa.s.sed between them that actually overwhelmed me with amazement. It was the very look that two accomplices might have interchanged in a moment when they could not communicate more freely.

Don't think that there is any exaggeration in this, Lucy, or that I am a.s.suming to possess a finer insight into human motives than my neighbors; but my old craft as a doctor supplies me with a technical skill that no acquaintance with the mere surface-life of the world could have given; for the _Medico_ reads mankind by a stronger and steadier light than ever shone out of conventionalities or social usages.

"'We are on our way to England, to Ireland, perhaps,' he said to me, in a careless way; but she, not aware of his speech, told me they had been invited to the Priory,--a piece of information which I own startled me. First of all, they are not by any means like people who would be agreeable to my father, nor, so far as I can guess, are they persons who would easily sacrifice their own modes of life and habits to the wishes of a recluse. Least of all, dearest Lucy, do I desire this lady to be your companion. She has, I see, many attractive qualities; she may have others as good and excellent; but if I do not greatly err, her whole nature and being are in subjection to a very stern, cold, and unscrupulous man, and she is far from being all that she should be with such gifts as she possesses, and farther again from what she might have been with a happier destiny in marriage.

"If it were not that you are so certain to meet, and not improbably see much of these people, I should not have filled so much of my letter with them; but I confess to you, since I saw them they have never been out of my thoughts. Our relationship--if that be the name for it--led us rapidly into considerable intimacy; he brought his children--two lovely girls, and a little cherub of a boy of three years old--to see me yesterday, and Mrs. Sewell comes to take me to drive every day after luncheon. She expresses the most ardent desire to meet you, and says she knows you will love each other. She carried off your picture t' other day, and I was in real terror till I got it back again. She seemed in ecstasy on being told you were living with your grandfather; but I saw a look she shot across to her husband as I told it, and I saw his reply by another glance that revealed to me how my tidings had caused surprise, and something more than surprise.

"You must not set me down as fanciful or captious, dear Lucy; but the simple truth is, I have never had a quiet moment since I knew these people. They inspire me with the same sort of anxiety I have often felt when, in the course of my profession, some symptom has supervened in a case not very grave or startling in itself, but still such as I have always found heralding in very serious combinations. It is therefore the doctor as much as the father that takes alarm here.

"It is just possible--mind, I say possible--that I am a little jealous of these Sewells, for they have already seduced from me my young friend Lionel, who was so kind to me on the voyage. I scarcely see him now, he is always with them; and yesterday I heard--it may not be true--that he is already weary of Cape Town, and means to return home by the next ship,--that is, along with the Sewells, who are to sail on Friday.

"I am certain that Sewell is neither a good nor a safe companion for a young fellow so bashful and unsuspecting as Lionel Trafford.

"There are men who read the world the way certain dishonest critics quote a book or an article, by extracting all that is objectionable, and, omitting context and connection, place pa.s.sage after pa.s.sage in quick sequence. By such a process as this, human life is a pandemonium.

I half suspect Sewell to be one of this scornful school; and if so, a most dangerous intimate. The heartfelt racy enjoyment of his manner, as he records some trait of rascality or fraud, is not more marked than the contemptuous sneer with which he receives a story that bears testimony to generosity or trustfulness, throwing over his air in each that tone of knowledge of life and the world that seems to say, 'These are the things we all of us know well, though only a few have either the manliness or the honesty to declare them openly.'

"I may have tired you with this long tirade, my dear Lucy, but I am pouring out to you my thoughts as they come,--come, too, out of the fulness of much reflection. Remember, too, my sweet child, that I have often told you, 'It is just some half-dozen people with whom we are intimate who make or mar our fate in life.' Big as the world is, we play a very small game in one corner of the board, and it behoves us to look well to those with whom we are to play it.

"If I am jealous of the Sewells for having robbed me of my young friend, I am envious of himself also, for he is going back to England,--going back to the loved faces and scenes he has left,--going back to Home.

There 's the word, Lucy, that gathers all that we come to live for, when life really is a blessing.

"It would seem too early to p.r.o.nounce, but I think I can already see this is not a place to which I would like to bring you; but I will not prejudge it. It may be that time will reconcile me to some things I now dislike; it may be, too, that the presence of my own around me will dispose me to take a cheerier view of much that now depresses me. I have a great deal to do; I am employed during the whole day, and never really free till evening, when society claims me. This latter is my only severe burden. You can imagine me daily dining out, and fancy the martyrdom it costs me.

"I am most anxious to hear of you, and how you like your new life,--I mean how you bear it. Liking is not the word for that which entails separation. I feel a.s.sured that you will love my father. You will be generous towards those traits which the host of mere acquaintanceship took pleasure in exaggerating, and you will be fair enough not to misjudge his great qualities because of certain faults of temper. He has great gifts, Lucy; and as you will see, the two pendulums of his nature, heart and head, swing together, and he is as n.o.ble in sentiment as he is grand in action.

"It almost consoles me for separation when I think that I have transferred to him the blessings of that presence that made my own sunshine. Mind that you send me a diary of your life. I want your whole day; I want to see how existence is filled, so that whenever my mind flies back to you I may say, 'She is in her garden,--she is working,--she is at her music,--she is reading to him.'

"It was a mistake to send me here, Lucy. There are men in scores who would rejoice in the opportunities of such a place, and see in it the road to rapid fortune. I only look at one feature of it,--the banishment. Not that by nature I am discontented,--I hope and believe this is not so,--but I feel that there are many things in life far worse than poverty. I have not the same dread of narrow means most men have.

I do not feel depressed in spirit when I lie beneath a very humble roof, and sit down to a coa.r.s.e meal; nor has splendor the power to exhilarate or elevate me. I am essentially humble, and I need nothing that is not generally within the reach of the humble; and I vow to you in all truth, I 'd rather be your grandfather's gardener than be the governor of this great colony. There 's an ign.o.ble confession, but keep it for yourself.

"I have written a long letter to Tom by this post, and addressed it to Mr. Dempster, who will forward it if he should have left before this. It distresses me greatly when I think that I have not been able to give him any definite career in life before we parted. Mere apt.i.tude has no value with the world. You may be willing and ready to do fifty things, but some fourth-rate fellow who _knows_ how to do one will beat you. The marketable quality in life is skill; the thing least in request is genius. Tom has this harsh lesson yet to learn, but learn it he must, for the world is a schoolmaster that will stand no skulking, and however little to our taste be its tasks, we must come up when called on, and go on with our lesson as well as we may.

"In many respects Sir Brook Fossbrooke was an unfortunate companion for him to have chanced upon. A man of considerable resources, who has employed them all unprofitably, is a bad pilot. The very waywardness of such a nature was exactly the quality to be avoided in Tom's case; but what was to be done? Poverty can no more select its company than its climate; and it would have been worse than ungracious to have rejected a friendship so generously and freely offered.