Kitabı oku: «There & Back», sayfa 29

CHAPTER LI. BARONET AND BLACKSMITH

The more sir Wilton’s anger subsided, the more his heart turned to Richard, and the more he regretted that he had begun by quarrelling with him. Sir Wilton loved his ease, and was not a quarrelsome man. He could dislike intensely, he could hate heartily, but he seldom quarrelled; and if he could have foreseen how his son would take the demand he made upon him, he would not at the outset have risked it. He liked Richard’s looks and carriage. He liked also his spirit and determination, though his first experience of them he could have wished different. He felt also that very little would make of him a man fit to show to the world and be proud of as his son. To his satisfaction on these grounds was added besides a peculiar pleasure in the discovery of him which he could ask no one to share—that it was to him as a lump of dynamite under his wife’s lounge, of which no one knew but himself, and which he could at any instant explode. It was sweet to know what he could do! to be aware, and alone aware, of the fool’s paradise in which my lady and her brood lived! And already, through his own precipitation, his precious secret was in peril!

The fact gave him not a little uneasiness. His thought was, at the ripest moment of her frosty indifference, to make her palace of ice fly in flinders about her. Then the delight of her perturbation! And he had opened his hand and let his bird fly!

His father did not know Richard’s prudence. Like the fool every man of the world is, he judged from Richard’s greatness of heart, and his refusal to forsake his friends, that he was a careless, happy-go-lucky sort of fellow, who would bluster and protest. As to the march he had stolen upon him on behalf of the Mansons, he nowise resented that. When pressed by no selfish necessity, he did not care much about money; and his son’s promptitude greatly pleased him.

“The fellow shall go to college,” he said to himself; “and I won’t give my lady even a hint before I have him the finest gentleman and the best scholar in the county! He shall be both! I will teach him billiards myself! By Jove! it is more of a pleasure than at my years I had a right to expect! To think of an old sinner like me being blessed with such a victory over his worst enemy! It is more than I could deserve if I lived to the age of Mephistopheles! I shouldn’t like to live so long—there’s so little worth remembering! I wish forgetting things wiped them out! There are things I hardly know whether I did or only wanted to do!—Damn it, it may be all over Barset by this time, that the heir to sir Wilton’s property has turned up!”

He rang the bell, and ordered his carriage.

“I must see the old fellow, the rascal’s grandfather!” he kept on to himself. “I haven’t exchanged a word with him for years! And now I think of it, I take poor Robina’s father for a very decent sort of fellow! If he had but once hinted what he was, every soul in the parish would have known it! I must find out whether he’s in my secret! I can’t prove it yet, but perhaps he can!”

Simon Armour was not astonished to see the Lestrange carriage stop at the smithy: he thought sir Wilton had come about the cheque. He went out, and stood in hairy arms and leather apron at the carriage door.

“Well, Armour, how are you?” said the baronet.

“Well and hearty, sir, I thank you,” answered Simon.

“I want a word with you,” said sir Wilton.

“Shall I tell the coachman to drive round to the cottage, sir?”

“No; I’ll get out and walk there with you.”

Simon opened the carriage-door, and the baronet got out.

“That grandson of yours—” he began, the moment they were in Simon’s little parlour.

Simon started. “The old wretch knows!” he said to himself.

“—has been too much for me!” continued sir Wilton. “He got a cheque out of me whether I would or not!”

“And got the money for it, sir!” answered the smith. “He seemed to think the money better than the cheque!”

“I don’t blame him, by Jove! There’s decision in the fellow!—They say his father’s a bookbinder in London!”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know better! I don’t want humbug, Armour! I’m not fond of it!”

“You told me people said his father was a bookbinder, and I said ‘Yes, sir’!”

“You know as well as I do it’s a damned lie! The boy is mine. He belongs neither to bookbinder nor blacksmith!”

“You’ll allow me a small share in him, I hope! I’ve done more for him than you, sir.”

“That’s not my fault!”

“Perhaps not; but I’ve done more for him than you ever will, sir!”

“How do you make that out?”

“I’ve made him as good a shoesmith as ever drove nail! I don’t say he’s up to his grandfather at the anvil yet, but—”

“An accomplishment no doubt, but not exactly necessary to a gentleman!”

“It’s better than dicing or card-playing!” said the blacksmith.

“You’re right there! I hope he has learned neither. I want to teach him those things myself.—He’s not an ill-looking fellow!”

“There’s not a better lad in England, sir! If you had brought him up as he is, you might ha’ been proud o’ your work!”

“He seems proud of somebody’s work!—prouder of himself than his prospects, by Jove!” said sir Wilton, feeling his way. “You should have taught him not to quarrel with his bread and butter!”

“I never saw any call to teach him that. He never quarrelled with anything at my table, sir. A man who has earned his own bread and butter ever since he left school, is not likely to quarrel with it.”

“You don’t say he has done so?”

“I do—and can prove it!—Did you tell him, sir, you were his father?”

“Of course I did!—and before I said another word, there we were quarrelling—just as it was with me and my father!”

“He never told me!” said Simon, half to himself, and ready to feel hurt.

“He didn’t tell you?”

“No, sir.”

“Where is he?”

“Gone to London with your bounty.”

“Now, Simon Armour,” began the baronet with some truculence.

“Now, sir Wilton Lestrange!” interrupted Simon.

“What’s the matter?”

“Please to remember you are in my house!”

“Tut, tut! All I want to say is that you will spoil everything if you encourage the rascal to keep low company!”

“You mean?”

“Those Mansons.”

“Are your children low company, sir?”

“Yes; I am sorry, but I must admit it. Their mother was low company.”

“She was in it at least, when she was in yours!” had all but escaped Simon’s lips, but he caught the bird by the tail.—

“The children are not the mother!” he said. “I know the girl, and she is anything but low company. She lay ill in my house here for six weeks or more. Ask Miss Wylder.—If you want to be on good terms with your son, don’t say a word, sir, against your daughter or her brother.”

“I like that! On good terms with my son! Ha, ha!”

“Remember, sir, he is independent of his father.”

“Independent! A beggarly bookbinder!”

“Excuse me, sir, but an honest trade is the only independence! You are dependent on your money and your land. Where would you be without them? And you made neither! They’re yours only in a way! We, my grandson and I, have means of our own,” said the blacksmith, and held out his two brawny hands. “—The thing that is beggarly,” he resumed, “is to take all and give nothing. If your ancestors got the land by any good they did, you did not get it by any good you did; and having got it, what have you done in return?”

“By Jove! I didn’t know you were such a radical!” returned the baronet, laughing.

“It is such as you, sir, that make what you call radicals. If the landlords had used what was given them to good ends, there would be no radicals—or not many—in the country! The landlords that look to their land and those that are on it, earn their bread as hardly as the man that ploughs it. But when you call it yours, and do nothing for it, I am radical enough to think no wrong would be done if you were deprived of it!”

“What! are you taking to the highway at your age?”

“No, sir; I have a trade I like better, and have no call to lighten you of anything, however ill you may use it. But there are those that think they have a right and a call to take the land from landlords like you, and I would no more leave my work to prevent them than I would to help them.”

“Well, well! I didn’t come to talk politics; I came to ask a favour of you.”

“What I can do for you, sir, I shall be glad to do.”

“It is merely this—that you will, for the present, say nothing about the heir having turned up.”

“I could have laid my hand on him any moment this twenty years; and I can tell you where to find the parish book with his baptism in it! That I’ve not spoken proves I can hold my tongue; but I will give no pledge; when the time comes I will speak.”

“Are you aware I could have you severely punished for concealing the thing?”

“Fire away. I’ll take my chance. But I would advise you not to allow the thing come into court. Words might be spoken that would hurt! I know nothing myself, but there is one that could and would speak. Better let sleeping dogs lie.”

“Oh, damn it! I don’t want to wake ‘em! Most old stories are best forgotten. But what do you think: will the boy—What’s his name?”

“My father’s, sir,—Richard.”

“Will Richard, then, as you have taken upon you to call him”—

“His mother gave him the name.”

“What I want to know is, whether you think he will go and spread the thing, or leave it to we to publish when I please.”

“Did you tell him to hold his tongue?”

“No; he didn’t give me time.”

“That’s a pity! He would have done whatever you asked him.”

“Oh! would he!”

“He would—so long as it was a right thing.”

“And who was to judge of that?”

“Why the man who had to do it or leave it, of course!—But if he didn’t tell me, he’s not likely to go blazing it abroad!”

“You said he would go to his mother first: his mother is nowhere.”

“So say some, so say not I!”

“Never mind that. Who is it he calls his mother?”

“The woman that brought him up—and a good mother she’s been to him!”

“But who is she? You haven’t told me who she is!” cried the baronet, beginning to grow impatient; and impatience and anger were never far apart with him.

“No, sir, I haven’t told you; and I don’t mean to tell you till I see fit.”

“And when, pray, will that be?”

“When I have your promise in writing that you will give her no trouble about what is past and gone.”

“I will give you that promise—always provided she can prove that what was past and gone is come again. I shall insist upon that!”

“Most properly, sir I You shall not have to wait for it.—And now, if you will take me to the post-office, I will send a telegram to Richard, warning him to hold his tongue.”

“Good! Come.”

They walked to the carriage, and Simon, displacing the footman, got up beside the coachman. He was careful, however, to be set down before they got within sight of the post-office.

The message he sent was—

“I know all, and will write. Say nothing but to your mother.”

CHAPTER LII. UNCLE-FATHER AND AUNT-MOTHER

When Richard reached London, he went straight to Clerkenwell. There he found Arthur, in bed and unattended, but covered up warm. Except one number of The Family Herald, he had nothing to read. The room was tidy, but very dreary. Richard asked him why he did not move into the front room. Arthur did not explain, but Richard understood that the mother had left so many phantasms behind her that he preferred his own dark chamber. When Richard told him what he had done and the success he had had, he thanked him with such a shining face that Richard saw in it the birth of saving hope.

“And now, Arthur,” he said, “you must get better as fast as you can; and the first minute you are able to be moved, we’ll ship you off to my grandfather’s, where Alice was.”

“Away from Alice?”

“Yes; but you must remember there will be so much more for her to eat, and so much more money to get things comfortable with by the time you come back. Besides, you will grow well faster, and then perhaps we shall find some fitter work for you than that hideous clerking!”

The flush of joy on Arthur’s cheek was a divine reward to Richard for what he had done and suffered and sacrificed for the sake of his brother. He made a fire, and having set on the kettle, went to buy some things, that he might have a nice supper ready for Alice when she came home. Next he found two clean towels, and covered the little table, forgetting all his troubles in the gladness of ministration, and the new life that hope gives. If only we believed in God, how we should hope! And what would not hope do to reveal the new heavens and the new earth—that is, to show us the real, true, and gracious aspect of those heavens and that earth in which we now live so sadly, and are not at home, because we do not see them as they are, do not recognize in them the beginning of the inheritance we long for!

When Alice came in, she heard Arthur cough, and hurried up; but before she reached the top of the second stair, she heard a laugh which, though feeble, was of such merry enjoyment, that it filled her with wonder and gladness. Had the fairy god-mother appeared at last? What could have come to make Arthur laugh like that? She opened the door, and all was explained: there sat the one joy of their life, their brother Richard, looking much like himself again! What a healer, what a strength-giver is joy! Will not holy joy at last drive out every disease in the world? Will it not be the elixir of life, and drive out death? She sprang upon him, and burst out weeping.

“Come and have supper,” he said. “I’ve been out to buy it, and haven’t much time to help you eat it. My father and mother don’t know where I am.”

Then he told her what he had been about. It was with a happy heart he made his way home, for he left happy hearts behind him. He wondered that his mother was not surprised to see him—wondered too why she looked so troubled.

“What does this telegram mean?” she asked.

“I don’t know, mother,” he replied. “Won’t you give me a kiss first?”

She threw her arms about him. “You won’t give up saying mother to me, will you?” she pleaded, fighting with her emotion.

“It will be a bad day for me when I do!” he answered. “My mother you are and shall be. But I don’t understand it!”

The telegram let him know that sir Wilton and his grandfather had been in communication, and gave him hope that things might be accommodated between him and his father.

“You’ve got your real father now, Richard!” said his mother.

But she saw an expression on his face that made her add,—

“You must respect your father, Richard—now you know him for your father.”

“I can’t respect him, mother. He is not a good man. I can only love him.”

“You have no right to find fault with him. He was not to blame that I carried you away when your mother died! I was terrified at your stepmother!”

“I don’t wonder at that, mother!—Ah, now I begin to understand it all!—But, mother, if my father had been a good man, I don’t believe you would hare carried me away from him!”

“Very likely not, my boy—though he did make me that angry by calling you ugly! And I don’t believe I should have taken you at all, if that woman hadn’t sent me away for no reason but to have a nurse of her choosing. How could I leave my sister’s child in the power of such a woman! Day and night, Richard, was I haunted with the sight of her cold face hanging over you. I was certain the devil might have his way with her when he chose: there was no love in her to prevent him. In my dreams I saw her giving you poison, or with a pen-knife in her hand, and her eyes shining like ice. I could not bear it. I should have gone mad to leave you there. I knew I was committing a crime in the eyes of the law; but I felt a stronger law compelling me; and I said to myself, ‘I will be hanged for my child, rather than my child should be murdered! I will not leave him with that woman!’ So I took you, Richard!”

“Thank you, mother, a thousand times! I am sure it was right, and every way best for me! Oh, how much I owe you and my—uncle! I must call you mother still, but I’m afraid I shall have to call my father uncle!”

“It won’t hurt him, Richard; he has been a good uncle to you, but I don’t think he would have taught you the things he did, if you had been his very own child!”

“He has done me no harm, mother,—nothing but good,” said Richard. “—And so you are my own mother’s sister?”

“Yes, and a good mother she would have been to you! You must not think of her as a grim old woman like me! She was but six and twenty when you were born and she died! She was the most beautiful woman I ever saw, Richard!—Never another woman’s hand has touched your body but hers and mine, Richard!”

He took her hand and kissed it. Jane Tuke had never had her hand kissed before, and would have drawn it away. The lady within was ashamed of her rough gloves, not knowing they had won her her ladyhood. In the real world, there are no ladies but true women. Also they only are beautiful. All there show what they are, and the others are all more or less deformed. Oh, what lovely ladies will walk into the next world out of the rough cocoon of their hard-wrought bodies—not because they have been working women, but because they have been true women. Among working women as among countesses, there are last that shall be first, and first that shall be last. What kind of woman will be the question. Alas for those, whether high or low or in the middle, whose business in life has been to be ladies! What poor, mean, draggled, unangelic things will come crawling out of the husk they are leaving behind them, which yet, perhaps, will show a glimmer, in the whiteness of death, of what they were meant to be, if only they had lived, had been, had put forth the power that was in them as their birthright! Not a few I know will crawl out such, except they awake from the dead, and cry for life. Perhaps one and another in the next world will say to me, “You meant me! I know now why you were always saying such things!” For I suspect the next world will more plainly be a going on with this than most people think—only it will be much better for some, and much worse for others, as the Lord has taught us in the parable of the rich man and the beggar.

“No, Richard,” resumed his aunt, “your father was not a good man, but he may be better now, and perhaps you will help him to be better still.”

“It’s doubtful if ever I have the chance,” returned Richard. “We’ve had a pretty fair quarrel already!”

“He can’t take your birthright from you!” she cried.

“That may be—but what is my birthright? He told me the land was not entailed; he can leave it to anybody he likes. But I’m not going to do what he would have me do—that is if it be wrong,” added Richard, not willing to start the question about the Mansons. “To be a sneak would be a fine beginning! If that’s to be a gentleman, I will be no gentleman!”

“Right you are, my son!” said Tuke, who that moment came in.

“Oh uncle!” cried Richard, starting to his feet.

“Uncle!—Ho! ho! What’s up now?”

“Nothing’s up, but all’s out, father!” answered Richard, putting his hand in that of the bookbinder. “You knew, and now I know! How shall I ever thank you for what you have done for me, and been to me, and given me!”

“Precious little anyway, my boy! I wish it had been a great deal more.”

“Shall I tell you what you have done for me I—You made a man of me first of all, by giving me a trade, and making me independent. Then again, by that trade you taught me to love the very shape of a book. Baronet or no baronet,—”

“What do you mean?”

“My father threatens to disown me.”

“He can’t take your rank from you. We’ll have you sir Richard anyhow!—An’ I’d let ‘em see that a true baronet—”

“—is just a true man, uncle.” interposed Richard; “and that you’ve helped to make me. It’s being independent and helping others, not being a baronet, that will make a gentleman of me! That’s how it goes in the true world anyhow!”

“The true world! Where’s that?” rejoined Tuke, with what would have been a sneer had there been ill-nature in it.

“And that reminds me of another precious thing you’ve given me,” Richard went on: “You’ve taught me to think for myself!”

“Think for yourself indeed, and talk of any world but the world we’ve got!”

“If you hadn’t taught me,” returned Richard, “to think for myself, I should have thought just as you did. But I’ve been thinking for myself a great deal, and I say now, that, if there be no more of it after we die, then the whole thing is such a sell as even the dumb, deaf, blind, heartless, headless God you seem to believe in, could not have been guilty of!”

“Ho! ho!—that’s the good my teaching has done you? Well, we’ll have it out by and by! In the meantime, tell us how it all came about—how you came to know, I mean. You’re a good sort, whatever you believe or don’t believe, and I wish you were ours in reality!”

“It’s just in reality that I am yours!” protested Richard; but his mother broke in.

“Would you dare, John,” she cried, “to wish him ours to his loss?”

“No, no, Jane! You know me! It was but a touch of what you call the old Adam—and I the old John! We’ve got to take care of each other! We’re all agreed about that!”

“And you do it, father, and that’s before any agreeing about it!”

“Come and let’s have our tea!” said the mother; “and Richard shall tell us how it worked round that the old gentleman knew him. I remember him young enough to be no bad match for your mother, and that’s enough to say for any man—as to looks, I mean only. There wasn’t a more beautiful woman than my sister Robina in all England—and I’m bold to say it—not that it wants much boldness to say the truth!”

“It wants nearly as much at this moment as I have got,” returned Richard; for his narrative required, as an essential part of it, that he should tell what had made him go to his father.

He had but begun when a black cloud rose on his mother’s face, and she almost started from her seat.

“I told you, Richard, you were to have nothing to do with those creatures!” she cried.

“Mother,” answered Richard, “was it God or the devil told me I must be neighbour to my own brother and sister? Hasn’t my father done them wrong enough that you should side with him and want me to carry on the wrong? I heard the same voice that made you run away with me. You were ready to be hanged for me; I was ready to lose my father for them. He too said I must have done with them, and I told him I wouldn’t. That was why I got you to put me on journeyman’s wages, uncle. They were starving, and I had nothing to give them. What am I in the world for, if not to set right, so far as I may, what my father has set wrong? You see I have learned something of you, uncle!”

“I don’t see what,” returned Tuke.

He had been listening with a grave face, for he had his pride, and did not relish his nephew’s being hand and glove with his base-born brother and sister.

“Don’t you, father? Where’s your socialism? I’m only trying to carry it out.”

“Out and away, my boy, as Samson did the gates in my mother’s old bible!” answered John.

“If a man’s socialism don’t apply to his own flesh and blood,” resumed Richard, “where on earth is it to begin? Must you hate your own flesh, and go to Russia or China for somebody to be fair to? Ain’t your own got as good a right to fair play as any, and ain’t they the readiest to begin with? Is it selfish to help your own? It ain’t the way you’ve done by me, uncle!”

“You mustn’t forget,” said John, “that a grave wrong is done the nation when marriage is treated with disrespect.”

“It was my father did that! Was it Alice and Arthur that broke the marriage-law by being born out of wedlock?”

“If you treat them like other people, you slight that law.”

“If sir Wilton Lestrange were to come into the room this minute, you would offer him a chair; his children you would order out of the house!”

“I wouldn’t do that,” said Mrs. Tuke.

“Mother, you turned them out of the house!—I beg your pardon, mother, but you know it was the same thing! You visited the sins of the father on the children!”

“Bravo!” cried his uncle; “I thought you couldn’t mean the rot!”

“What rot, father?”

“That rot about God you flung at me first thing.”

“Father, it would take the life out of me to believe there was no God; but the God I hope in is a very different person from the God my mother’s clergy have taught her to believe in. Father, do you know Jesus Christ!”

“I know the person you mean, my boy.”

“I know what kind of person he is, and he said God was just like him, and in the God like him, if I can find him, I will believe with all my heart and soul—and so would you, father, if you knew him. You will say, perhaps, he ain’t nowhere to know! but you haven’t a right to say that until you’ve been everywhere to look; for such a God is no absurdity; it’s nothing ridiculous to look for him. I beg your pardon, both of you, but I’m bound to speak. Jesus Christ said we must leave father and mother for him, because he is true; and I must speak for him what is true, even if my own father and mother should think me rude.”

He had spoken eagerly; and man or woman who does not put truth first, may think he ought to have held his tongue. But neither father nor mother took offence. The mother, unspeakably relieved by what had taken place, was even ready to allow that her favourite preacher might “perhaps dwell too much upon the terrors of the law.”