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.
Perhaps of all about him it was from that father that he could expect
the least sympathy. Ovington was not only a banker, he was a banker to
whom his business was everything. He had created it. It had made him.
It was not in his eyes a mere adjunct, as in the eyes of one born in
the purple and to the leisure which invites to the higher uses of
wealth. Able he was, and according to his lights honorable; but a
narrow education had confined his views, and he saw in his money merely
the means to rise in the world and eventually to become one of the
landed class which at that time monopolized all power and all
influence, political as well as social. Such a man could only see in
Clement a failure, a reversion to the yeoman type, and own with sorrow
the irony of fortune that so often delights to hand on the sceptre of
an Oliver to a “Tumble-down-Dick.”
Only from Betty, young and romantic, yet possessed of a woman’s
intuitive power of understanding others, could Clement look for any
sympathy. And even Betty doubted while she loved—for she had also that
other attribute of woman, a basis of sound common-sense. She admired
her father. She saw more clearly than Clement what he had done for them
and to what he was raising them. And she could not but grieve that
Clement was not more like him, that Clement could not fall in with his
wishes and devote himself to the attainment of the end for which the
elder man had worked. She could enter into the father’s disappointment
as well as into the son’s distaste.
Meanwhile Clement, dreaming now of a girl’s face, now of a new drill
which he had seen that morning, now of the passing sights and sounds
which would have escaped nine men out of ten but had a meaning for him,
drew near to the town. He topped the last eminence, he rode under the
ancient oak, whence, tradition had it, a famous Welshman had watched
the wreck of his fortunes on a pitched field. Finally he saw, rising
from the river before him, the amphitheatre of dim lights that was the
town. Descending he crossed the bridge.
He sighed as he did so. For to him to pass from the silent lands and to
enter the brawling streets where apprentices were putting up the
shutters and beggars were raking among heaps of market garbage was to
fall half way from the clouds. To right and left the inns were roaring
drunken choruses, drabs stood in the mouths of the alleys—dubbed in
Aldersbury “shuts”—tradesmen were hastening to wet their profits at the
Crown or the Gullet. When at last he heard the house door clang behind
him, and breathed the confined air of the bank, redolent for him of
ledgers and day-books, the fall was complete. He reached the earth.
If he had not done so, his sister’s face when he entered the
dining-room would have brought him to his level.
“My eye and Betty Martin!” she said. “But you’ve done it now, my lad!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Father will tell you that. He’s in his room and as black as thunder.
He came home by the mail at three—Sir Charles waiting, Mr. Acherley
waiting, the bank full, no Clement! You are in for it. You are to go to
him the moment you come in.”
He looked longingly at the table where supper awaited him. “What did he
say?” he asked.
“He said all I have said and d—n besides. It’s no good looking at the
table, my lad. You must see him first and then I’ll give you your
supper.”
“All right!” he replied, and he turned to the door with something of a
swagger.
But Betty, whose moods were as changeable as the winds, and whose
thoughts were much graver than her words, was at the door before him.
She took him by the lapel of his coat and looked up in his face. “You
won’t forget that you’re in fault, Clem, will you?” she said in a small
voice. “Remember that if he had not worked there would be no walking
about with a gun or a rod for you. And no looking at new drills,
whatever they are, for I know that that is what you had in your mind
this morning. He’s a good dad, Clem—better than most. You won’t forget
that, will you?”
“But after all a man must——”
“Suppose you forget that ‘_after all_,’” she said sagely. “The truth is
you have played truant, haven’t you? And you must take your medicine.
Go and take it like a good boy. There are but three of us, Clem.”
She knew how to appeal to him, and how to move him; she knew that at
bottom he was fond of his father. He nodded and went, knocked at his
father’s door and, tamed by his sister’s words, took his scolding—and
it was a sharp scolding—with patience. Things were going well with the
banker, he had had his usual four glasses of port, and he might not
have spoken so sharply if the contrast between the idle and the
industrious apprentice had not been thrust upon him that day with a
force which had startled him. That little hint of a partnership had not
been dropped without a pang. He was jealous for his son, and he spoke
out.
“If you think,” he said, tapping the ledger before him, to give point
to his words, “that because you’ve been to Cambridge this job is below
you, you’re mistaken, Clement. And if you think that you can do it in
your spare time, you’re still more mistaken. It’s no easy task, I can
tell you, to make a bank and keep a bank, and manage your neighbor’s
money as well as your own, and if you think it is, you’re wrong. To
make a hundred thousand pounds is a deal harder than to make Latin
verses—or to go tramping the country on a market day with your gun!
That’s not business! That’s not business, and once for all, if you are
not going to help me, I warn you that I must find someone who will! And
I shall not have far to look!”
“I’m afraid, sir, that I have not got a turn for it,” Clement pleaded.
“But what have you a turn for? You shoot, but I’m hanged if you bring
home much game. And you fish, but I suppose you give the fish away. And
you’re out of town, idling and doing God knows what, three days in the
week! No turn for it? No will to do it, you mean. Do you ever think,”
the banker continued, joining the fingers of his two hands as he sat
back in his chair, and looking over them at the culprit, “where you
would be and what you would be doing if I had not toiled for you? If I
had not made the business at which you do not condescend to work? I had
to make my own way. My grandfather was little better than a laborer,
and but for what I’ve done you might be a clerk at a pound a week, and
a bad clerk, too! Or behind a shop-counter, if you liked it better. And
if things go wrong with me—for I’d have you remember that nothing in
this world is quite safe—that is where you may still be! Still, my
lad!”
For the first time Clement looked his father fairly in the face—and
pleased him. “Well, sir,” he said, “if things go wrong I hope you won’t
find me wanting. Nor ungrateful for what you have done for us. I know
how much it is. But I’m not Bourdillon, and I’ve not got his head for
figures.”
“You’ve not got his application. That’s the mischief! Your heart’s not
in it.”
“Well, I don’t know that it is,” Clement admitted. “I suppose you
couldn’t——” he hesitated, a new hope kindled within him. He looked at
his father doubtfully.
“Couldn’t what?”
“Release me from the bank, sir? And give me a—a very small capital
to——”
“To go and idle upon?” the banker exclaimed, and thumped the ledger in
his indignation at an idea so preposterous. “No, by G—d, I couldn’t!
Pay you to go idling about the country, more like a dying duck in a
thunder-storm, as I am told you do, than a man! Find you capital and
see you loiter your life away with your hands in your pockets? No, I
couldn’t, my boy, and I would not if I could! Capital, indeed? Give you
capital? For what?”
“I could take a farm,” sullenly, “and I shouldn’t idle. I can work hard
enough when I like my work. And I know something about farming, and I
believe I could make it pay.”
The other gasped. To the banker, with his mind on thousands, with his
plans and hopes for the future, with his golden visions of Lombard
Street and financial sway, to talk of a farm and of making it pay! It
seemed—it seemed worse than lunacy. His son must be out of his mind. He
stared at him, honestly wondering. “A farm!” he ejaculated at last.
“And make it pay? Go back to the clodhopping life your grandfather
lived before you and from which I lifted you? Peddle with pennies and
sell ducks and chickens in the market? Why—why, I don’t know what to
say to you?”
“I like an outdoor life,” Clement pleaded, his face scarlet.
“Like a—like a——” Ovington could find no word to express his feelings
and with an effort he swallowed them down. “Look here, Clement,” he
said more mildly; “what’s come to you? What is it that is amiss with
you? Whatever it is you must straighten it out, boy; there must be an
end of this folly, for folly it is. Understand me, the day that you go
out of the bank you go to stand on your own legs, without help from me.
If you are prepared to do that?”
“I don’t say that I could—at first.”
“Then while I keep you I shall certainly do it on my own terms. So, if
you please, I will hear no more of this. Go back to your desk, go back
to your desk, sir, and do your duty. I sent you to Cambridge at
Butler’s suggestion, but I begin to fear that it was the biggest
mistake of my life. I declare I never heard such nonsense except from a
man in love. I suppose you are not in love, eh?”
“No!” Clement cried angrily, and he went out.
For he could not own to his father that he was in love; in love with
the brown earth, the woods, and the wide straggling hedge-rows, with
the whispering wind and the music of the river on the shallows, with
the silence and immensity of night. Had he done so, he would have
spoken a language which his father did not and could not understand.
And if he had gone a step farther and told him that he felt drawn to
those who plodded up and down the wide stubbles, who cut and bound the
thick hedge-rows, who wrought hand in hand with Nature day in and day
out, whose lives were spent in an unending struggle with the soil until
at last they sank and mingled with it—if he had told him that he felt
his kinship with those humble folk who had gone before him, he would
only have mystified him, only have angered him the more.
Yet so it was. And he could not change himself.
He went slowly to his supper and to Betty, owning defeat; acknowledging
his father’s strength of purpose, acknowledging his father’s right, yet
vexed at his own impotence. Life pulsed strongly within him. He longed
to do something. He longed to battle, the wind in his teeth and the
rain in his face, with some toil, some labor that would try his
strength and task his muscles, and send him home at sunset weary and
satisfied. Instead he saw before him an endless succession of days
spent with his head in a ledger and his heels on the bar of his stool,
while the sun shone in at the windows of the bank and the flies buzzed
sleepily about him; days arid and tedious, shared with no companion
more interesting than Rodd, who, excellent fellow, was not amusing, or
more congenial than Bourdillon, who patronized him when he was not
using him. And in future he would have to be more punctual, more
regular, more assiduous! It was a dreary prospect.
He ate his supper in morose silence until Betty, who had been quick to
read the upshot of the interview in his face, came behind him and
ruffled his hair. “Good boy!” she whispered, leaning over him. “His
days shall be long in the land!”
“I wish to heaven,” he answered, “they were in the land! I am sure they
will be long enough in the bank!” But after that he recovered his
temper.