Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  But Betty put her hands behind her back. “Why? Where are you going?”

  “You have forgotten that it is Saturday. I am going home.”

  “Horrid Saturday! I thought that to-night, with father just back — —”

  “I wouldn’t go? If I don’t my mother will think that the skies have fallen. Besides, I am riding Clement’s mare, and if I don’t go, how is he to come back?”

  “As you go at other times. On his feet.”

  “Ah, well, very soon I shall have a horse of my own. You’ll see, Betty. We are all going to make our fortunes now.”

  “Fortunes?” — with disdain. “Whose?”

  “Your father’s for one.”

  “Silly! He’s made his.”

  “Then yours — and mine, Betty. Yours and mine — and Clement’s.”

  “I don’t think he’ll thank you.”

  “Then Rodd’s. But, no, we’ll not make Rodd’s. We’ll not make Rodd’s, Betty.”

  “And why not Mr. Rodd’s?”

  “Never mind. We’ll not make it,” mischievously. “I wonder why you’ve got such a color, Betty?” And as she snatched the book from him and threatened him with it, “Good-bye till Monday. I’m late now, and it will be dark before I am out of the town.”

  With a gay nod he vanished through the door that led into the bank. She looked after him, the book in her hand. Her lip curled. “Rodd indeed!” she murmured. “Rodd? As if I should ever — oh, isn’t he provoking!”

  CHAPTER II

  The village of Garthmyle, where Arthur had his home, lay in the lap of the border hills more than seven miles from Aldersbury, and night had veiled the landscape when he rode over the bridge and up the village street. The squat church-tower, firm and enduring as the hopes it embodied, rose four-square above the thatched dwellings, and some half-mile away the rider could discern or imagine the blur of trees that masked Garth, on its sister eminence. But the bounds of the valley, in the mouth of which the village nestled, were obscured by darkness; the steep limestone wall which fenced it on one side and the more distant wooded hills that sloped gently to it on the other were alike hidden. It was only when Arthur had passed through the hamlet, where all doors were closed against the chill of a January night, and he had ridden a few paces down the hillock, that the lights of the Cottage broke upon his view. Many a time had they, friendly beacons of home and rest, greeted him at that point.

  Not that Arthur saw them as beacons, for at no time was he much given to sentiment. His outlook on life was too direct and vivid for that, and to-day in particular his mind was teeming with more practical thoughts, with hopes and plans and calculations. But the lights meant that a dull ride over a rough road was at an end, and so far they gave him pleasure. He opened the gate and rode round to the stable, gave up the horse to Pugh, the man-of-all-work, and made his way into the house.

  He entered upon a scene as cheerful as any lights shining on weary traveller could promise. In a fair-sized room a clear grate held a coal fire, the flames of which danced on the red-papered walls. A kettle bubbled on the hob, a tea-tray gleamed on the table, and between the two a lady and gentleman sat, eating crumpets; the lady with much elegance and a napkin spread over her lavender silk dress, the gentleman in a green cutaway coat with basket buttons — a coat that ill concealed the splashed gaiters for which he had more than once asked pardon.

  But fair as things looked on the surface, all was not perfect even in this pleasant interior. The lady held herself stiffly, and her eyes rested rather more often than was courteous on the spatter-dashes. Secretly she thought her company not good enough for her, while the gentleman was frankly bored. Neither was finding the other as congenial as a first glance suggested, and it would have been hard to say which found Arthur’s entrance the more welcome interruption.

  “Hallo, mother!” he said, stooping carelessly to kiss her. “Hallo, Clement.”

  “My dear Arthur!” the lady cried, the lappets of her cap shaking as she embraced him. “How late you are! That horrid bank! I am sure that some day you will be robbed and murdered on your way home!”

  “I! No, mother. I don’t bring the money, more’s the pity! I am late, am I? The worse for Clement, who has to ride home. But I have been doing your work, my lad, so you mustn’t grumble. What did you get?”

  “A brace and a wood-pigeon. Has my father come?”

  “Yes, he has come, and I am afraid has a wigging in store for you. But — a brace and a wood-pigeon? Lord, man,” with a little contempt in his tone, “what do you do with your gun all day? Why, Acherley told me that in that rough between the two fallows above the brook — —”

  “Oh, Arthur,” Mrs. Bourdillon interposed, “never mind that!” She had condescended sufficiently, she thought, and wished to hear no more of Clement Ovington’s doings. “I’ve something more important to tell you, much more important. I’ve had a shock, a dreadful shock to-day.”

  She was a faded lady, rather foolish than wise, and very elegant: one who made the most of such troubles as she had, and the opening her son now heard was one which he had heard often before.

  “What’s the matter now, mother?” he asked, stooping to warm his hands.

  “Your uncle has been here.”

  “Well, that’s no new thing.”

  “But he has behaved dreadfully, perfectly dreadfully to me.”

  “I don’t know that that is new, either.”

  “He began again about your refusal to take Orders, and your going into that dreadful bank instead.”

  Arthur shrugged his shoulders. “That’s one for you, Clement.”

  “Oh, that wasn’t the half,” the lady continued, unbending. “He said, there was the living, three hundred and fifty a year, and old Mr. Trubshaw seventy-eight. And he’d have to sell it and put in a stranger and have quarrels about tithes. He stood there with his great stick in his hand and his eyes glaring at me like an angry cat’s, and scolded me till I didn’t know whether I stood on my head or my heels. He wanted to know where you got your low tastes from.”

  “There you are again, Clement!”

  “And your wish to go into trade, and I answered him quite sharp that you didn’t get them from me; as for Mr. Bourdillon’s grandfather, who had the plantations in Jamaica, it wasn’t the same at all, as everybody knows and agrees that nothing is genteeler than the West Indies with black men to do the work!”

  “You confounded him there, mother, I’m sure. But as we have heard something like this before, and Clement is not much interested, if that is all — —”

  “Oh, but it is not all! Very far from it!” Mrs. Bourdillon’s head shook till the lappets swung again. “The worst is to come. He said that we had had the Cottage rent-free for four years — and I’m sure I don’t know who has a better right to it — but that that was while he still hoped that you were going to live like a gentleman, like the Griffins before you — and I am sure the Bourdillons were gentry, or I should have been the last to marry your father! But as you seemed to be set on going your own way and into the bank for good — and I must say I told him it wasn’t any wish of mine and I’d said all I could against it, as you know, and Mr. Clement knows the same — why, it was but right that we should pay rent like other people! And it would be thirty pounds a year from Lady Day!”

  “The d — d old hunks!” Arthur cried. He had listened unmoved to his mother’s tirade, but this touched him. “Well, he is a curmudgeon! Thirty pounds a year? Well, I’m d — d! And all because I won’t starve as a parson!”

  But his mother rose in arms at that. “Starve as a parson!” she cried. “Why, I think you are as bad, one as the other. I’m sure your father never starved!”

  “No, I know, mother. He was passing rich on four hundred pounds a year. But that is not going to do for me.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you want!”

  “My dear mother, I’ve told you before what I want.” Arthur was fast regaining the good temper that he seldom lost. �
�If I were a bishop’s son and could look to be a bishop, or if I were an archdeacon’s son with the prospect of a fat prebend and a rectory or two with it, I’d take Orders. But with no prospect except the Garthmyle living, and with tithes falling — —”

  “But haven’t I told you over and over again that you have only to make-up to — but there, I haven’t told you that Jos was with him, and I will say this for her, that she looked as ashamed for him as I am sure I was! I declare I was sorry for the girl and she not daring to put in a word — such an old bear as he is to her!”

  “Poor Jos!” Arthur said. “She has not a very bright life of it. But this does not interest Clement, and we’re keeping him.”

  The young man had indeed made more than one attempt to take leave, but every time he had moved Mrs. Bourdillon had either ignored him, or by a stately gesture had claimed his silence. He rose now.

  “I dare say you know my cousin?” Arthur said.

  “I’ve seen her,” Clement answered; and his mind went back to the only occasion on which he had remarked Miss Griffin. It had been at the last Race Ball at Aldersbury that he had noticed her — a gentle, sweet-faced girl, plainly and even dowdily dressed, and so closely guarded by her proud old dragon of a father that, warned by the fate of others and aware that his name was not likely to find favor with the Squire, he had shrunk from seeking an introduction. But he had noticed that she sat out more than she danced; sat, indeed, in a kind of isolation, fenced in by the old man, and regarded with glances of half-scornful pity by girls more smartly dressed. He had had time to watch her, for he also, though for different reasons, had been a little without the pale, and he had found her face attractive. He had imagined how differently she would look were she suitably dressed. “Yes,” he continued, recalling it, “she was at the last Race Ball, I think.”

  “And a mighty poor time she had of it,” Arthur answered, half carelessly, half contemptuously. “Poor Jos! She hasn’t at any time much of a life with my beauty of an uncle. Twopence to get and a penny to spend!”

  Mrs. Bourdillon protested. “I do wish you would not talk of your cousin like that,” she said. “You know that she’s your uncle’s heiress, and if you only — —”

  Arthur cut her short. “There! There! You don’t remember, mother, that Clement has seven miles to ride before his supper. Let him go now! He’ll be late enough.”

  That was the end, and the two young men went out together. When Arthur returned, the tea had been removed and his mother was seated at her tambour work. He took his stand before the fire. “Confounded old screw!” he fumed. “Thirty pounds a year? And he’s three thousand, if he’s a penny! And more likely four!”

  “Well, it may be yours some day,” with a sniff. “I’m sure Jos is ready enough.”

  “She’ll have to do as he tells her.”

  “But Garth must be hers.”

  “And still she’ll have to do as he tells her. Don’t you know yet, mother, that Jos has no more will than a mouse? But never mind, we can afford his thirty pounds. Ovington is giving me a hundred and fifty, and I’m to have another hundred as secretary to this new Company — that’s news for you. With your two hundred and fifty we shall be able to pay his rent and still be better off than before. I shall buy a nag — Packham has one to sell — and move to better rooms in town.”

  “But you’ll still be in that dreadful bank,” Mrs. Bourdillon sighed. “Really, Arthur, with so much money it seems a pity you should lower yourself to it.”

  He had some admirable qualities besides the gaiety, the alertness, the good looks that charmed all comers; ay, and besides the rather uncommon head for figures and for business which came, perhaps, of his Huguenot ancestry, and had commended him to the banker. Of these qualities patience with his mother was one. So, instead of snubbing her, “Why dreadful?” he asked good-humoredly. “Because all our county fogies look down on it? Because having nothing but land, and drawing all their importance from land, they’re jealous of the money that is shouldering them out and threatening their pride of place? Listen to me, mother. There is a change coming! Whether they see it or not, and I think they do see it, there is a change coming, and stiff as they hold themselves, they will have to give way to it. Three thousand a year? Four thousand? Why, if Ovington lives another ten years what do you think that he will be worth? Not three thousand a year, but ten, fifteen, twenty thousand!”

  “Arthur!”

  “It is true, mother. Ay, twenty, it is possible! And do you think that when he can buy up half a dozen of these thickheaded Squires who can just add two to two and make four — that he’ll not count? Do you think that they’ll be able to put him on one side? No! And they know it. They see that the big manufacturers and the big ironmasters and the big bankers who are putting together hundreds of thousands are going to push in among them and can’t be kept out! And therefore trade, as they call it, stinks in their nostrils!”

  “Oh, Arthur, how horrid!” Mrs. Bourdillon protested, “you are growing as coarse as your uncle. And I’m sure we don’t want a lot of vulgar purse-proud — —”

  “Purse-proud? And what is the Squire? Land-proud! But,” growing more calm, “never mind that. You will take a different view when I tell you something that I heard to-day. Ovington let drop a word about a partnership.”

  “La, Arthur, but — —”

  “A partnership! Nothing definite, nothing to bind, and not yet, but in the future. It was but a hint. But think of it, mother! It is what I have been aiming at all along, but I didn’t expect to hear of it yet. Not one or two hundred a year, but say, five hundred to begin with, and three, four, five thousand by and by! Five thousand!” His eyes sparkled and he threw back the hair from his forehead with a characteristic gesture. “Five thousand a year! Think of that and don’t talk to me of Orders. Take Orders! Be a beggarly parson while I have that in my power, and in my power while I am still young! For trust me, with Ovington at the helm and the tide at flood we shall move. We shall move, mother! The money is there, lying there, lying everywhere to be picked up. And we shall pick it up.”

  “You take my breath away!” his mother protested, her faded, delicate face unusually flushed. “Five thousand a year! Gracious me! Why, it is more than your uncle has!” She raised her mittened hands in protest. “Oh, it is impossible!” The vision overcame her.

  But “It is perfectly possible,” he repeated. “Clement is of no use. He is for ever wanting to be out of doors — a farmer spoiled. Rodd’s a mere mechanic. Ovington cannot do it all, and he sees it. He must have someone he can trust. And then it is not only that I suit him. I am what he is not — a gentleman.”

  “If you could have it without going to the bank!” Mrs. Bourdillon said. And she sighed, golden as was the vision. But before they parted his eloquence had almost persuaded her. She had heard such things, had listened to such hopes, had been dazzled by such sums that she was well-nigh reconciled even to that which the old Squire dubbed “the trade of usury.”

  CHAPTER III

  Meanwhile Clement Ovington jogged homeward through the darkness, his thoughts divided between the discussion at which he had made an unwilling third, and the objects about him which were never without interest for this young man. He had an ear, and a very sharp one, for the piping of the pee-wits in the low land by the river, and the owl’s cadenced cry in the trees about Garth. He marked the stars shining in a depth of heaven opened amid the flying wrack of clouds; he picked out Jupiter sailing with supreme dominion, and the Dog-star travelling across the southern tract. His eye caught the gleam of water on a meadow, and he reflected that old Gregory would never do any good with that ground until he made some stone drains in it. Not a sound in the sleeping woods, not the barking of a dog at a lonely homestead — and he knew every farm by name and sight and quality — escaped him; nor the shape of a covert, blurred though it was and leafless. But amid all these interests, and more than once, his thoughts as he rode turned inwards, and he pictured the face of the girl
at the ball. Long forgotten, it recurred to him with strange persistence.

  He was an out-of-door man, and that, in his position, was the pity of it. Aldersbury School — and Aldersbury was a very famous school in those days — and Cambridge had done little to alter the tendency: possibly the latter, seated in the midst of wide open spaces, under a wide sky, the fens its neighbors, had done something to strengthen his bent. Bourdillon thought of him with contempt, as a clodhopper, a rustic, hinting that he was a throwback to an ancestor, not too remote, who had followed the plough and whistled for want of thought. But he did Clement an injustice. It was possible that in his love of the soil he was a throwback; he would have made, and indeed he was, a good ploughman. He had learnt the trick with avidity, giving good money, solid silver shillings, that Hodge might rest while he worked. But, a ploughman, he would not have turned a clod without noticing its quality, nor sown a seed without considering its fitness, nor observed a rare plant without wondering why it grew in that position, nor looked up without drawing from the sky some sign of the weather or the hour. Much less would he have gazed down a woodland glade, flecked with sunlight, without perceiving its beauty.

  He was, indeed, both in practice and theory a lover of Nature; breathing freely its open air, understanding its moods, asking nothing better than to be allowed to turn them to his purpose. Though he was no great reader, he read Wordsworth, and many a line was fixed in his memory and, on occasions when he was alone, rose to his lips.

  But he hated the desk and he hated figures. His thoughts as he stood behind the bank counter, or drummed his restless heels against the legs of his high stool, were far away in fallow and stubble, or where the trout, that he could tickle as to the manner born, lay under the caving bank. And to his father and to those who judged him by the bank standard, and felt for him half scornful liking, he seemed to be an inefficient, a trifler. They said in Aldersbury that it was lucky for him that he had a father.