by Ellen Wood
“Ah, I thought I could not have been there. I went to Geneva the latter part of June. I and a fellow were taking a walking tour together. We stayed there a few days, and left it for Savoy the first week in July. I think I did write to Valentine while I was there. All these people, that you speak of, must have arrived afterwards.”
“Then did you not see this Mr. Hardcastle, Ben?” asked his sister.
“I tell you, no! I never saw or heard of him in my life.”
“Then why need you have flown out so?”
“Well, one does not like to be compared to a — murderer. Some of you had been calling him one.”
No more was said. But the hilarity (if there had been any) of the meeting was taken away, and Robert Carr rose to leave. He had a little business to do in Westerbury yet, he said, and must go back that night to London. The squire was the only one who showed courtesy in the farewell. Benjamin was sullenly resentful still; Mrs. Lewis haughty and indifferent.
“Is he quite in his right mind?” Robert Carr asked of Mr. Arkell, as they drove out of the avenue.
“Who? — Benjamin Carr? Oh yes, he is right enough. He is as sharp as a needle.”
“Then what could have caused him to break out in the manner he did? I never was so taken to in my life.”
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Arkell; “it is puzzling me still. But for his very emphatic denial, I should assume it to be as Mrs. Lewis suggested — that he must have got acquainted with this Hardcastle, and did not like to hear any ill of him.”
“Is he a married man?”
“No. Not any of the squire’s children have married, except Mrs. Lewis. And she’s a widow, as you heard her say.”
“I suppose she is the daughter that has entered into possession of my grandfather’s house?”
“She is. Hoping, no doubt, to stay there.”
“Tell me, Mr. Arkell,” resumed Robert Carr after a pause, for he could not forget the recent occurrence, “did you see anything offensive in my allusion?”
“Certainly not. Neither would anyone else. I say I cannot make out Benjamin Carr.”
Before starting for London that night, Robert Carr paid a visit to Mr. Fauntleroy. It was after office hours, but that gentleman received him in his drawing-room. One of Mr. Fauntleroy’s daughters, a buxom damsel on the same large scale as her father, was thumping through some loud piece on the piano. She satisfied her curiosity by a good look at the intruder, as all Westerbury would like to have done, for his name had been in men’s mouths that day, and then retired with a good-humoured smile and nod, carrying her piece of music.
“Bab!” called out the lawyer.
Miss Fauntleroy came back. “Did you speak, pa?”
“Don’t go strumming that in the next room. This gentleman has perhaps called to talk on matters of business.”
She threw down the music with a laugh: gave another good-natured nod to Robert, and finally quitted the room.
“Mr. Fauntleroy, I have come — but I ought first to apologize for calling at this hour, but I am going off at once to London — I have come to ask if you will act for me as my legal adviser?”
Mr. Fauntleroy made a momentary pause. “Do you mean generally, or in any particular cause?”
“I mean in this, my cause. I require some solicitor to take it up at once, and serve a notice of ejectment on Squire Carr, from the possession of the property he has assumed. I suppose that would be the first legal step; but you will know what to do better than I. As the many years solicitor to my grandfather, I thought you might perhaps have no objection to become mine.”
“I have no objection in the world,” said Mr. Fauntleroy. “But, my good sir — and this, mind you, is disinterested advice — I would recommend you to pause before you enter on any such contest. There’s not a shadow of chance that the property can be wrested from Squire Carr, so long as your father’s marriage remains a doubt. It is his by law.”
“I do not think there is a shadow of doubt that the proofs of the marriage will be found, and speedily. I go up to London to search. Meanwhile you will be so kind as act just as you would act were the proofs in your hand. I will not allow Squire Carr to retain, by ever so short a time, the property unmolested, or to fancy he retains it,” continued the young man, in some emotion. “Every hour that he does so is a reflection on my mother’s name.”
“But — yes, that’s all very well, very dutiful — but where’s the use of entering on a contest certain to be lost?”
“It is certain to be gained; I know the proofs will be forthcoming.”
“The most prudent plan will be to wait until they are,” returned the lawyer. He was not usually so considerate for his clients; but this, as he looked upon it, was a hopeless case, one that nobody, many degrees removed from a fool, would venture upon.
“No,” said Robert Carr, “I will not wait a day. Be so kind as take proper steps at once, Mr. Fauntleroy.”
“Very well; if you insist upon it. It will cost money, you know.”
“That shall be placed in your hands as soon as I can send the necessary instructions to Rotterdam. What sum shall you require?”
“Oh, suppose you let me have fifty pounds at first. Before that’s expended, perhaps — perhaps some decision may have been come to.”
Had Mr. Fauntleroy spoken the words on his tongue, they would have run, “perhaps you will have come to your senses.”
“I will spare no expense on this cause; any money you want, you shall have, only my right must be maintained against the other branch of the family. Do you understand me, Mr. Fauntleroy?”
“I do; and I must ask you to understand me, and to remember later that I did not advise this. If the proofs of the marriage shall come to light, why, then of course the tables will be turned.”
“By the way,” said Robert Carr, “I have never asked what amount of money my grandfather has left?”
“Not much less than the value of twenty thousand pounds, taking it in the aggregate. He did not live up to his income, and it accumulated. There are several houses; the one he resided in is a beautiful little place. You have not been inside it?”
“No; I met Mrs. Lewis to-day, at the squire’s, and I thought she might have invited me to see it,” added Robert Carr. “But she did not.”
“No danger; they’ll keep you at arm’s length, if they can. Well, Mr. Carr, you will not forget what I say, that I do not advise you to enter on this contest. And should you, after a day or two’s reflection, think better of it, there’s no harm done. Just drop me a line to say so, that’s all. I won’t charge you for my advice.”
“You must think I am of a changeable nature,” returned the young clergyman, half resentfully.
“I should think you a sensible man.”
Robert could not smile, he was too serious. “And if you receive the money from me, instead of the letter you suggest, you will immediately commence this action; is that an understood thing between us, Mr. Fauntleroy?”
“It is,” said Mr. Fauntleroy; “it will cost a mint of money, mind you, if it goes on to trial.”
Robert Carr said no more; he was satisfied. As he went down the richly-carpeted stairs, two large female heads, and two coarsely-handsome, good-natured faces were propelled over the balustrades, to gaze after him: the heads and the faces of the Miss Fauntleroys.
CHAPTER X.
A MISSIVE FOR SQUIRE CARR.
Domestic relations did not progress very pleasantly at Squire Carr’s. It was the old story; the old grievance; the one that had disturbed the internal economy of the home ever since Benjamin became a grown man: Benjamin required money, and the squire protested he had it not to give. Ben, he said, wanted to ruin him.
This time Ben had come home particularly out at elbows, metaphorically speaking; literally, he was, in regard to clothes, rather better off than usual. Ben had quitted his home the previous April, with a very fair sum of money in his pocket, drawn from the squire; where he had spent the time since was
not very clear, unless he had been, as the squire expressed it, dodging about the continent; two or three letters having been received from him at long intervals, dated from different parts of it. Ben was not accustomed to be particularly communicative on the subject of his own wanderings; and all he said now was, that he had made a “pedestrian tour.” One other thing was a vast deal more clear — that he had brought back empty pockets.
He was now worrying the squire to advance him funds for a visit to Australia, where he should be sure to make his fortune. Three or four fellows, whom he knew, were going, he said; they had a fine prospect before them, and he had the opportunity offered him of joining them. The worrying had begun on the very evening subsequent to the visit of Mr. Arkell and Robert Carr; a week or more had gone on since; and Ben systematically continued his importunities. The squire turned a stone-deaf ear. Ben had once before got money from him to make his fortune in Australia; and had come home after a two years’ absence without a shirt to his back: Squire Carr must live to be an older man than he was now, before he forgot that. Valentine Carr put in his voice against it; he had for a long while been angrily resentful at these sums of money being advanced to Ben, far larger ones, he suspected, than the reigning powers allowed to come to his knowledge; and he was now raising his voice in opposition. He was the heir; and the estate, he said, was already impoverished too much.
One cloudy Saturday morning, close, hot, and unhealthy, Valentine Carr was mounting his horse to go to Westerbury. They had breakfasted early; breakfast was always taken early at the squire’s, but especially so on Saturdays, the market day at Westerbury. Squire Carr was standing by his son, giving him various directions.
“You’ll see how prices run to-day, Valentine; but mark you, I’ll not sell a sheaf of the old corn if the market’s flat. And the new you need not think of soliciting offers for, for I shall not sell yet awhile. The barley market ought to be brisk to-day; some of the maltsters, I hear, are already preparing to steep; and you may, perhaps, get rid of some loads. Have you the samples?”
Valentine Carr dived with one hand into his capacious pocket, by way of answer, and just showed some three or four little bags tied round with tape.
“You’ll get first prices, mind, or you won’t sell. Not a farmer in all the county can show better barley this year than ours. Do you hear?”
“I know,” ungraciously returned Valentine. “I believe you think I’m a child still. I can’t ride off to market without you, but you go on at me in this fashion: and it’s nigh upon thirty years now since I went first.”
“I know my own business better than anybody, and I can’t afford to let things go below their value,” rejoined the squire. “A halfpenny a bushel would make a difference to me now, and I should feel it. I’m shorter of money than I ought to be.”
“Money goes in many ways that it ought not to go in,” said Valentine, gathering up his bridle with a sniff. And the squire knew that it was a side-thrust at Ben. “Anything more?”
“You had better call on Emma, and ask whether she has made a list of the plate and pictures. If she has not, you may tell her that I shall come over next week and go over the things for myself. She might have sent it to me days ago. I’ll not have so much as a plated spoon omitted, and so I told her. That’s all.”
Valentine Carr touched his horse and rode at a quick trot down the avenue. When the squire looked round, he found Benjamin — who had just got down to breakfast — at his side.
“We shall have a nasty, hot, muggy day, Ben!”
“Yes,” said Ben, “we get these days sometimes in September. Father, if you won’t let me have the two hundred, will you let me have one? I don’t want to lose this chance, and my friends will have sailed. They are putting in three hundred each, but — —”
“How many times are you going to tell me that?” interrupted the squire. “I don’t believe it; no, I don’t believe you have any friends who are possessed of three hundred to put. It is of no use your bothering, Ben; I haven’t got the money to spare.”
“Not got it to spare, when you have just come in to twenty thousand pounds!” returned Ben, not, however, venturing to speak in any tone but a conciliating one. “I only wish I had come in to a tithe of it! It was a slice of good luck that you never expected, squire, and you might be generous enough to help me once again.”
In truth, the good luck had been so entirely unlooked for, that Squire Carr could not find in his heart to snub Ben for saying so, quite as fiercely as he might otherwise have done. “It was just a chance, Ben, Robert Carr’s dying as he did.”
“A very good chance for us. Look here, father: I can’t stop on here, nagged at by Valentine, out of purse, out of your favour — —”
“Whose fault is it that you are out of my favour?” interrupted the squire, taking off his old drab wide-awake to straighten a dent in the brim.
“Well, I suppose it’s mine,” acknowledged Ben. “What is a hundred pounds to the twenty thousand you have come into? A drop of water in the ocean.”
“And if you got the hundred pounds and started with it, you’d be writing home in three months for another hundred! It has always been the case, Ben.”
The words seemed to imply symptoms of so great a concession, compared to the positive refusal hitherto accorded him, that Ben Carr’s hopes went up like a sky-rocket. He saw the hundred pounds in his possession and himself ploughing the deep waters, as vividly as though the picture had been presented to him in a magic mirror.
“It is a chance that I have never had, squire. These men are steady, industrious, practical fellows, who will keep me to my work, whether I will or not. They go out to make money, and I shall make some. Who knows but I may return home with a fortune to match this, just come to you?”
“Ben, you harp upon this money of Marmaduke’s; but let me tell you that I don’t know what I should have done without it. I have had nothing but drains upon me for years: you’ve been one of them.”
“The old hypocrite!” thought Ben, “he’s rolling in money, besides this new windfall. Well, sir,” he said aloud, “I shall write — —”
“Who’s this?” interrupted the squire, who did not see so well as he once did.
It was the postman. Letters were not frequent at the squire’s, as they are at many houses. The man was coming up the avenue, in the distance as yet. Squire Carr walked towards him and stretched out his hand for the letters.
The postman gave him two. One was a large, blue, formidable-looking packet, addressed to himself; the other was a perfumed, mignonne, three-cornered sort of missive, for Benjamin Carr, Esq.
“Here, Ben, I don’t know who your correspondent may be,” said the squire, tossing him the note. “She’s an idiot, that’s certain; nobody, above one, would think of sending a doll’s thing like that through the post. It’s a wonder it wasn’t lost.”
Benjamin Carr glanced at the handwriting and slipped the note into the pocket of his shooting coat. Sauntering to a little distance, while the squire was busy with his own letter, he there took it out, opened, and began to read it: a closely-written epistle, on thin foreign paper.
He was startled by something very like the bellow of a bull. Turning round, he saw the squire in a fine commotion, and the noise had come from him.
“Why, what is the matter?” exclaimed Ben, advancing.
“Matter!” ejaculated Squire Carr— “matter! They are mad; or else I am dreaming.”
He held the formidable document before his eyes. He turned it, he gazed at it, he shook it, he pinched himself to see whether he was dreaming. If any man ever believed that his eyes played him false, Squire Carr believed his did then.
“What is it?” repeated the astonished Ben.
It was a notice from Mr. Fauntleroy that an action was entered upon — to eject him from the possession of that bijou of a house; to wrest from him the fortune; to give Marmaduke’s money to Robert Carr; to forbid him to touch or remove so much (his own words just before to his
son) as a plated spoon of the effects; to reduce him, in short, to a poor wretched non-inheriting beggar again. Not that all this, or the half of it, was stated; it was implied, and that was enough for the squire’s vivid imagination.
“Ben, my boy, what does it mean?” he gasped.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Ben, considerably crestfallen.
“I’m not dreaming, am I?” asked the squire. “Mercy be good to us! What can they have found? Perhaps old Marmaduke made a will after all! They’d never enter an action without being justified. Get the horse into the dog-cart and drive me to the station, Ben. I must go over to see Fauntleroy. Hang him! the sly old villain! I should like to twist his neck.”
“But you will promise me the hundred pounds, father?”
“Hundred pounds be shot!” shrieked the squire in a fury. “I’ve just got notice that I’m ruined, and he asks me for a hundred pounds! No, sir! nor a hundred pence. How can I afford money, now this inheritance is threatened?”
Benjamin Carr had a great mind to tell his father, that even if it were threatened and taken, he was as well off now as he had been a short while before. But it was not a time to press matters, and he drove the squire to the station in silence.
On that busy Saturday morning — and Saturdays were always busy days at the office of Mr. Fauntleroy — the clerks were amazed by the disturbed entrance of Squire Carr, pushing, agitated, restless; far more amazed than was perhaps their master, Mr. Fauntleroy. He had half expected it.
There ensued a hasty explanation; but the squire scarcely allowed himself to listen to it. Of all the blows that could have come upon him, this was the worst.
“And what do you think of yourself, pray, to be taking up a cause against the Carr family, when you have stuck by it for half a century, or it by you?”
“By old Marmaduke; by no others of it,” returned Mr. Fauntleroy, who was secretly enjoying the squire’s perplexity beyond everything.
“Why do you turn round against him now? I did not expect it of you, Fauntleroy.”