by Ellen Wood
“It shall all be as you wish, Thomas,” she whispered.
“Ay,” he answered. “Jacob, come here.”
Jacob let his arms drop, and left the book-case to stand close over his brother. Mr. Chandler lifted his right hand, and Jacob stooped and took it.
“When we drew up our articles of partnership, Jacob, a clause was inserted, that upon the death of either of us, the survivor should pay a hundred and fifty pounds a-year out of the practice to those the other should leave behind him, provided the business could afford it. You remember that?”
“Yes,” said Jacob. “I wish it had been me to go instead of you, Thomas.”
“The business will afford it well, as you know, and more than afford it: you might well double it, Jacob. But I suppose you will have to take an additional clerk in my place, some efficient man, and he must be paid. So we will let it be at the hundred and fifty, Jacob. Pay that sum to my wife regularly.”
“To be sure I will,” said Jacob.
“And when Tom shall be of age he must take my place, you know, and draw his full half share. That was always an understood thing between you and me, Jacob, if I were taken. Your own son will, I suppose, be coming in shortly: so that in later years, when you shall have followed me to a better world, the old firm will be perpetuated in them — Chandler and Chandler. Tom and Valentine will divide the profits equally, as we have divided them.”
“To be sure,” said Jacob.
“Yes, yes; my mind is at rest on the score of worldly things. I would that all dying men could be as much at ease. God bless and prosper you, Jacob! You’ll give a fatherly eye over Tom and George in my place, and lead them in straightforward paths.”
“That I will,” said Jacob. “I wish with all my heart this dreadful day’s work had never happened!”
“And so will I too,” put in the Squire. “I’ll look a bit after your two boys myself, Chandler.”
Mr. Chandler, drawing his hand from his brother, held it towards the Squire. At that moment, a suppressed stir was heard outside, and an eager voice. Tom had arrived: having run all the way from Islip.
“Where’s papa? — where’s he lying? Is he hurt very much?”
Cole appeared, marshalling him in. A well-grown young fellow for sixteen, with dark eyes, a fresh colour, and a good-natured face; altogether, the image of his father. Cole took a look down at the mattress, and saw how very much nearer something was at hand than it had been only a few minutes before.
“Hush, Tom,” he said, hastily pouring some drops into half a wine-glass of water. “Gently, lad. Let me give him this.”
Poor Tom Chandler, aghast at what he beheld, was too frightened to speak. A sudden stillness fell upon him, and he knelt down by the side of his mother. Cole’s drops did no good. There could be only a few last words.
“I never thought it would end thus — that I should not have time granted me for even a last farewell,” spoke the dying man in a faint voice and with a gasp between every word, as he took Tom’s hand. “Tom, my boy, I cannot say to you what I would.”
Tom gave a great burst as though he were choking, and was still the next minute.
“Do your duty, my boy, before God and man with all the best strength that Heaven gives you. You must some time lie as I am lying, Tom; it may be with as little warning of it as I have had: at the best, this life will last such a little while as compared with life eternal. Fear God; find your Saviour; love and serve your fellow-creatures. Make up your accounts with your conscience morning and evening. And — Tom — —”
“Yes, father; yes, father?” spoke poor Tom, entreatingly, as the voice died away, and he was afraid that the last words were dying away too and would never be spoken.
“Take care of your mother and be dutiful to her. And do you and George be loving brothers to each other always: tell him I enjoined it with my closing breath. Poor George! if I could but see him! And — and — and — —”
“Yes, oh yes, I will; I will indeed! What else, father?”
But there was nothing else. Just two or three faint words as death came in, and a final gasp to close them.
“God be with you ever, Tom!”
That was all. And the only other thing I recollect was seeing the sister, Mrs. Cramp, come up in a yellow chaise from the Bell at Islip, and pass into the house, as we sat on the gate. But she was just too late.
You may be sure that the affair caused a commotion. So grave a calamity had never happened at North Crabb. Mr. Chandler and his brother had started from Islip in their gig to look at some land that was going to be valued, which lay a mile or two on the other side Crabb on the Worcester Road. They had driven the horse a twelvemonth and never had any trouble with him. It was supposed that something must have been wrong with the harness. Any way, he had started, kicked, backed, and finally run away.
I saw the funeral: standing with Tod in the churchyard amidst many other spectators, and reading the inscriptions on the grave-stones while we waited. Mr. Chandler had been taken back to his house at Islip, and was brought from thence to Crabb to be buried. Tom and George Chandler came in the first mourning-coach with their Uncle Jacob and his son Valentine. In the next sat two other relatives, with the Squire and Mr. Cole.
Changes followed. Mrs. Chandler left the house at Islip, and Jacob Chandler and his family moved into it. She took a pretty cottage at North Crabb, and Tom walked to the office of a morning and home again at night. Valentine, Jacob’s only son, was removed from school at once to be articled to his father. He was fifteen, just a year younger than Tom.
Years passed on. Tom grew to be four-and-twenty, Valentine three-and-twenty. Both of them were good-looking young men, tall and straight; but Tom had the pleasanter face, address, and manners. Every one liked him. Crabb had thought when Tom attained his majority, and got his certificate as a solicitor, that his uncle would have taken him into partnership. The Squire had said it publicly. Instead of that, old Jacob gave him a hundred a-year salary to start with, and said to him, “Now we shall go on comfortably, Tom.” Tom, who was anything but exacting, supposed his uncle wished him to add a year or two to his age and some more experience, before taking him in. So he thanked old Jacob for the hundred a-year, and was contented.
George Chandler had emigrated to Canada. Which rather gave his mother a turn. Some people they knew had gone out there, purchased land, and were doing well on it; and George resolved to follow them. George had been placed with a good farmer in Gloucestershire and learnt farming thoroughly. That accomplished, he began to talk to his mother about his prospects. What he would have liked was, to take a farm on his own account. But he had no money to stock it, and his mother had none to give him. Her income, including the hundred and fifty paid to her from the business, was about four hundred pounds, all told: home living and her sons’ expenses had taken it all, leaving no surplus. “There’s nothing for me but going to Canada, mother,” said George: “I don’t see any opening for me in England. I shall be sure to get on, over there. I am healthy and steady and industrious; and those are the qualities that make way in a new country. If the worst comes to the worst, and I do not succeed, I can but come back again.” His arguments prevailed at length, and he sailed for Canada, their friends over there promising to receive and help him.
All this while Jacob Chandler had flourished. His practice had gradually increased, and he had become a great man. Great in show and expense. It was not his fault; it was that of his family: of his own will, he would never have put a foot forward out of his plain old groove. Mrs. Jacob Chandler, empty-headed, vain, and pretty, had but two thoughts in the world: the one to make her way amidst fashionable people, the other to marry her daughters well. Originally a small tradesman’s daughter in Birmingham, she was now ridiculously upstart, and put on more airs and graces in an hour than a lady born and bred would in a lifetime. Mrs. Jacob Chandler’s people had sold brushes and brooms, soaps and pickles: she had occasionally stood behind the counter and served out the soa
p with her own hands; and Mrs. Jacob now looked down upon Birmingham itself and every one in it.
North Villa had not been given up, though they did move to Islip. Jacob Chandler held a long lease of it, and he sub-let it for three or four years. At the end of that period it occurred to Mrs. Jacob that she should like to keep it for herself, as a sort of country house to retire to at will. As she was the grey mare, this was done; though Jacob grumbled. So North Villa was furbished up, and some new furniture put into it; and the garden, a very nice one, improved: and Mrs. Jacob, with one or other or all three of her daughters, might be frequently seen driving her pony-carriage with its handsome ponies between North Villa and Islip, streamers flying, ribbons fluttering: you would have taken it for a rainbow coming along. The girls were not bad-looking, played and sang with open windows loud enough to frighten the passers-by, and were given to speak to one another in French at table. “Voulez-vouz donner-moi la sel, Clementina?” “Voulez-vous passer-moi le moutarde, Georgiana?” “Voulez-vous envoyer-moi les poivre, Julietta?” For, as Mrs. Jacob would have told you, they had learnt French at school; and to converse in it was of course only natural to themselves, and most instructive to any visitor who might chance to be present. Added to these advantages Mrs. and the Miss Chandlers adored dress, their out-of-door toilettes being grander than a queen’s.
All this: the two houses and the company received in them; the ponies and the groom; the milliners’ bills and the dress-makers’, made a hole in Jacob Chandler’s purse. Not too much of a hole in one sense of the word; Jacob took care of that: but it prevented him from putting by all the money he wished. He made plenty of it: more than the world supposed.
In this manner matters had gone on since the departure of George Chandler for Canada. Mrs. Chandler living quietly in her home making it a happy one for her son Tom, and treasuring George’s letters from over the sea: Mrs. Jacob Chandler and her daughters keeping the place alive; Valentine getting to be a very fine gentleman indeed; old Jacob sticking to business and pocketing his gains. The first interruption came in the shape of a misfortune for Mrs. Chandler. She lost a good portion of her money through a calamity that you have heard of before — the bursting-up of Clement Pell. It left her with very little, save the hundred and fifty pounds a-year paid to her regularly by Jacob. Added to this was the hundred a-year Tom earned, and which his uncle had not increased. And this brings us down to the present time, when Tom was four-and-twenty.
Jacob Chandler sat one morning in his own room at his office, when a clerk came in and said Mrs. Chandler from Crabb was asking to see him. Cordiality had always subsisted between the two families, though they were not much together; Mrs. Chandler disliking their show; Mrs. Jacob and her daughters intensely despising one who wore black silk for best, and generally made her puddings with her own fingers. “So low-lived, you know, my dears,” Mrs. Jacob would say, with a toss of her bedecked head.
Jacob heard his clerk’s announcement with annoyance; the lines on his brow grew deeper. He had always been a shrimp of a man, but he looked like a shrivelled one now. His black clothes sat loosely upon him; his white neckcloth, for he dressed like a parson, seemed too large for his thin neck.
“Mrs. Chandler can come in,” said he, after a few moments’ hesitation. “But say I am busy.”
She came in, putting back her veil: she had worn a plain-shaped bonnet with a white border ever since her husband died. It suited her meek, kind, and somewhat homely face, on which the brown hair, streaked with grey, was banded.
“Jacob, I am sorry to disturb you, especially as you are busy; but I have wanted to speak to you for some time now and have not liked to come,” she began, taking the chair that stood near the table at which he sat. “It is about Tom.”
“What about him?” asked Jacob. “Has he been up to any mischief?”
“Mischief! Tom! Why, Jacob, I hardly think there can be such another young man as he, for steadiness and good conduct; and, I may say, for kindness. I have never heard anything against him. What I want to ask you is, when you think of making a change?”
“A change?” echoed Jacob, as if the words puzzled him, biting away at the feather of his pen. “A change?”
“Is it not time that he should be taken into the business? I — I thought — and Tom I know also thought, Jacob — that you would have done it when he was twenty-one.”
“Oh, did you?” returned Jacob, civilly.
“He is twenty-four, you know, now, Jacob, and naturally wishes to get forward in life. I am anxious that he should; and I think it is time — forgive me for saying it, Jacob — that something was settled.”
“I was thinking of raising Tom’s salary,” coolly observed Jacob; “of giving him, say, fifty pounds a-year more. Valentine has been bothering me to do the same by him; so I suppose I must.”
The fixed colour on Mrs. Chandler’s thin cheeks grew a shade deeper. “But, Jacob, it was his father’s wish, you know, that he should be taken into partnership, should succeed to his own share of the business; and I thought you would have arranged it ere this. An increase of salary is not the thing at all: it is not that that is in question.”
“Nothing can be so bad for a young man as to make him his own master too early,” cried Jacob. “I’ve known it ruin many a one.”
“You promised my husband when he was dying that it should be so,” she gently urged. “Besides, it is Tom’s right. I understood that when he was of a proper age, he was to come in, in accordance with a previous arrangement made between you and poor Thomas.”
Jacob bit the end of the pen right off and nearly swallowed it. “Thomas left all things in my hands,” said he, coughing and choking. “Tom must acquire some further experience yet.”
“When do you propose settling it, then? How long will it be first?”
“Well, that depends, you know. I shall see.”
“Will it be in another year? Tom will be five-and-twenty then.”
“Ay, he will: and Val four-and-twenty. How time flies! It seems but the other day that they were in jackets and trousers.”
“But will it be then — in another year? You have not answered me, Jacob.”
“And I can’t answer you,” returned Jacob. “How can I? Don’t you understand me when I say I must wait and see?”
“You surely will do what is right, Jacob?”
“Well now, can you doubt it, Betsy? Of course I shall. When did you hear from George?”
Mrs. Chandler rose, obliged to be satisfied. To urgently press any interest of her own was not in her nature. As she shook hands with Jacob she was struck with the sickly appearance of his face.
“Are you feeling quite well, Jacob? You look but poorly.”
“I have felt anything but well for a long time,” he replied, in a fretful tone. “I don’t know what ails me: too much work, perhaps, but I seem to have strength for nothing.”
“You should give yourself a rest, Jacob, and take some bark.”
“Ay. Good-day.”
Now it came to pass that in turning out of the house, after nodding to Tom and Valentine, who sat at a desk side by side in the room to the left, the door of which stood open, Mrs. Chandler saw the Squire on the opposite side of the street, and crossed over to him. He asked her in a joking way whether she had been in to get six and eightpenceworth of law. She told him what she had been in for, seeing no reason for concealing it.
“Bless me, yes!” cried he, in his impulsive way. “I’m sure it’s quite time Tom was in the firm. I’ll go and talk to Jacob.”
And when he got in — making straight across the street with the words, and through the passage, and so to the room without halt or ceremony — he saw Jacob leaning back in his chair, his hands thrust into his black side-pockets, and his head bent on his chest in deep thought. The Squire noticed how deep the lines in his brow had grown, just as Mrs. Chandler had.
“But you know, Jacob Chandler, that it was an agreement with the dead,” urged the Squire, in his
eagerness, after listening to some plausible (and shuffling) remarks from Jacob.
“An agreement with the dead!” repeated Jacob, looking up at the Squire for explanation. They were both standing on the matting near the fender: which was filled with an untidy mass of torn and twisted scraps of paper. “What do you mean, Squire? I never knew before that the dead could make an agreement.”
“You know what I mean,” cried the Squire, hotly. “Poor Thomas was close upon death at the time you and he had the conversation: he wanted but two or three minutes of it.”
“Oh, ah, yes; that’s true enough, so far as it goes, Squire,” replied Jacob, pulling up his white cravat as if his throat felt cold.
“Well,” argued the Squire. “Did not you and he agree that Tom was to come in when he was twenty-one? Both of you seemed to imply that there existed a previous understanding to that effect.”
“There never was a word said about his coming in when he was twenty-one,” contended Jacob.
“Why, bless my heart and mind, do you suppose my ears were shut, Jacob Chandler?” retorted the Squire, beginning to rub his head with his red silk handkerchief. “I heard the words.”
“No, Squire. Think a bit.”
Jacob spoke so calmly that the Squire began to rub up his memory as well as his head. He had no cause to suppose Jacob Chandler to be other than an honourable man.
“‘When Tom shall be of age, he must take my place:’ those were I think the very words,” repeated the Squire. “I can see your poor brother’s face now as he lay down on the floor and spoke them. It had death in it.”