Wives and Daughters Part 37

"I can't justly say as I do," said he. "Mebbe, you'll just go o'er it all once again, Miss Molly. I'm not so young as I oncst was, and my head is not so clear now-a-days, and I'd be loath to make mistakes when you're so set upon your plans."

Molly gave up her impulse in a moment. She saw that the old gardener was really perplexed, yet that he was as anxious as he could be to do his best. So she went over the ground again, pegging and explaining till the wrinkled brow was smooth again, and he kept saying, "I see, miss. All right, Miss Molly, I'se gotten it in my head as clear as patchwork now."

So she could leave him, and go in. But just as she was close to the garden door, Roger came out. It really was for once a case of virtue its own reward, for it was far pleasanter to her to have him in a tete-a-tete, however short, than in the restraint of Mrs. Gibson's and Cynthia's presence.

"I only just found out where you were, Molly. Mrs. Gibson said you had gone out, but she didn't know where; and it was the greatest chance that I turned round and saw you."

"I saw you some time ago, but I couldn't leave Williams. I think he was unusually slow to-day; and he seemed as if he couldn't understand my plans for the new flower-beds."

"Is that the paper you've got in your hand? Let me look at it, will you? Ah, I see! you've borrowed some of your ideas from our garden at home, haven't you? This bed of scarlet geraniums, with the border of young oaks, pegged down! That was a fancy of my dear mother's."

They were both silent for a minute or two. Then Molly said,--

"How is the Squire? I've never seen him since."

"No, he told me how much he wanted to see you, but he couldn't make up his mind to come and call. I suppose it would never do now for you to come and stay at the Hall, would it? It would give my father so much pleasure: he looks upon you as a daughter, and I'm sure both Osborne and I shall always consider you are like a sister to us, after all my mother's love for you, and your tender care of her at last. But I suppose it wouldn't do."

"No! certainly not," said Molly, hastily.

"I fancy if you could come it would put us a little to rights. You know, as I think I once told you, Osborne has behaved differently to what I should have done, though not wrongly,--only what I call an error of judgment. But my father, I'm sure, has taken up some notion of--never mind; only the end of it is that he holds...o...b..rne still in tacit disgrace, and is miserable himself all the time. Osborne, too, is sore and unhappy, and estranged from my father. It is just what my mother would have put right very soon, and perhaps you could have done it--unconsciously, I mean--for this wretched mystery that Osborne preserves about his affairs is at the root of it all. But there's no use talking about it; I don't know why I began." Then, with a wrench, changing the subject, while Molly still thought of what he had been telling her, he broke out,--"I can't tell you how much I like Miss Kirkpatrick, Molly. It must be a great pleasure to you having such a companion!"

"Yes," said Molly, half smiling. "I'm very fond of her; and I think I like her better every day I know her. But how quickly you have found out her virtues!"

"I didn't say 'virtues,' did I?" asked he, reddening, but putting the question in all good faith. "Yet I don't think one could be deceived in that face. And Mrs. Gibson appears to be a very friendly person,--she has asked Osborne and me to dine here on Friday."

"Bitter beer" came into Molly's mind; but what she said was, "And are you coming?"

"Certainly, I am, unless my father wants me; and I've given Mrs.

Gibson a conditional promise for Osborne, too. So I shall see you all very soon again. But I must go now. I have to keep an appointment seven miles from here in half-an-hour's time. Good luck to your flower-garden, Molly."

CHAPTER XXII.

THE OLD SQUIRE'S TROUBLES.

Affairs were going on worse at the Hall than Roger had liked to tell.

Moreover, very much of the discomfort there arose from "mere manner,"

as people express it, which is always indescribable and indefinable.

Quiet and pa.s.sive as Mrs. Hamley had always been in appearance, she was the ruling spirit of the house as long as she lived. The directions to the servants, down to the most minute particulars, came from her sitting-room, or from the sofa on which she lay. Her children always knew where to find her; and to find her, was to find love and sympathy. Her husband, who was often restless and angry from one cause or another, always came to her to be smoothed down and put right. He was conscious of her pleasant influence over him, and became at peace with himself when in her presence; just as a child is at ease when with some one who is both firm and gentle. But the keystone of the family arch was gone, and the stones of which it was composed began to fall apart. It is always sad when a sorrow of this kind seems to injure the character of the mourning survivors.

Yet, perhaps, this injury may be only temporary or superficial; the judgments so constantly pa.s.sed upon the way in which people bear the loss of those whom they have deeply loved, appear to be even more cruel, and wrongly meted out, than human judgments generally are. To careless observers, for instance, it would seem as though the Squire was rendered more capricious and exacting, more pa.s.sionate and authoritative, by his wife's death. The truth was, that it occurred at a time when many things came to hara.s.s him, and some to bitterly disappoint him; and _she_ was no longer there to whom he used to carry his sore heart for the gentle balm of her sweet words. So the sore heart ached and smarted intensely; and often, when he saw how his violent conduct affected others, he could have cried out for their pity, instead of their anger and resentment: "Have mercy upon me, for I am very miserable." How often have such dumb thoughts gone up from the hearts of those who have taken hold of their sorrow by the wrong end, as prayers against sin! And when the Squire saw that his servants were learning to dread him, and his first-born to avoid him, he did not blame them. He knew he was becoming a domestic tyrant; it seemed as if all circ.u.mstances conspired against him, and as if he was too weak to struggle with them; else, why did everything in doors and out of doors go so wrong just now, when all he could have done, had things been prosperous, was to have submitted, in very imperfect patience, to the loss of his wife? But just when he needed ready money to pacify Osborne's creditors, the harvest had turned out remarkably plentiful, and the price of corn had sunk down to a level it had not touched for years. The Squire had insured his life at the time of his marriage for a pretty large sum. It was to be a provision for his wife, if she survived him, and for their younger children.

Roger was the only representative of these interests now; but the Squire was unwilling to lose the insurance by ceasing to pay the annual sum. He would not, if he could, have sold any part of the estate which he inherited from his father; and, besides, it was strictly entailed. He had sometimes thought how wise a step it would have been could he have sold a portion of it, and with the purchase-money have drained and reclaimed the remainder; and at length, learning from some neighbour that Government would make certain advances for drainage, &c., at a very low rate of interest, on condition that the work was done, and the money repaid, within a given time, his wife had urged him to take advantage of the proffered loan. But now that she was no longer there to encourage him, and take an interest in the progress of the work, he grew indifferent to it himself, and cared no more to go out on his stout roan cob, and sit square on his seat, watching the labourers on the marshy land all overgrown with rushes; speaking to them from time to time in their own strong nervous country dialect: but the interest to Government had to be paid all the same, whether the men worked well or ill.

Then the roof of the Hall let in the melted snow-water this winter; and, on examination, it turned out that a new roof was absolutely required. The men who had come about the advances made to Osborne by the London money-lender, had spoken disparagingly of the timber on the estate--"Very fine trees--sound, perhaps, too, fifty years ago, but gone to rot now; had wanted lopping and clearing. Was there no wood-ranger or forester? They were nothing like the value young Mr.

Hamley had represented them to be." The remarks had come round to the squire's ears. He loved the trees he had played under as a boy as if they were living creatures; that was on the romantic side of his nature. Merely looking at them as representing so many pounds sterling, he had esteemed them highly, and had had, until now, no opinion of another by which to correct his own judgment. So these words of the valuers cut him sharp, although he affected to disbelieve them, and tried to persuade himself that he did so. But, after all, these cares and disappointments did not touch the root of his deep resentment against Osborne. There is nothing like wounded affection for giving poignancy to anger. And the Squire believed that Osborne and his advisers had been making calculations, based upon his own death. He hated the idea so much--it made him so miserable--that he would not face it, and define it, and meet it with full inquiry and investigation. He chose rather to cherish the morbid fancy that he was useless in this world--born under an unlucky star--that all things went badly under his management. But he did not become humble in consequence. He put his misfortunes down to the score of Fate--not to his own; and he imagined that Osborne saw his failures, and that his first-born grudged him his natural term of life. All these fancies would have been set to rights could he have talked them over with his wife; or even had he been accustomed to mingle much in the society of those whom he esteemed his equals; but, as has been stated, he was inferior in education to those who should have been his mates; and perhaps the jealousy and _mauvaise honte_ that this inferiority had called out long ago, extended itself in some measure to the feelings he entertained towards his sons--less to Roger than to Osborne, though the former was turning out by far the most distinguished man. But Roger was practical; interested in all out-of-doors things, and he enjoyed the details, homely enough, which his father sometimes gave him of the every-day occurrences which the latter had noticed in the woods and the fields. Osborne, on the contrary, was what is commonly called "fine;" delicate almost to effeminacy in dress and in manner; careful in small observances. All this his father had been rather proud of in the days when he looked forward to a brilliant career at Cambridge for his son; he had at that time regarded Osborne's fastidiousness and elegance as another stepping-stone to the high and prosperous marriage which was to restore the ancient fortunes of the Hamley family. But now that Osborne had barely obtained his degree; that all the boastings of his father had proved vain; that the fastidiousness had led to unexpected expenses (to attribute the most innocent cause to Osborne's debts), the poor young man's ways and manners became a subject of irritation to his father. Osborne was still occupied with his books and his writings when he was at home; and this mode of pa.s.sing the greater part of the day gave him but few subjects in common with his father when they did meet at meal times, or in the evenings. Perhaps if Osborne had been able to have more out-of-door amus.e.m.e.nts it would have been better; but he was short-sighted, and cared little for the carefully observant pursuits of his brother; he knew but few young men of his own standing in the county; his hunting even, of which he was pa.s.sionately fond, had been curtailed this season, as his father had disposed of one of the two hunters he had been hitherto allowed.

The whole stable establishment had been reduced; perhaps because it was the economy which told most on the enjoyment of both the Squire and Osborne, and which, therefore, the former took a savage pleasure in enforcing. The old carriage--a heavy family coach bought in the days of comparative prosperity--was no longer needed after madam's death, and fell to pieces in the cobwebbed seclusion of the coach-house. The best of the two carriage-horses was taken for a gig, which the Squire now set up; saying many a time to all who might care to listen to him that it was the first time for generations that the Hamleys of Hamley had not been able to keep their own coach.

The other carriage-horse was turned out to gra.s.s; being too old for regular work. Conqueror used to come whinnying up to the park palings whenever he saw the Squire, who had always a piece of bread, or some sugar, or an apple for the old favourite; and would make many a complaining speech to the dumb animal, telling him of the change of times since both were in their prime. It had never been the Squire's custom to encourage his boys to invite their friends to the Hall.

Perhaps this, too, was owing to his _mauvaise honte_, and also to an exaggerated consciousness of the deficiencies of his establishment as compared with what he imagined these lads were accustomed to at home.

He explained this once or twice to Osborne and Roger when they were at Rugby.

"You see, all you public schoolboys have a kind of freemasonry of your own, and outsiders are looked on by you much as I look on rabbits and all that isn't game. Ay, you may laugh, but it is so; and your friends will throw their eyes askance at me, and never think on my pedigree, which would beat theirs all to shivers, I'll be bound.

No; I'll have no one here at the Hall who will look down on a Hamley of Hamley, even if he only knows how to make a cross instead of write his name."

Then, of course, they must not visit at houses to whose sons the Squire could not or would not return a like hospitality. On all these points Mrs. Hamley had used her utmost influence without avail; his prejudices were immoveable. As regarded his position as head of the oldest family in three counties, his pride was invincible; as regarded himself personally--ill at ease in the society of his equals, deficient in manners, and in education--his morbid sensitiveness was too sore and too self-conscious to be called humility.

Take one instance from among many similar scenes of the state of feeling between him and his eldest son, which, if it could not be called active discord, showed at least pa.s.sive estrangement.

It took place on an evening in the March succeeding Mrs. Hamley's death. Roger was at Cambridge. Osborne had also been from home, and he had not volunteered any information as to his absence. The Squire believed that Osborne had been either at Cambridge with his brother, or in London; he would have liked to hear where his son had been, what he had been doing, and whom he had seen, purely as pieces of news, and as some diversion from the domestic worries and cares which were pressing him hard; but he was too proud to ask any questions, and Osborne had not given him any details of his journey. This silence had aggravated the Squire's internal dissatisfaction, and he came home to dinner weary and sore-hearted a day or two after Osborne's return. It was just six o'clock, and he went hastily into his own little business-room on the ground-floor, and, after washing his hands, came into the drawing-room feeling as if he were very late, but the room was empty. He glanced at the clock over the mantel-piece, as he tried to warm his hands at the fire. The fire had been neglected, and had gone out during the day; it was now piled up with half-dried wood, which sputtered and smoked instead of doing its duty in blazing and warming the room, through which the keen wind was cutting its way in all directions. The clock had stopped, no one had remembered to wind it up, but by the squire's watch it was already past dinner-time. The old butler put his head into the room, but, seeing the squire alone, he was about to draw it back, and wait for Mr. Osborne, before announcing dinner. He had hoped to do this unperceived, but the squire caught him in the act.

"Why isn't dinner ready?" he called out sharply. "It's ten minutes past six. And, pray, why are you using this wood? It's impossible to get oneself warm by such a fire as this."

"I believe, sir, that Thomas--"

"Don't talk to me of Thomas. Send dinner in directly."

About five minutes elapsed, spent by the hungry Squire in all sorts of impatient ways--attacking Thomas, who came in to look after the fire; knocking the logs about, scattering out sparks, but considerably lessening the chances of warmth; touching up the candles, which appeared to him to give a light unusually insufficient for the large cold room. While he was doing this, Osborne came in dressed in full evening dress. He always moved slowly; and this, to begin with, irritated the Squire. Then an uncomfortable consciousness of a black coat, drab trousers, checked cotton cravat, and splashed boots, forced itself upon him as he saw Osborne's point-device costume. He chose to consider it affectation and finery in Osborne, and was on the point of bursting out with some remark, when the butler, who had watched Osborne downstairs before making the announcement, came in to say dinner was ready.

"It surely isn't six o'clock?" said Osborne, pulling out his dainty little watch. He was scarcely more unaware than it of the storm that was brewing.

"Six o'clock! It's more than a quarter past," growled out his father.

"I fancy your watch must be wrong, sir. I set mine by the Horse Guards only two days ago."

Now, impugning that old steady, turnip-shaped watch of the Squire's was one of the insults which, as it could not reasonably be resented, was not to be forgiven. That watch had been given him by his father when watches were watches long ago. It had given the law to house-clocks, stable-clocks, kitchen-clocks--nay, even to Hamley Church clock in its day; and was it now, in its respectable old age, to be looked down upon by a little whipper-snapper of a French watch which could go into a man's waistcoat pocket, instead of having to be extricated, with due effort, like a respectable watch of size and position, from a fob in the waistband? No! not if the whipper-snapper were backed by all the Horse Guards that ever were, with the Life Guards to boot. Poor Osborne might have known better than to cast this slur on his father's flesh and blood; for so dear did he hold his watch!

"My watch is like myself," said the squire, 'girning,' as the Scotch say--"plain, but steady-going. At any rate, it gives the law in my house. The King may go by the Horse Guards if he likes."

"I beg your pardon, sir," said Osborne, really anxious to keep the peace, "I went by my watch, which is certainly right by London time; and I'd no idea you were waiting for me; otherwise I could have dressed much quicker."

"I should think so," said the Squire, looking sarcastically at his son's attire. "When I was a young man I should have been ashamed to have spent as much time at my looking-gla.s.s as if I'd been a girl.

I could make myself as smart as any one when I was going to a dance, or to a party where I was likely to meet pretty girls; but I should have laughed myself to scorn if I'd stood fiddle-faddling at a gla.s.s, smirking at my own likeness, all for my own pleasure."

Osborne reddened, and was on the point of letting fly some caustic remark on his father's dress at the present moment; but he contented himself with saying, in a low voice,--

"My mother always expected us all to dress for dinner. I got into the habit of doing it to please her, and I keep it up now." Indeed, he had a certain kind of feeling of loyalty to her memory in keeping up all the little domestic habits and customs she had inst.i.tuted or preferred. But the contrast which the Squire thought was implied by Osborne's remark, put him beside himself.

"And I, too, try to attend to her wishes. I do; and in more important things. I did when she was alive; and I do so now."

"I never said you did not," said Osborne, astonished at his father's pa.s.sionate words and manner.

"Yes, you did, sir. You meant it. I could see by your looks. I saw you look at my morning coat. At any rate, I never neglected any wish of hers in her lifetime. If she'd wished me to go to school again and learn my A, B, C, I would. By ---- I would; and I wouldn't have gone playing me, and lounging away my time, for fear of vexing and disappointing her. Yet some folks older than school-boys--"

The squire choked here; but though the words would not come his pa.s.sion did not diminish. "I'll not have you casting up your mother's wishes to me, sir. You, who went near to break her heart at last!"

Osborne was strongly tempted to get up and leave the room. Perhaps it would have been better if he had; it might then have brought about an explanation, and a reconciliation between father and son. But he thought he did well in sitting still and appearing to take no notice.

This indifference to what he was saying appeared to annoy the Squire still more, and he kept on grumbling and talking to himself till Osborne, unable to bear it any longer, said, very quietly, but very bitterly--

"I am only a cause of irritation to you, and home is no longer home to me, but a place in which I am to be controlled in trifles, and scolded about trifles as if I were a child. Put me in a way of making a living for myself--that much your oldest son has a right to ask of you--I will then leave this house, and you shall be no longer vexed by my dress, or my want of punctuality."