The Chronicles of Barsetshire

by Anthony Trollope

  After he had had his brandy, he sat glaring a while at vacancy, as though he was dead to all around him, and was thinking—thinking—thinking of things in the infinite distance of the past.

  “Shall I go now,” said the doctor, “and send Lady Scatcherd to you?”

  “Wait a while, doctor; just one minute longer. So you will do nothing for Louis, then?”

  “I will do everything for him that I can do.”

  “Ah, yes! everything but the one thing that will save him. Well, I will not ask you again. But remember, Thorne, I shall alter my will to-morrow.”

  “Do so by all means; you may well alter it for the better. If I may advise you, you will have down your own business attorney from London. If you will let me send he will be here before to-morrow night.”

  “Thank you for nothing, Thorne: I can manage that matter myself. Now leave me; but remember, you have ruined that girl’s fortune.”

  The doctor did leave him, and went not altogether happy to his room. He could not but confess to himself that he had, despite himself as it were, fed himself with hope that Mary’s future might be made more secure, aye, and brighter too, by some small unheeded fraction broken off from the huge mass of her uncle’s wealth. Such hope, if it had amounted to hope, was now all gone. But this was not all, nor was this the worst of it. That he had done right in utterly repudiating all idea of a marriage between Mary and her cousin—of that he was certain enough; that no earthly consideration would have induced Mary to plight her troth to such a man—that, with him, was as certain as doom. But how far had he done right in keeping her from the sight of her uncle? How could he justify it to himself if he had thus robbed her of her inheritance, seeing that he had done so from a selfish fear lest she, who was now all his own, should be known to the world as belonging to others rather than to him? He had taken upon him on her behalf to reject wealth as valueless; and yet he had no sooner done so than he began to consume his hours with reflecting how great to her would be the value of wealth. And thus, when Sir Roger told him, as he left the room, that he had ruined Mary’s fortune, he was hardly able to bear the taunt with equanimity.

  On the next morning, after paying his professional visit to his patient, and satisfying himself that the end was now drawing near with steps terribly quickened, he went down to Greshamsbury.

  “How long is this to last, uncle?” said his niece, with sad voice, as he again prepared to return to Boxall Hill.

  “Not long, Mary; do not begrudge him a few more hours of life.”

  “No, I do not, uncle. I will say nothing more about it. Is his son with him?” And then, perversely enough, she persisted in asking numerous questions about Louis Scatcherd.

  “Is he likely to marry, uncle?”

  “I hope so, my dear.”

  “Will he be so very rich?”

  “Yes; ultimately he will be very rich.”

  “He will be a baronet, will he not?”

  “Yes, my dear.”

  “What is he like, uncle?”

  “Like—I never know what a young man is like. He is like a man with red hair.”

  “Uncle, you are the worst hand in describing I ever knew. If I’d seen him for five minutes, I’d be bound to make a portrait of him; and you, if you were describing a dog, you’d only say what colour his hair was.”

  “Well, he’s a little man.”

  “Exactly, just as I should say that Mrs. Umbleby had a red-haired little dog. I wish I had known these Scatcherds, uncle. I do so admire people that can push themselves in the world. I wish I had known Sir Roger.”

  “You will never know him now, Mary.”

  “I suppose not. I am so sorry for him. Is Lady Scatcherd nice?”

  “She is an excellent woman.”

  “I hope I may know her some day. You are so much there now, uncle; I wonder whether you ever mention me to them. If you do, tell her from me how much I grieve for her.”

  That same night Dr. Thorne again found himself alone with Sir Roger. The sick man was much more tranquil, and apparently more at ease than he had been on the preceding night. He said nothing about his will, and not a word about Mary Thorne; but the doctor knew that Winterbones and a notary’s clerk from Barchester had been in the bedroom a great part of the day; and, as he knew also that the great man of business was accustomed to do his most important work by the hands of such tools as these, he did not doubt but that the will had been altered and remodelled. Indeed, he thought it more than probable, that when it was opened it would be found to be wholly different in its provisions from that which Sir Roger had already described.

  “Louis is clever enough,” he said, “sharp enough, I mean. He won’t squander the property.”

  “He has good natural abilities,” said the doctor.

  “Excellent, excellent,” said the father. “He may do well, very well, if he can only be kept from this;” and Sir Roger held up the empty wine-glass which stood by his bedside. “What a life he may have before him!—and to throw it away for this!” and as he spoke he took the glass and tossed it across the room. “Oh, doctor! would that it were all to begin again!”

  “We all wish that, I dare say, Scatcherd.”

  “No, you don’t wish it. You ain’t worth a shilling, and yet you regret nothing. I am worth half a million in one way or the other, and I regret everything—everything—everything!”

  “You should not think in that way, Scatcherd; you need not think so. Yesterday you told Mr. Clarke that you were comfortable in your mind.” Mr. Clarke was the clergyman who had visited him.

  “Of course I did. What else could I say when he asked me? It wouldn’t have been civil to have told him that his time and words were all thrown away. But, Thorne, believe me, when a man’s heart is sad—sad—sad to the core, a few words from a parson at the last moment will never make it all right.”

  “May He have mercy on you, my friend!—if you will think of Him, and look to Him, He will have mercy on you.”

  “Well—I will try, doctor; but would that it were all to do again. You’ll see to the old woman for my sake, won’t you?”

  “What, Lady Scatcherd?”

  “Lady Devil! If anything angers me now it is that ‘ladyship’—her to be my lady! Why, when I came out of jail that time, the poor creature had hardly a shoe to her foot. But it wasn’t her fault, Thorne; it was none of her doing. She never asked for such nonsense.”

  “She has been an excellent wife, Scatcherd; and what is more, she is an excellent woman. She is, and ever will be, one of my dearest friends.”

  “Thank’ee, doctor, thank’ee. Yes; she has been a good wife—better for a poor man than a rich one; but then, that was what she was born to. You won’t let her be knocked about by them, will you, Thorne?”

  Dr. Thorne again assured him, that as long as he lived Lady Scatcherd should never want one true friend; in making this promise, however, he managed to drop all allusion to the obnoxious title.

  “You’ll be with him as much as possible, won’t you?” again asked the baronet, after lying quite silent for a quarter of an hour.

  “With whom?” said the doctor, who was then all but asleep.

  “With my poor boy; with Louis.”

  “If he will let me, I will,” said the doctor.

  “And, doctor, when you see a glass at his mouth, dash it down; thrust it down, though you thrust out the teeth with it. When you see that, Thorne, tell him of his father—tell him what his father might have been but for that; tell him how his father died like a beast, because he could not keep himself from drink.”

  These, reader, were the last words spoken by Sir Roger Scatcherd. As he uttered them he rose up in bed with the same vehemence which he had shown on the former evening. But in the very act of doing so he was again struck by paralysis, and before nine on the following morning all was over.

  “Oh, my man—my own, own man!” exclaimed the widow, remembering in the paroxysm of her grief nothing but the loves of their early days
; “the best, the brightest, the cleverest of them all!”

  Some weeks after this Sir Roger was buried, with much pomp and ceremony, within the precincts of Barchester Cathedral; and a monument was put up to him soon after, in which he was portrayed as smoothing a block of granite with a mallet and chisel; while his eagle eye, disdaining such humble work, was fixed upon some intricate mathematical instrument above him. Could Sir Roger have seen it himself, he would probably have declared, that no workman was ever worth his salt who looked one way while he rowed another.

  Immediately after the funeral the will was opened, and Dr. Thorne discovered that the clauses of it were exactly identical with those which his friend had described to him some months back. Nothing had been altered; nor had the document been unfolded since that strange codicil was added, in which it was declared that Dr. Thorne knew—and only Dr. Thorne—who was the eldest child of the testator’s only sister. At the same time, however, a joint executor with Dr. Thorne had been named—one Mr. Stock, a man of railway fame—and Dr. Thorne himself was made a legatee to the humble extent of a thousand pounds. A life income of a thousand pounds a year was left to Lady Scatcherd.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  War

  We need not follow Sir Roger to his grave, nor partake of the baked meats which were furnished for his funeral banquet. Such men as Sir Roger Scatcherd are always well buried, and we have already seen that his glories were duly told to posterity in the graphic diction of his sepulchral monument. In a few days the doctor had returned to his quiet home, and Sir Louis found himself reigning at Boxall Hill in his father’s stead—with, however, a much diminished sway, and, as he thought it, but a poor exchequer. We must soon return to him and say something of his career as a baronet; but for the present, we may go back to our more pleasant friends at Greshamsbury.

  But our friends at Greshamsbury had not been making themselves pleasant—not so pleasant to each other as circumstances would have admitted. In those days which the doctor had felt himself bound to pass, if not altogether at Boxall Hill, yet altogether away from his own home, so as to admit of his being as much as possible with his patient, Mary had been thrown more than ever with Patience Oriel, and, also, almost more than ever with Beatrice Gresham. As regarded Mary, she would doubtless have preferred the companionship of Patience, though she loved Beatrice far the best; but she had no choice. When she went to the parsonage Beatrice came there also, and when Patience came to the doctor’s house Beatrice either accompanied or followed her. Mary could hardly have rejected their society, even had she felt it wise to do so. She would in such case have been all alone, and her severance from the Greshamsbury house and household, from the big family in which she had for so many years been almost at home, would have made such solitude almost unendurable.

  And then these two girls both knew—not her secret: she had no secret—but the little history of her ill-treatment. They knew that though she had been blameless in this matter, yet she had been the one to bear the punishment; and, as girls and bosom friends, they could not but sympathise with her, and endow her with heroic attributes; make her, in fact, as we are doing, their little heroine for the nonce. This was, perhaps, not serviceable for Mary; but it was far from being disagreeable.

  The tendency to finding matter for hero-worship in Mary’s endurance was much stronger with Beatrice than with Miss Oriel. Miss Oriel was the elder, and naturally less afflicted with the sentimentation of romance. She had thrown herself into Mary’s arms because she had seen that it was essentially necessary for Mary’s comfort that she should do so. She was anxious to make her friend smile, and to smile with her. Beatrice was quite as true in her sympathy; but she rather wished that she and Mary might weep in unison, shed mutual tears, and break their hearts together.

  Patience had spoken of Frank’s love as a misfortune, of his conduct as erroneous, and to be excused only by his youth, and had never appeared to surmise that Mary also might be in love as well as he. But to Beatrice the affair was a tragic difficulty, admitting of no solution; a Gordian knot, not to be cut; a misery now and for ever. She would always talk about Frank when she and Mary were alone; and, to speak the truth, Mary did not stop her as she perhaps should have done. As for a marriage between them, that was impossible; Beatrice was well sure of that: it was Frank’s unfortunate destiny that he must marry money—money, and, as Beatrice sometimes thoughtlessly added, cutting Mary to the quick—money and family also. Under such circumstances a marriage between them was quite impossible; but not the less did Beatrice declare, that she would have loved Mary as her sister-in-law had it been possible; and how worthy Frank was of a girl’s love, had such love been permissible.

  “It is so cruel,” Beatrice would say; “so very, very, cruel. You would have suited him in every way.”

  “Nonsense, Trichy; I should have suited him in no possible way at all; nor he me.”

  “Oh, but you would—exactly. Papa loves you so well.”

  “And mamma; that would have been so nice.”

  “Yes; and mamma, too—that is, had you had a fortune,” said the daughter, naïvely. “She always liked you personally, always.”

  “Did she?”

  “Always. And we all love you so.”

  “Especially Lady Alexandrina.”

  “That would not have signified, for Frank cannot endure the De Courcys himself.”

  “My dear, it does not matter one straw whom your brother can endure or not endure just at present. His character is to be formed, and his tastes, and his heart also.”

  “Oh, Mary!—his heart.”

  “Yes, his heart; not the fact of his having a heart. I think he has a heart; but he himself does not yet understand it.”

  “Oh, Mary! you do not know him.”

  Such conversations were not without danger to poor Mary’s comfort. It came soon to be the case that she looked rather for this sort of sympathy from Beatrice, than for Miss Oriel’s pleasant but less piquant gaiety.

  So the days of the doctor’s absence were passed, and so also the first week after his return. During this week it was almost daily necessary that the squire should be with him. The doctor was now the legal holder of Sir Roger’s property, and, as such, the holder also of all the mortgages on Mr. Gresham’s property; and it was natural that they should be much together. The doctor would not, however, go up to Greshamsbury on any other than medical business; and it therefore became necessary that the squire should be a good deal at the doctor’s house.

  Then the Lady Arabella became unhappy in her mind. Frank, it was true, was away at Cambridge, and had been successfully kept out of Mary’s way since the suspicion of danger had fallen upon Lady Arabella’s mind. Frank was away, and Mary was systematically banished, with due acknowledgement from all the powers in Greshamsbury. But this was not enough for Lady Arabella as long as her daughter still habitually consorted with the female culprit, and as long as her husband consorted with the male culprit. It seemed to Lady Arabella at this moment as though, in banishing Mary from the house, she had in effect banished herself from the most intimate of the Greshamsbury social circles. She magnified in her own mind the importance of the conferences between the girls, and was not without some fear that the doctor might be talking the squire over into very dangerous compliance.

  She resolved, therefore, on another duel with the doctor. In the first she had been pre-eminently and unexpectedly successful. No young sucking dove could have been more mild than that terrible enemy whom she had for years regarded as being too puissant for attack. In ten minutes she had vanquished him, and succeeded in banishing both him and his niece from the house without losing the value of his services. As is always the case with us, she had begun to despise the enemy she had conquered, and to think that the foe, once beaten, could never rally.

  Her object was to break off all confidential intercourse between Beatrice and Mary, and to interrupt, as far as she could do it, that between the doctor and the squire. This, it may be said, could be
more easily done by skilful management within her own household. She had, however, tried that and failed. She had said much to Beatrice as to the imprudence of her friendship with Mary, and she had done this purposely before the squire; injudiciously however—for the squire had immediately taken Mary’s part, and had declared that he had no wish to see a quarrel between his family and that of the doctor; that Mary Thorne was in every way a good girl, and an eligible friend for his own child; and had ended by declaring, that he would not have Mary persecuted for Frank’s fault. This had not been the end, nor nearly the end of what had been said on the matter at Greshamsbury; but the end, when it came, came in this wise, that Lady Arabella determined to say a few words to the doctor as to the expediency of forbidding familiar intercourse between Mary and any of the Greshamsbury people.

  With this view Lady Arabella absolutely bearded the lion in his den, the doctor in his shop. She had heard that both Mary and Beatrice were to pass a certain afternoon at the parsonage, and took that opportunity of calling at the doctor’s house. A period of many years had passed since she had last so honoured that abode. Mary, indeed, had been so much one of her own family that the ceremony of calling on her had never been thought necessary; and thus, unless Mary had been absolutely ill, there would have been nothing to bring her ladyship to the house. All this she knew would add to the importance of the occasion, and she judged it prudent to make the occasion as important as it might well be.

  She was so far successful that she soon found herself tête-à-tête with the doctor in his own study. She was no whit dismayed by the pair of human thigh-bones which lay close to his hand, and which, when he was talking in that den of his own, he was in the constant habit of handling with much energy; nor was she frightened out of her propriety even by the little child’s skull which grinned at her from off the chimney-piece.

  “Doctor,” she said, as soon as the first complimentary greetings were over, speaking in her kindest and most would-be-confidential tone, “Doctor, I am still uneasy about that boy of mine, and I have thought it best to come and see you at once, and tell you freely what I think.”