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.”