Wenderholme Part 28

The accusations in this letter were perfectly well founded, though it is quite certain that they would never have been made if Philip Stanburne's communication had been edged with silver instead of black. Margaret Anison had remarked with secret satisfaction that Jacob Ogden's behavior as a lover gave her good reasons for retreating from her engagement, whenever she might determine on that decisive step; but in the mean while she had never reproached him with it, had never appeared aware of it when he _did_ come, but always received him in the same uniformly gracious way, as if he had been the most a.s.siduous of adorers. She had kept this accusation of negligence to be used against him whenever it might be convenient to throw the blame of a rupture upon _him_; but if she had finally decided to marry him, this and all other faults would have been affectionately overlooked. It had been highly convenient to let him sink deeper and deeper in that sin of negligence, till at last, from mere carelessness and an aversion to all letter-writing that was not upon business, he had actually reached that depth in crime that he no longer observed the common forms of society, and did not even write a line of apology or excuse. Margaret never expected him to be attentive to her as a husband: she intended to spend his money, and, so long as that was forthcoming, cared little about Jacob Ogden's manners. But it was charming to be able to back out of her engagement, now that Alice was dead, and do it in a dignified and honorable manner. For of all sins that a lover can commit, the chief is the sin of neglect; and in this case any competent and just jury would have p.r.o.nounced the verdict "guilty."

To this letter Jacob Ogden made no reply. His feelings on receiving it were, first, the most unfeigned astonishment (for he thought he had been very attentive, and that "courtin'" had absorbed far too much of his time); next, a paroxysm of indignation, with a sense of injury; and then, when this subsided, a sense of relief so exquisite, so delicious, and so complete, that n.o.body can have any idea of it unless at some period of his existence a wearing and persistent anxiety has been suddenly removed for ever. The love of Margaret Anison had been one of those masterful pa.s.sions which sometimes force the most prudent men to folly. He had made his offer in the height of his temporary insanity, but after the engagement had been entered upon, his old self had gradually returned; and though he was fully determined to "go through with it," as a business which had to be done, he by no means looked forward to the conjugal state as an improvement upon his accustomed life. It was like embarking on an unknown and perilous sea, in utter ignorance of the art of navigation, and that sea might be a sea of troubles. The complex details of married life, its endless little duties, were perplexing to a man whose time and thoughts were already taken up by the government of a heavy business, and the care of an increasing estate. And now to escape from these new and unfamiliar troubles--to remain in the old quiet life at Milend--to have full control over his own expenditure, with no female criticism or interference--to see his fortune growing and growing without sons to establish or daughters to dower, or an expensive houseful of servants to eat the bank-notes in his pocket-book like so many nattering mice,--ah!

it was sweet to him to think of this in his innermost and sincerest self! He had loved his bachelor life well enough before, but he had never felt the full luxury of its independence as he did now!

Jacob Ogden enjoyed a privilege highly favorable to happiness, but not so favorable to moral or intellectual growth. He lived at peace with himself, and looking back on his life, he approved of its whole course, with the single exception of that hour of folly at Whittlecup. He felt and believed that no man could be wiser or more perfect than he was.

When he humbly called his faculties "common-sense," he by no means understood the word as meaning a sense which he had in common with others, but rather a special faculty, to himself vouchsafed by the bounteous gift of nature. He lived in absolute independence of the good opinion of others, because his mind was at peace with itself--because he always manfully did to-day what he was sure to approve to-morrow, or ten years after to-morrow. Am I painting the portrait of a man of pre-eminent virtues? Not exactly, but of a man who would have been pre-eminently virtuous, or pre-eminently learned, if virtue or knowledge had been his ideal. For he had a manly resolution, a steady unflinching determination, to live up to the standard which he fixed for himself.

And the inward peace which he enjoyed was due to his obedience to the laws of his own nature, which thus ever remained in harmony with itself in serene strength and efficiency.

This peace had for a while been lost to him, and he had felt a strange change and diminution in the inward satisfactions. His communings with himself had lost their old sweetness, and he no longer masticated the cud of contentment in the fair pastures of reflection and imagination.

To go back to those happy pastures once more--to chew that sweet cud again, after months of privation--what a deep, strengthening, cheering, encouraging, replenishing delight it was!

Yet there was one drawback to the plenitude of Ogden's happiness, even though he had escaped the misery of the wedding-day. That new mansion had been begun, he had spent 400 upon it already, and spoilt a pretty meadow, and he had spent some money on presents for Margaret--not very much, for his ideas on the subject of gift-making were not very large ideas, yet still enough to plague and torment him, for the loss of a sovereign would do that. To be jilted did not trouble him much, but to have been cheated into wasting his money! that thought would not let him rest. It followed and hara.s.sed him wherever he went, and it was the cause of the following letter, which was received by Mr. Joseph Anison:--

"SIR,--I am instructed by my client, Mr. Jacob Ogden, to lay before you the following statement of facts. Your daughter, Miss Margaret Anison, by a letter bearing date ----, and which is in our possession, accepted his proposal of marriage, and promised marriage; which promise she now, by a letter bearing date ----, refuses to execute. In consequence of her promise, and in conformity with her desires, our client has been led into considerable expense, especially in the erection of a mansion, of which Miss Anison herself selected the site. The works were immediately stopped when it became known to our client that Miss Anison had determined upon a breach of promise, but a heavy sum had been already expended, which, so far as our client is concerned, is money utterly thrown away. We beg to call your attention to the fact that our client and his mother offered another most commodious and suitable residence to Miss Anison, situated at Milend, and that she declined this, and induced our client to commence the erection of a new and costly mansion on a site which he would never have selected for himself. We therefore claim for our client damages to the amount of one thousand pounds (1,000), and beg to inform you, that unless this sum is paid before the expiration of one calendar month from this date, we shall inst.i.tute a suit for breach of promise of marriage, and claim damages on that score to a far heavier amount. The present claim, we desire it to be understood, is not made on the ground of breach of promise, but is merely a claim for compensation on account of outlay which our client has been induced to incur. Our client has no desire to push matters to the extremity of a public exposure, but will not shrink from doing so if his present just claim is refused.

"I am, sir, your obedient servant,

"JONAS HANBY."

"You may decide for yourself, Margaret," said Mr. Anison, "whether you prefer that I should pay this out of your fortune, or stand an action for breach of promise. It is not usual to bring actions of this sort against women, but Ogden is a most determined fellow, and he doesn't care much for what people may say. He will bring his action if we don't send him a cheque, and I don't think such an action would be very pleasant to you. Considering circ.u.mstances, too, especially the building of that new house, I am inclined to think that he would get rather heavy damages, certainly at least as much as he is asking for. Such an action would make a tremendous noise, and we should be in all the newspapers. We must consider your sisters, too, who wouldn't be much benefited by publicity of this kind. In short, my advice is to send the cheque."

The cheque was accordingly sent to Mr. Hanby, and duly acknowledged. The presents had been returned a few days before. These last had been purchased of a jeweller in St. Ann's Square, Manchester, who took them back in exchange for an excellent gentleman's watch and a big cameo brooch. The watch went into Jacob Ogden's own fob, and the brooch adorned his already sufficiently ornamented mother. All things considered, Jacob Ogden now felt that he could look back upon the whole business with a mind at ease. He had done his duty by himself. After deducting the outlay on the house, and the outlay necessary for restoring the field to its pristine verdure, he found that there remained to him a clear surplus of four hundred and fifteen pounds seven shillings and twopence, which he entered in the column of profits. "It's been rather a good business for once, has this courtin'," said Jacob to himself; "but it's devilish risky, and there's n.o.body'll catch me at it again. If she'd n.o.bbut stuck to me, she'd 'ave wenly ruined me."

So, when the walls of the mansion that was to have been were levelled with the ground, and the foundations buried under the earth that they might be no more seen, Jacob Ogden buried with them the thought and idea of marriage; and the gra.s.s grew on the field that had been so torn, and cut, and burdened, and disturbed by the masons and laborers who had been there.

As the field grew level and green again just as it used to be, so flourished the mind of Jacob Ogden in serene and productive life. But as _beneath_ the field--beneath the waving of the rich gra.s.s--there still lay the plan of the house that was to have been, traced out in stony foundations, so in the mind of its owner there lay hidden a stony memory of the plans of this strange year; and though the surface was perfectly restored, there were hard places under his happiness that had not been there before.

CHAPTER x.x.xV.

LITTLE JACOB'S EDUCATION.

The rupture between Jacob Ogden and Miss Anison had an immediate effect upon the fortunes of a young friend of ours, who has for a long time been very much in the background. Little Jacob began to occupy a larger and larger place in his uncle's thoughts. For, though Uncle Jacob had formerly always intended, in a general way, to remain a bachelor, this had been nothing more than a sort of intellectual preference for bachelorhood, deduced from his general views of life, and especially from his dominant anxiety to make a fortune. But his objections to matrimony were no longer of this mild kind. Like a wild animal that has once felt the noose of the trapper round its neck, and yet succeeded in freeing itself, he had conceived a horror of the snare which was incomparably more active and intense than the vague alarms of the inexperienced. His former ideas about marriage had been purely negative.

He had no intention to marry, and there was the end of his reflections on the matter. But now his preference for celibacy had taken the shape of a pa.s.sionate and unalterable resolution.

The increase of his fortune, which might henceforth be surely relied on, led him to think a good deal about the little boy at Twistle Farm, who was most probably destined to inherit it; and he determined to use a legitimate influence over his brother Isaac, so that little Jacob might be educated in a manner suitable to his future position.

We have said that Jacob Ogden was perfectly satisfied with himself, and that knowledge was not his ideal. But although this is true, his views were really larger than the reader may have hitherto suspected. He considered himself perfect in his place; but as little Jacob would probably have a very different place in the world, he would need different perfections. The qualities needed for making a large fortune were, in Jacob Ogden's view, the finest qualities that a human being can possess, and he knew that he possessed them; but then there were certain ornaments and accomplishments which were necessary to a rich gentleman, and which the manufacturer had not had time to acquire. He was not foolish enough to torment himself with regrets that he did not know Latin and Greek; he had none of the silly humilities of weak minds that are perpetually regretting their "deficiencies." Whatever it was necessary for his main purpose that he should know, he always resolutely set himself to learn, and, by strenuous application, mastered; what was unnecessary for his purpose, he remained contentedly ignorant about. The customary pedantries of the world, its shallow pretension to scholarship, never humiliated _him_. He suspected, perhaps, that genuine cla.s.sical acquirement was much rarer than the varnish of pseudo-scholarship, and he had not that deferential faith in gentlemen's Latin and Greek which is sometimes found in the uneducated. But, on the other hand, as he had learned every thing that was necessary to a plodding Shayton cotton-spinner, so he was determined that little Jacob should learn every thing necessary to a perfect English gentleman. He had not read the sentence of Emerson, "We like to see every thing do its office after its kind, whether it be a milk-cow or a rattlesnake;" but the sentiment in it was his own. His strong sense perceived that so long as men hold different situations in the world, their preparatory training must be different; and that, as a young pigeon must learn to fly, and a young terrier to catch rats, so the youthful heir of a splendid fortune, and the boy who has his fortune to make, ought to receive respectively a celestial and a terrestrial training.

For Jacob Ogden, himself a terrestrial, knew that there was a heaven above him--the heaven of aristocracy! _There_ dwelt superior beings, in golden houses, like G.o.ds together, far above the ill-used race of men that cleave the soil and store their yearly dues. There is something ludicrous, if it were not pathetic and painful, in the self-abas.e.m.e.nt of a man so strong and resolute as Ogden before a heaven whose saints and angels were only t.i.tled ladies and gentlemen, mainly occupied in amusing themselves; but to him it was the World of the Ideal. And this religion had one great advantage--it kept him a little humbler than he ever would have been without it. Great was the successful cotton-spinner in his eyes, but there were beings cast by nature in a n.o.bler mould. For Jacob Ogden actually believed, in all sincerity and simplicity, that there was the same natural difference between a lord and a plebeian that there is between a thorough-bred and a cart-horse. This superst.i.tion, though founded on a dim sense of the natural differences which do exist, erred in making them the obedient servants of the artificial differences.

There are, no doubt, thorough-breds and cart-horses amongst mankind, and the popular phraseology would imply that there are also a.s.ses; but these natural differences seem to be independent of t.i.tle altogether, and dependent even upon fortune only so far as it may help or hinder their development. The superst.i.tion that lords, _qua_ lords, are wiser, and better, and braver, and more respectable than other people, was more prevalent in Shayton than it is in places where lords are more frequently seen.

Now, with this deeply rooted Anglican superst.i.tion about the heaven of aristocracy and the angels that dwell therein, Uncle Jacob naturally desired that his nephew should be qualified for admission there. And he had a devout belief that the states of probation for a young soul aspiring to celestial bliss were terms of residence at Eton and at Oxford.

Little Jacob had continued his custom of staying at Milend every Sunday, that he might benefit by the services of our friend Mr. Prigley in the pew at Shayton Church. Isaac Ogden, though he had come to church three Sundays in succession after the recovery of little Jacob, and had attended divine service regularly as an officer of militia (being in that character compulsible thereunto by martial law), had, I regret to say, relapsed into his old habits of negligence at Twistle Farm, and spent the Sunday there in following his own devices. It must be admitted, however, that he did little harm, on that day or any other, to himself or anybody else. He remained religiously faithful to his vow of total abstinence, and spent several hours every day in giving a sound elementary education to his son.

"I'll tell you what it is, Isaac," said Uncle Jacob one day when his elder brother had come on one of his rare visits to Milend--"I'll tell you what it is; if you'll just let me have my own way about th'

eddication o' th' young un, I'll leave him all my bra.s.s, and, what's more, I don't mind payin' for his schoolin' beside. I want nowt n.o.bbut what's reet, but I'll make sich a gentleman on him as there isn't i' o Shayton nor i' o Manchester nother. And to start wi', I reckon nowt of his stoppin' up at Twistle Farm same as he is doin' an' idlin' away auve[19] his time. Let him live at Milend regular for a twelvemonth, and go to Prigley six hour every day, and then send him to Eton--that's where gentlefolk sends their lads to. And afther that, we'll send him to Hoxford College."

CHAPTER x.x.xVI.

A SHORT CORRESPONDENCE.

No sooner had Mr. Prigley got into the full swing of work with his young pupil, than he received a letter from our friend Colonel Stanburne of Wenderholme:--

"MY DEAR MR. PRIGLEY,--It would give me great pleasure, and be of great use to me besides, if you could come over here and stay with me for a fortnight or three weeks. We got the house covered in just before the winter, and the works have been going forward since in some parts of the interior, but there are some points about internal fittings, especially in the princ.i.p.al rooms, that I and my architect don't agree about. Now, what I most want is, the advice of a competent unprofessional friend; and as I know that you have studied architecture much more deeply than I have ever done myself, I look to you to help me. It will probably be a long time before the house is finished, but now is the time to decide about the interior arrangements. Helena is at Lord Adisham's, and so I am left alone with the architect. I wish you would come. He seems to want me to adopt a different style for the finishing of the interior to that which was generally prevalent when Wenderholme was built.

Now my notion is (_puisque l'occasion se presente_) to make the place as h.o.m.ogeneous as possible.

"Do come. You will stay here at the Cottage. I am living with my mother.

"Very faithfully yours, JOHN STANBURNE."

To this letter, which offered to Mr. Prigley's mind the most tempting of all possible baits, for he dearly loved to dabble in architecture and restorations, the reverend gentleman, being bound by his engagement with the Ogdens, could only regretfully answer:--

"MY DEAR COLONEL STANBURNE,--I should have accepted your kind invitation with the greatest pleasure, and the more so that I take a deep interest in the restoration of your n.o.ble old mansion, but unfortunately I have a private pupil whom I cannot leave. It is young Jacob Ogden, whose father is one of your militia officers.

"Yours most truly, E. PRIGLEY."

But by return of post Mr. Prigley got the following short reply:--

"MY DEAR MR. PRIGLEY,--The best solution of the difficulty will be, to bring little Jacob with you. I know little Jacob very well, and he knows me. Give my compliments to his father if you have to ask his permission, and tell him we will take good care of his little boy.

"Yours very faithfully, J. STANBURNE."

So the end of it was, that little Jacob found himself suddenly removed to Wenderholme Cottage, where old Mrs. Stanburne lived. The change was highly agreeable to him--not the less agreeable that the companion of his leisure hours was the beautiful little Edith.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

AT WENDERHOLME COTTAGE.

Wenderholme Cottage was in fact a very comfortable and commodious house.

Its claims to the humble t.i.tle which it bore, were, first, that its front was all gables, with projecting roofs, and carved or traceried barge-boards; and, secondly, that its rooms were small. But if they were small they were numerous; and when it pleased Mrs. Stanburne to receive visitors--and it often pleased that hospitable lady so to do--it was astonishing how many people the Cottage could be made to hold.

A little kindness soon wins the affections of a child, and little Jacob had not been more than three or four days at Wenderholme before he began to be very fond of Mrs. Stanburne. Hers was just the sort of influence which is necessary to a young gentleman at that age--the influence of a woman of experience, who is at the same time a high-bred gentlewoman. No doubt his old grandmother loved little Jacob more than any thing else in the world; but she was narrow-minded, and despotic, and vulgar in all her ways. Mrs. Ogden, too, had moments of caprice and violence, in which, she was dangerous to oppose, and difficult to pacify; in short, she was one of those persons, too common in her cla.s.s, of whom Matthew Arnold says that they are deficient in sweetness and light. The steady unfailing goodness of Mrs. Stanburne, her uniformly gentle manners, her open intelligent sympathy, produced on her young guest an effect made ten times more powerful by all his early a.s.sociations. It was like coming out of a chamber where every thing was rough and uncouth, into a pleasant drawing-room, full of light and elegance, where there are flowers, and music, and books. Such a change would not be agreeable to every one: whether it would be agreeable or not depends upon the instinctive preferences. Ladies like Mrs. Stanburne do not put everybody at his ease, and it proves much in little Jacob's favor that he felt happy in her presence. As Jacob Ogden, the elder, had been formed by nature for the rude contest with reluctant fortune, so his nephew had been created for the refinements of an attained civilization. Therefore, henceforth, though he still loved his grandmother, both from grat.i.tude and habit, his young mind saw clearly that neither her precepts nor her example were to be accepted as authoritative, and he looked up to Mrs.

Stanburne as his preceptress.

Little Jacob's healthy honest face and simple manners recommended him to the good lady from the first, and he had not been a week under her roof before she took a kind interest in every thing concerning him. The mere facts that he had no mother, no sister, no brother, and that he had lived alone with his father in such a place as Twistle Farm, were of themselves enough to attract attention and awaken curiosity; but the story of his arrival at Wenderholme in the preceding winter was also known to her, and she knew how unendurably miserable his lonely home had been. Mrs. Stanburne talked a good deal with Mr. Prigley about the boy, and learned with pleasure his father's wonderful and (as now might be hoped) permanent reformation.