Toward the evening of the following day, Randal Leslie walked slowly
from a village on the main road (about two miles from Rood Hall), at
which he had got out of the coach. He passed through meads and
corn-fields, and by the skirts of woods which had formerly belonged to
his ancestors, but had long since been alienated. He was alone amidst
the haunts of his boyhood, the scenes in which he had first invoked the
grand Spirit of Knowledge, to bid the Celestial Still One minister to
the commands of an earthly and turbulent ambition. He paused often in
his path, especially when the undulations of the ground gave a glimpse
of the gray church tower, or the gloomy firs that rose above the
desolate wastes of Rood.
"Here," thought Randal, with a softening eye--"here, how often,
comparing the fertility of the lands passed away from the inheritance of
my fathers, with the forlorn wilds that are left to their mouldering
hall--here, how often have I said to myself--'I will rebuild the
fortunes of my house.' And straightway Toil lost its aspect of drudge,
and grew kingly, and books became as living armies to serve my thought.
Again--again--O thou haughty Past, brace and strengthen me in the battle
with the Future." His pale lips writhed as he soliloquized, for his
conscience spoke to him while he thus addressed his will, and its voice
was heard more audibly in the quiet of the rural landscape, than amid
the turmoil and din of that armed and sleepless camp which we call a
city.
Doubtless, though Ambition have objects more vast and beneficent than
the restoration of a name--_that_ in itself is high and chivalrous, and
appeals to a strong interest in the human heart. But all emotions, and
all ends, of a nobler character, had seemed to filter themselves free
from every golden grain in passing through the mechanism of Randal's
intellect, and came forth at last into egotism clear and unalloyed.
Nevertheless, it is a strange truth that, to a man of cultivated mind,
however perverted and vicious, there are vouchsafed gleams of brighter
sentiments, irregular perceptions of moral beauty, denied to the brutal
unreasoning wickedness of uneducated villainy--which perhaps ultimately
serve as his punishment--according to the old thought of the satirist,
that there is no greater curse than to perceive virtue, yet adopt
vice. And as the solitary schemer walked slowly on, and his
childhood--innocent at least of deed--came distinct before him through
the halo of bygone dreams--dreams far purer than those from which he now
rose each morning to the active world of Man--a profound melancholy
crept over him, and suddenly he exclaimed aloud, "_Then_ I aspired to be
renowned and great--_now_, how is it that, so advanced in my career, all
that seemed lofty in the means has vanished from me, and the only means
that I contemplate are those which my childhood would have called poor
and vile? Ah! is it that I then read but books, and now my knowledge has
passed onward, and men contaminate more than books? But," he continued
in a lower voice, as if arguing with himself, "if power is only so to be
won--and of what use is knowledge if it be not power--does not success
in life justify all things? And who prizes the wise man if he fails?" He
continued his way, but still the soft tranquillity around rebuked him,
and still his reason was dissatisfied, as well as his conscience. There
are times when Nature, like a bath of youth, seems to restore to the
jaded soul its freshness--times from which some men have emerged, as if
reborn. The crises of life are very silent. Suddenly the scene opened on
Randal Leslie's eyes. The bare desert common--the dilapidated
church--the old house, partially seen in the dank dreary hollow, into
which it seemed to Randal to have sunken deeper and lowlier than when he
saw it last. And on the common were some young men playing at hockey.
That old-fashioned game, now very uncommon in England, except at
schools, was still preserved in the primitive simplicity of Rood by the
young yeomen and farmers. Randal stood by the stile and looked on, for
among the players he recognized his brother Oliver. Presently the ball
was struck toward Oliver, and the group instantly gathered round that
young gentleman, and snatched him from Randal's eye; but the elder
brother heard a displeasing din, a derisive laughter. Oliver had shrunk
from the danger of the thick clubbed sticks that plied around him, and
received some strokes across the legs, for his voice rose whining, and
was drowned by shouts of, "Go to your mammy. That's Noll Leslie--all
over. Butter shins."
Randal's sallow face became scarlet. "The jest of boors--a Leslie!" he
muttered, and ground his teeth. He sprang over the stile, and walked
erect and haughtily across the ground. The players cried out
indignantly. Randal raised his hat, and they recognized him, and stopped
the game. For him at least a certain respect was felt. Oliver turned
round quickly, and ran up to him. Randal caught his arm firmly, and,
without saying a word to the rest, drew him away toward the house.
Oliver cast a regretful, lingering look behind him, rubbed his shins,
and then stole a timid glance toward Randal's severe and moody
countenance.
"You are not angry that I was playing at hockey with our neighbors,"
said he deprecatingly, observing that Randal would not break the
silence.
"No," replied the elder brother; "but, in associating with his
inferiors, a gentleman still knows how to maintain his dignity. There is
no harm in playing with inferiors, but it is necessary to a gentleman to
play so that he is not the laughing-stock of clowns."
Oliver hung his head, and made no answer. They came into the slovenly
precincts of the court, and the pigs stared at them from the palings as
they had stared years before, at Frank Hazeldean.
Mr. Leslie senior, in a shabby straw hat, was engaged in feeding the
chickens before the threshold, and he performed even that occupation
with a maundering lackadaisical slothfulness, dropping down the grains
almost one by one from his inert dreamy fingers.
Randal's sister, her hair still and forever hanging about her ears, was
seated on a rush-bottom chair, reading a tattered novel; and from the
parlor window was heard the querulous voice of Mrs. Leslie, in high
fidget and complaint.
Somehow or other, as the young heir to all this helpless poverty stood
in the court-yard, with his sharp, refined, intelligent features, and
his strange elegance of dress and aspect, one better comprehended how,
left solely to the egotism of his knowledge and his ambition, in such a
family, and without any of the sweet nameless lessons of Home, he had
grown up into such close and secret solitude of soul--how the mind had
taken so little nutriment from the heart, and how that affection and
respect which the warm circle of the hearth usually calls forth had
passed with him to the graves of dead fathers, growing, as it were,
bloodless and ghoul-like amid the charnels on which they fed.
"Ha, Randal, boy," said Mr. Leslie, looking up lazily, "how d'ye do? Who
could have expected you? My dear--my dear," he cried, in a broken voice,
and as if in helpless dismay, "here's Randal, and he'll be wanting
dinner, or supper, or something." But in the mean while, Randal's sister
Juliet had sprung up and thrown her arms round her brother's neck, and
he had drawn her aside caressingly, for Randal's strongest human
affection was for this sister.
"You are growing very pretty, Juliet," said he, smoothing back her hair;
"why do yourself such injustice--why not pay more attention to your
appearance, as I have so often begged you to do?"
"I did not expect you, dear Randal; you always come so suddenly, and
catch us _en dish-a-bill_."
"Dish-a-bill!" echoed Randal, with a groan.--"_Dishabille!_--you ought
never to be so caught!"
"No one else does so catch us--nobody else ever comes! Heigho," and the
young lady sighed very heartily.
"Patience, patience; my day is coming, and then yours, my sister,"
replied Randal with genuine pity, as he gazed upon what a little care
could have trained into so fair a flower, and what now looked so like a
weed.
Here Mrs. Leslie, in a state of intense excitement--having rushed
through the parlor--leaving a fragment of her gown between the yawning
brass of the never-mended Brummagem work-table--tore across the
hall--whirled out of the door, scattering the chickens to the right and
left, and clutched hold of Randal in her motherly embrace. "La, how you
do shake my nerves," she cried, after giving him a most hearty and
uncomfortable kiss. "And you are hungry, too, and nothing in the house
but cold mutton! Jenny, Jenny, I say Jenny! Juliet, have you seen Jenny?
Where's Jenny? Out with the old man, I'll be bound."
"I am not hungry, mother," said Randal; "I wish for nothing but tea."
Juliet, scrambling up her hair, darted into the house to prepare the
tea, and also to "tidy herself." She dearly loved her fine brother, but
she was greatly in awe of him.
Randal seated himself on the broken pales. "Take care they don't come
down," said Mr. Leslie, with some anxiety.
"Oh, sir, I am very light; nothing comes down with me."
The pigs stared up, and grunted in amaze at the stranger.
"Mother," said the young man, detaining Mrs. Leslie, who wanted to set
off in chase of Jenny--"mother, you should not let Oliver associate with
those village boors. It is time to think of a profession for him."
"Oh, he eats us out of house and home--such an appetite! But as to a
profession--what is he fit for! He will never be a scholar."
Randal nodded a moody assent; for, indeed, Oliver had been sent to
Cambridge, and supported there out of Randal's income from his official
pay;--and Oliver had been plucked for his Little Go.
"There is the army," said the elder brother--"a gentleman's calling. How
handsome Juliet ought to be--but--I left money for masters--and she
pronounces French like a chambermaid."
"Yet she is fond of her book too. She's always reading, and good for
nothing else."
"Reading!--those trashy novels!"
"So like you--you always come to scold, and make things unpleasant,"
said Mrs. Leslie, peevishly. "You are grown too fine for us, and I am
sure we suffer affronts enough from others, not to want a little respect
from our own children."
"I did not mean to affront you," said Randal, sadly. "Pardon me. But who
else has done so?"
Then Mrs. Leslie went into a minute and most irritating catalogue of all
the mortifications and insults she had received; the grievances of a
petty provincial family, with much pretension and small power; of all
people, indeed, without the disposition to please--without the ability
to serve--who exaggerate every offense, and are thankful for no
kindness. Farmer Jones had insolently refused to send his wagon twenty
miles for coals. Mr. Giles, the butcher, requesting the payment of his
bill, had stated that the custom at Rood was too small for him to allow
credit. Squire Thornhill, who was the present owner of the fairest slice
of the old Leslie domains, had taken the liberty to ask permission to
shoot over Mr. Leslie's land, since Mr. Leslie did not preserve. Lady
Spratt (new people from the city, who hired a neighboring country seat)
had taken a discharged servant of Mrs. Leslie's without applying for the
character. The Lord Lieutenant had given a ball, and had not invited the
Leslies. Mr. Leslie's tenants had voted against their landlord's wish at
the recent election. More than all, Squire Hazeldean and his Harry had
called at Rood, and though Mrs. Leslie had screamed out to Jenny, "Not
at home," she had been seen at the window, and the Squire had actually
forced his way in, and caught the whole family "in a state not fit to be
seen." That was a trifle, but the Squire had presumed to instruct Mr.
Leslie how to manage his property, and Mrs. Hazeldean had actually told
Juliet to hold up her head and tie up her hair, "as if we were her
cottagers!" said Mrs. Leslie, with the pride of a Montfydget.
All these and various other annoyances, though Randal was too sensible
not to perceive their insignificance, still galled and mortified the
listening heir of Rood. They showed, at least, even to the well-meant
officiousness of the Hazeldeans, the small account in which the fallen
family was held. As he sat still on the moss-grown pale, gloomy and
taciturn, his mother standing beside him, with her cap awry, Mr. Leslie
shamblingly sauntered up and said, in a pensive, dolorous whine--
"I wish we had a good sum of money, Randal, boy!"
To do Mr. Leslie justice, he seldom gave vent to any wish that savored
of avarice. His mind must be singularly aroused, to wander out of its
normal limits of sluggish, dull content.
So Randal looked at him in surprise, and said, "Do you, sir?--why?"
"The manors of Rood and Dulmansberry, and all the lands therein, which
my great-grandfather sold away, are to be sold again when Squire
Thornhill's eldest son comes of age, to cut off the entail. Sir John
Spratt talks of buying them. I should like to have them back again! 'Tis
a shame to see the Leslie estates hawked about, and bought by Spratts
and people. I wish I had a great--great sum of ready money."
The poor gentleman extended his helpless fingers as he spoke, and fell
into a dejected reverie.
Randal sprang from the paling, a movement which frightened the
contemplative pigs, and set them off squalling and scampering. "When
does young Thornhill come of age?"
"He was nineteen last August. I know it, because the day he was born I
picked up my fossil of the sea-horse, just by Dulmansberry church, when
the joy-bells were ringing. My fossil sea-horse? It will be an heirloom,
Randal--"
"Two years--nearly two years--yet--ah, ah!" said Randal; and his sister
now appearing to announce that tea was ready, he threw his arm round her
neck and kissed her. Juliet had arranged her hair and trimmed up her
dress. She looked very pretty, and she had now the air of a
gentlewoman--something of Randal's own refinement in her slender
proportions and well-shaped head.
"Be patient, patient still, my dear sister," whispered Randal, "and keep
your heart whole for two years longer."
The young man was gay and good-humored over his simple meal, while his
family grouped round him. When it was over, Mr. Leslie lighted his pipe,
and called for his brandy-and-water. Mrs. Leslie began to question about
London and Court, and the new King and the new Queen, and Mr. Audley
Egerton, and hoped Mr. Egerton would leave Randal all his money, and
that Randal would marry a rich woman, and that the King would make him a
prime-minister one of these days; and then she would like to see if
Farmer Jones would refuse to send his wagon for coals! And every now and
then, as the word "riches" or "money" caught Mr. Leslie's ear, he shook
his head, drew his pipe from his mouth, and muttered, "A Spratt should
not have what belonged to my great-great-grandfather, if I had a good
sum of ready money!--the old family estates!" Oliver and Juliet sate
silent, and on their good-behavior; and Randal, indulging his
own reveries, dreamily heard the words "money," "Spratt,"
"great-great-grandfather," "rich wife," "family estates;" and they
sounded to him vague and afar off, like whispers from the world of
romance and legend--weird prophecies of things to be.
Such was the hearth which warmed the viper that nestled and gnawed at
the heart of Randal, poisoned all the aspirations that youth should have
rendered pure, ambition lofty, and knowledge beneficent and divine.