The Tenants of Malory Volume I Part 14

"Yes, of course; I never thought anything else--eventually; and I knew all along you were jesting. I told these little creatures so this morning, over and over again. If they could speak they would say so.

Would not you, you two dear little witches?"

So she carried out her pets with her, and hung their cage among the boughs of the tree that stood by the rustic seat to which she used to take her book.

"Well, I've relieved her mind," thought Miss Sheckleton.

But oddly enough, she found the young lady not sad, but rather cross and fierce all that afternoon--talking more bitterly than ever to her squirrels, about Malory, and with an angry kind of gaiety, of her approaching exile to France.

"It is not always easy to know how to please young ladies," thought Miss Sheckleton. "They won't always take the trouble to know their own minds. Poor thing! It _is_ very lonely--very lonesome, to be sure;--and this little temper will blow over."

So, full of these thoughts, Miss Sheckleton repaired to that mysterious study door within which Sir Booth, dangerous as a caged beast, paced his floor, and stormed and ground his teeth, over--not his own vices, prodigalities, and madness, but the fancied villanies of mankind--glared through his window in his paroxysms, and sent his curses like muttered thunder across the sea over the head of old Pendillion--and then would subside, and write long, rambling, rubbishy letters to his attorneys in London, which it was Miss Sheckleton's business to enclose and direct, in her feminine hand, to her old friend Miss Ogden, of Bolton Street, Piccadilly, who saw after the due delivery of these missives, and made herself generally useful during the mystery and crisis of the Fanshawe affairs.

Outside the sombre precincts of Malory Margaret Fanshawe would not go.

Old Miss Sheckleton had urged her. Perhaps it was a girlish perversity; perhaps she really disliked the idea of again meeting or making an acquaintance. At all events, she was against any more excursions. Thus the days were dull at Malory, and even Miss Sheckleton was weary of her imprisonment.

It is a nice thing to hit the exact point of reserve and difficulty at which an interest of a certain sort is piqued, without danger of being extinguished. Perhaps it is seldom compa.s.sed by art, and a fluke generally does it. I am absolutely certain that there was no design here. But there is a spirit of contrariety--a product of pride, of a sensitiveness almost morbid, of a reserve gliding into duplicity, a duplicity without calculation--which yet operates like design. Cleve was piqued--Cleve was angry. The spirit of the chase was roused, as often as he looked at the dusky woods of Malory.

And now he had walked on three successive days past the old gateway, and on each of them, loitered long on the wind-beaten hill that overlooks the grounds of Malory. But in vain. He was no more accustomed to wait than Louis XIV. Now wonder he grew impatient, and meditated the wildest schemes--even that of walking up to the hall-door, and asking to see Sir Booth and Miss Sheckleton, and, if need be, Miss Fanshawe. He only knew that, one way or another, he _must_ see her. He was a young man of exorbitant impatience, and a violent will, and would control events.

There are consequences, of course, and these subjugators are controlled in their turn. Time, as mechanical science shows us, is an element in power; and patience is in durability. G.o.d waits, and G.o.d is might. And without patience we enter not into the kingdom of G.o.d, which is the kingdom of power, and the kingdom of eternity.

Cleve Verney's romance, next morning, was doomed to a prosaic interruption. He was examining a chart of the Cardyllian estuary, which hangs in the library, trying to account for the boat's having touched the bank at low water, at a point where he fancied there was a fathom to spare, when the rustic servant entered with--

"Please, sir, a gentleman which his name is Mr. Larkin, is at the door, and wishes to see you, sir, on partickler business, please."

"Just wait a moment, Edward. Three fathom--two--four feet--by Jove! So it is. We might have been aground for five hours; a shame there isn't a buoy there--got off in a coach, by Jove! _Larkin_? Has he no card?"

"Yes, sir, please."

"Oh! yes--very good. Mr. Larkin--The Lodge. Does he look like a gatekeeper?"

"No, sir, please; quite the gentleman."

"What the devil can he want of me? Are you certain he did not ask for my uncle?"

"Yes, sir--the Honourable Mr. Verney--which I told him he wasn't here."

"And why did not you send him away, then?"

"He asked me if you were here, and wished to see you partickler, sir."

"Larkin--The Lodge; what is he like--tall or short--old or young?" asked Cleve.

"Tall gentleman, please, sir--not young--helderley, sir, rayther."

"By Jove! Larkin? I think it _is_.--Is he bald--a long face, eh?" asked Cleve with sudden interest.

"Yes, sir, a good deal in that way, sir--rayther."

"Show him in," said Cleve; "I shall hear all about it, now," he soliloquised as the man departed. "Yes, the luckiest thing in the world!"

The tall attorney, with the tall bald head and pink eyelids, entered simpering, with hollow jaws, and a stride that was meant to be perfectly easy and gentlemanlike. Mr. Larkin had framed his costume upon something he had once seen upon somebody whom he secretly worshipped as a great authority in quiet elegance. But every article in the attorney's wardrobe looked always new--a sort of lavender was his favourite tint--a lavender waistcoat, lavender trowsers, lavender gloves--so that, as the tall lank figure came in, a sort of blooming and vernal effect, in spite of his open black frock-coat, seemed to enter and freshen the chamber.

"How d'ye do, Mr. Larkin? My uncle is at present in France. Sit down, pray--can I be of any use?" said Cleve, who now recollected his appearance perfectly, and did not like it.

The attorney, smiling engagingly, more and more, and placing a very smooth new hat upon the table, sat himself down, crossing one long leg over the other, throwing himself languidly back, and letting one of his long arms swing over the back of his chair, so that his fingers almost touched the floor, said--

"Oh?" in a prolonged tone of mild surprise. "They quite misinformed me in town--not at Verney House--I did not allow myself time to call there; but my agents, they a.s.sured me that your uncle, the Honourable Kiffyn Fulke Verney, was at present down here at Ware, and a most exquisite retreat it certainly is. My occupations, and I may say my habits, call me a good deal among the residences of our aristocracy," he continued, with a careless grandeur and a slight wave of his hand, throwing himself a little more back, "and I have seen nothing, I a.s.sure you, Mr. Verney, more luxurious and architectural than this patrician house of Ware, with its tasteful colonnade, and pilastered front, and the distant view of the fashionable watering-place of Cardyllian, which also belongs to the family; nothing certainly lends a more dignified charm to the scene, Mr.

Verney, than a distant view of family property, where, as in this instance, it is palpably accidental--where it is at all forced, as in the otherwise highly magnificent seat of my friend Sir Thomas Oldbull, baronet; so far from elevating, it pains one, it hurts one's taste"--and Mr. Jos. Larkin shrugged and winced a little, and shook his head--"Do _you_ know Sir Thomas?--_no_--I dare say--he's quite a new man, Sir Thomas--we all look on him in that light in our part of the world--a--in fact, a _parvenu_," which word Mr. Larkin p.r.o.nounced as if it were spelled _pair vennew_. "But, you know, the British Const.i.tution, every man may go up--we can't help it--we can't keep them down. Money is power, Mr. Verney, as the old Earl of Coachhouse once said to me--and so it is; and when they make a lot of it, they come up, and we must only receive them, and make the best of them."

"Have you had breakfast, Mr. Larkin?" inquired Cleve, in answer to all this.

"Thanks, yes--at Llwynan--a very sweet spot--one of the sweetest, I should say, in this beauteous country."

"I don't know--I dare say--I think you wished to see me on business, Mr.

Larkin?" said Cleve.

"I must say, Mr. Verney, you will permit me, that I really have been taken a little by surprise. I had expected confidently to find your uncle, the Honourable Kiffyn Fulke Verney, here, where I had certainly no hope of having the honour of finding you."

I must here interpolate the fact that no person in or out of England was more exactly apprised of the whereabout of the Verneys, uncle and nephew, at the moment when he determined to visit Ware, with the ostensible object of seeing the Hon. Kiffyn Fulke, and the real one of seeing Mr. Cleve, than was my friend Mr. Larkin. He was, however, as we know, a gentleman of ingenious morals and labyrinthine tastes. With truth he was, as it were, on bowing terms, and invariably spoke of her with respect, but that was all. There was no intimacy, she was an utterly impracticable adviser, and Mr. Larkin had grown up under a more convenient tuition.

"The information, however, I feel concerns you, my dear sir, as nearly, in a manner, as it does your uncle; in fact, your youth taken into account, more momentously than it can so old a gentleman. I would, therefore, merely venture to solicit one condition, and that is, that you will be so good as not to mention me to your uncle as having conveyed this information to you, as he might himself have wished to be the first person to open it, and my having done so might possibly induce in his mind an unpleasant feeling."

"I shan't see my uncle before the fifteenth," said Cleve Verney.

"A long wait, Mr. Verney, for such intelligence as it falls to my lot to communicate, which, in short, I shall be most _happy_ to lay before you, provided you will be so good as to say you desire it on the condition I feel it due to all parties to suggest."

"You mean that my uncle need not be told anything about this interview.

I don't see that he _need_, if it concerns _me_. What concerns _him_, I suppose you will tell him, Mr. Larkin."

"Quite so; that's quite my meaning; merely to avoid unpleasant feeling.

I am most anxious to acquaint you--but you understand the delicacy of my position with your uncle--and that premised, I have now to inform you"--here he dropped his voice, and raised his hand a little, like a good man impressing a sublime religious fact--"that your uncle, the Honourable Arthur Verney, is no more."

The young man flushed up to the very roots of his hair. There was a little pink flush, also, on the attorney's long cheeks; for there was something exciting in even making such an announcement. The consequences were so unspeakably splendid.

Mr. Larkin saw a vision of permanent, confidential, and lucrative relations with the rich Verney family, such as warmed the cool tide of his blood, and made him feel for the moment at peace with all mankind.

Cleve was looking in the attorney's eyes--the attorney in his. There was a silence for while you might count three or four. Mr. Larkin saw that his intended client, Cleve--the future Viscount Verney--was dazzled, and a little confounded. Recollecting himself, he turned his shrewd gaze on the marble face of Plato, who stood on his pedestal near the window, and a smile seraphic and melancholy lighted up the features and the sad pink eyes of the G.o.dly attorney. He raised them; he raised his great hand in the lavender glove, and shook his long head devoutly.

"Mysterious are the dealings of Providence, Mr. Verney; happy those who read the lesson, sir. How few of us so favoured! Wonderful are his ways!"

With a little effort, and an affectation of serenity, Cleve spoke--

"No very great wonder, however, considering he was sixty-four in May last." The young man knew his vagabond uncle Arthur's age to an hour, and n.o.body can blame him much for his attention to those figures. "It might not have happened, of course, for ten or twelve years, but it might have occurred, I suppose, at any moment. How did it happen? Do you know the particulars? But, is there--is there no" (he was ashamed to say hope) "no chance that he may still be living?--is it quite certain?"

"Perfectly certain, _perfectly_. In a family matter, I have always made it a rule to _be_ certain before speaking. No trifling with sacred feelings, that has been my rule, Mr. Verney, and although in this case there are mitigations as respects the survivors, considering the life of privation and solitude, and, as I have reason to know, of ceaseless self-abas.e.m.e.nt and remorse, which was all that remained to your unhappy relative, the Honourable Arthur Verney, it was hardly to be desired that the event should be very much longer deferred."

Cleve Verney looked for a moment on the table, in the pa.s.sing contagion of the good attorney's high moral tone.