A FRIEND IN NEED
Basset had obtained the missing Bible very much in the way the lawyer
had indicated—partly by purchase and partly by pressure. Shocked as
Toft had been by his master’s sudden death, he had had the presence of
mind to remember that he might make something of what they had
discovered could he secrete it; and with every nerve quivering the man
had fought down panic until he had hidden the parcel which had caused
John Audley’s collapse. Then he had given way. He had turned his back
on the Great House, and shuddering, clutched at by grisly hands,
pursued by phantom feet, he had fled through the night and the Yew
Walk, to hide, for the present at least, his part in the tragedy.
Basset, however, had known too much for him, and the servant, shaken by
what had happened, had not been able to persist in his denials. But to
tell and to give were two things, and it is doubtful whether he would
have released his plunder if Basset had not in the last resort
disclosed to him Miss Audley’s engagement to her cousin.
The change which this news wrought in Toft had astonished Basset. The
man had gone down under it as under a blow on the head. The spirit had
gone out of him, and he had taken with thankfulness the sum which
Basset, as John Audley’s representative, had offered him—rather out of
pity than because it seemed necessary. He had given up the parcel on
the night before the funeral.
The book in his hands, Basset had hastened to be rid of it. Cynically
he had told himself that he did so, lest he too might give way to the
ignoble impulse to withhold it. Audley was his rival, but that he might
have forgiven, as men forgive great wrongs and in time smile on their
enemies. But the little wrongs, who can forgive these—the slight, the
sneer, the assumption of superiority, the upper hand lightly taken and
insolently held?
Not Peter Basset, at a moment when he was being tried almost beyond
bearing. For every day, between the finding of the body and the
funeral, and often more than once in the day he had to see Mary, he had
to advise her, he had—for there was no one else—to explain matters to
her, to bear her company. He had to quit this meeting and that
Ordinary—for election business stops for no man—and to go to her. He
had to find her alone and to see her face light up at his entrance; he
had to look back, and to see her watch him as he rode from the door.
Nor when he was absent from the Gatehouse was it any better; nay, it
was worse. For then he was forced to think of her as alone and sad, he
had to picture her brooding over the fire, he had to fancy her at her
solitary meals. And alike, with her or away from her, he had to damp
down the old passion, as well as the new regret that each day and each
hour and every kind look on her part fanned into a flame. Nor was even
this all; every day he saw that she grew more grave, daily he saw her
color fading, and he did not know what qualms she masked, what
nightmares she might be suffering in that empty house—nay, what cause
for unhappiness she might be hiding. At last—it was the afternoon
before the funeral—he could bear it no longer, and he spoke.
“You ought not to be here!” he said bluntly. “Why doesn’t Audley fetch
you away?” He was standing before the fire drawing on his gloves as he
prepared to leave. The room was full of shadows, for he had chosen a
time when she could not see his face.
She tried to fence with him. “I am afraid,” she said, “that some
formalities will be necessary before he can do that.”
“Then why is he not here?” he retorted. “Or why doesn’t he send some
one to be with you? You ought not to be alone. Mrs. Jenkinson at The
Butterflies—she’s a good soul—you know her?”
“Yes.”
“She’d come at a word. I know it’s not my business——”
“Or you would go about it, I am sure,” she replied gently, “with as
much respect to my wishes as Lord Audley shows.”
“Your wishes? But why—why do you wish——”
“Why do I wish to be alone?” she answered. “Because I owe something to
my uncle. Because I owe him a little thought and some remembrance. He
made my old life for me—would you have me begin the new one before he
is in the grave? This was his house—would you have me entertain Lord
Audley in it?” She stood up, slender and straight, with the table
between them—and he did not guess that her knees were trembling.
“Please to understand,” she continued, “that Lord Audley and I are
entirely at one in this. We have our lives before us, and it were
indeed selfish of us, and ungrateful of me, if we grudged a few days to
remembrance. As selfish,” she continued bravely—and he did not know
that she braced herself anew—“as if I were ever to forget the friend
who was _his_ friend, whose kindness has never failed me, whose loyalty
has never—” she broke down there. She could not go on.
“Add, too,” he said gruffly, “who has robbed you of the greater part of
your inheritance! Don’t forget that!” He had been explaining the effect
of John Audley’s will to her. It had been opened that morning.
His roughness helped her to recover herself. “I do not know what you
mean by ‘inheritance,’” she said. “My uncle has left me the portion his
wife brought to him. I am more than satisfied. I am very grateful. My
only fear is that, had he known of my engagement, he would not have
wished me to have this.”
“The will was made before you came to live here,” Basset said. “The
eight thousand was left to you because you were his brother’s child. It
was the least he could do for you, and had he made a new will he would
doubtless have increased it. But,” breaking off, “I must be going.” Yet
he still stood, and he still tapped the table with the end of his
riding-crop. “When is Audley coming?” he asked suddenly. “To-morrow?”
“Yes, to-morrow.”
“Well he ought to,” he replied, without looking at her. “You should not
be here a day longer by yourself. It is not fitting. I shall see you in
the morning before we start for the church, but the lawyer will be here
and I shall not be able to come again. But I must be sure that there is
some one here.” He spoke almost harshly, partly to impress her, partly
to hide his own feelings; and he did not suspect that she, too, was
fighting for calmness; that she was praying that he would go, before
she showed more clearly how much the parting tried her—before every
kind word, every thoughtful act, every toilsome journey taken on her
behalf, rose to her remembrance and swept away the remnants of her
self-control.
She had not imagined that she would feel the leave-taking as she did.
She could not speak, and she was thankful that it was too dark for him
to see her face. Would he never go? And still the slow tap-tap of his
whip on the table went on. It seemed to her that she would never forget
the sound! And if he touched her——
But he had no thought of touching her.
“Good-night,” he said at last. He turned, moved away, lingered. At the
door he looked back. “I am going into the library,” he said. “The
coffin will be closed in the morning.”
“Yes, good-night,” she muttered, thankful that the thought of the dead
man steadied her and gave her power to speak. “I shall see him in the
morning.”
He closed the door, and she crept blindly to a chair, and covered by
the darkness she gave way. She told herself that she was thinking of
her uncle. But she knew that she deceived herself. She knew that her
uncle had little to do with her tears, or with the feeling of
loneliness that overcame her. Once more she had lost her friend—and a
friend so good, so kind. Only now did she know his value!
Five minutes later Basset crossed the court in search of his horse.
Mrs. Toft’s door stood open and a stream of firelight and candlelight
poured from it and cut the January fog. She was hard at work, cooking
funeral meats with the help of a couple of women; for quietly as John
Audley had lived, he could not be buried without some stir. Odd people
would come, drawn by the Audley name, squires who boasted some distant
connection with the line, a few who had been intimate with him in past
days. And the gentry far and wide would send their carriages, and the
servants must be fed. Still the preparations jarred on Basset as he
crossed the court. He felt the bustle an outrage on the mourning girl
he had left, and on his own depression.
Probably Mrs. Toft had set the door open that she might waylay him, for
as he went by she came out and stopped him. “Mr. Basset, sir!” she said
in a low voice. “Is this true, what Toft tells me? I declare, when I
heard it, you could ha’ knocked me down with a common dip!” She was
wiping her hands on her apron. “That the young lady is to marry his
lordship?”
“I believe it is true,” Basset said coldly. “But you had better let her
take her own time to make it known. Toft should not have told you.”
“Never fear, sir, I’ll not let on. But, Lord’s sakes, who’d ha’ thought
it? And she’ll be my lady! Not that she’s not an Audley, and there’s
small differ, and she’ll make none, or I don’t know her! Well, indeed,
I hope she’s wise, but wedding cake, make it as rich as you like, it’s
soon stale. And for him, I don’t know what the Master would have said
if he’d known it! I thought things would come out,” with a quick look
at Basset, “quite otherways! And wished it, too!”
“Thank you, Mrs. Toft,” he said quietly.
“Just so, sir, you’ll excuse me. Well, it’s not many months since the
young lady came, and look at the changes! With the old Master dead, and
you going in for elections—drat ’em, I say, plaguy things that set
folks by the ears—and Mr. Colet gone and ’Truria that unsettled, and
Toft for ever wool-gathering, I shall be glad when tomorrow’s over and
I can sit down and sort things out a bit!”
“Yes, Mrs. Toft.”
“And speaking of elections reminds me. You know they two Boshams of the
Bridge End, sir?”
“I know them. Yes.”
Mrs. Toft sniffed. “They’re sort of kin to me, and middling honest as
town folks go. But two silly fellows, always meddling and making and
gandering with things they’d ought to leave to the gentry! The old lord
was soft with them, and so they’ve a mind now to see who is the
stronger, they or his lordship.”
“If you mean that they have promised to vote for me——”
“That’s it, sir! Vote their living away, they will, and leave ’em
alone! Votes are for poor men to make a bit of money by, odd times; but
they two Boshams I’ve no patience with. Sally, Ben’s wife, was with me
to-day, and the long and the short of it is, Mr. Stubbs has told them
that if they vote for you they’ll go into the street.”
“It’s a hard case,” Basset said. “But what can I do?”
“Don’t ha’ their votes. What’s two votes to you? For the matter of
that,” Mrs. Toft continued, thoroughly wound up, “what’s all the
votes—put together? Bassets and Audleys, Audleys and Bassets were
knights of the shire, time never was, as all the country knows! But for
this little borough—place it’s what your great-grandfather wouldn’t ha’
touched with a pair of gloves! I’d leave it to the riff-raff that’s got
money and naught else, and builds Institutes and such like!”
“But you’d like cheap bread?” Basset said, smiling.
“Bread? Law, Mr. Basset, what’s elections to do wi’ bread? It’s not
bread they’re thinking of, cheap or dear. It’s beer! Swim in it they
do, more shame to you gentry! I’ll be bound to say there’s three goes
to bed drunk in the town these days for two that goes sober! But there,
you speak to they Boshams, Mr. Basset, sir, and put some sense into
them!”
“I’m afraid I can’t promise,” he answered. “I’ll see!”
But it was not of the Boshams he thought as he rode down the hill with
a tight rein—for between fog and frost the road was treacherous. He was
thinking of the man who had been his friend and of whose face,
sphinx-like in death, he had taken farewell in the library. And solemn
thoughts, thoughts such as at times visit most men, calmed his spirit.
The fret of the contest, the strivings of the platform, the rubs of
vanity flitted to a distance, they became small things. Even passion
lost its fever and love its selfishness; and he thought of Audley with
patience and of Mary as he would think of her in years to come, when
time had enshrined her, and she was but a memory, one of the things
that had shaped his life. He knew, indeed, that this mood would pass;
that passion would surge up again, that love would reach out to its
object, that memory would awake and wound him, that pain and
restlessness would be his for many days. But he knew also—in this hour
of clear views—that all these things would have an end, and only the
love,
That seeketh not itself to please
Nor of itself hath any care,
would remain with him.
Already it had carried him some way. In the matter of the election,
indeed, he might be wrong. He might have entered on it too
hastily—often he thought that he had—he might be of fibre too weak for
the task. It cost him much to speak, and the occasional failure, the
mistake, the rebuff, worried him for hours and even days. Trifles, too,
that would not have troubled another, troubled his conscience;
side-issues that were false, but that he must not the less support,
workers whom he despised and must still use, tools that soiled his
hands but were the only tools. Then the vulgar greeting, the tipsy
grasp, the friend in the market-place:—
The man who hails you Tom or Jack
And proves by thumps upon your back
How he esteems your merit!
Who’s such a friend that one had need
Be very much his friend indeed
To pardon or to bear it!
these humiliated him. But worse, far worse, than all was his unhappy
gift of seeing the merits of the other side and of doubting the cause
which he had set out to champion. He had fits of lowness when he was
tempted to deny that honesty existed anywhere in politics; when Sir
Robert Peel no less than Lord George Bentinck—who was coming to the
front as the spokesman of the land—Cobden the Radical no less than Lord
John Russell, seemed to be bent only on their own advancement, when
all, he vowed, were of the School of the Cynics!
But were he right or wrong in his venture—and right or wrong he had
small hope of winning—he would not the less cling to the thing which
Mary had given him—the will to make something of his life, the
determination that he would leave the world, were it only the few
hundred acres that he owned, or the hamlet in which he lived, better
than he had found them. The turmoil of the election over, he would
devote himself to his property at Blore. There John Audley’s twenty
thousand pounds opened a wide door. He would build, drain, manure, make
roads, re-stock. He would make all things new. From him as from a
centre comfort should flow. He saw himself growing old in the middle of
his people, a lonely, but not an unhappy man.
As he passed the bridge at Riddsley he thought of the Boshams, and
weary as he was, he drew rein at their door. Ben Bosham came out,
bare-headed; a short, elderly man with a bald forehead and a dirty
complexion, a man who looked like a cobbler rather than the cow-keeper
he was.
“Shut your door, Bosham,” Basset said. “I want a word with you.”
And when the man had done this, he stooped from the saddle and said a
few words to him in a low voice.
“Well, I’m dommed!” the other answered, peering up through the
darkness. “It be you, Squire, bain’t it? But you’re not meaning it?”
“I am,” Basset replied in a low voice. “I’d not say, vote for him,
Bosham. But leave it alone. You’re not called upon to ruin yourself.”
“But ha’ you thought,” the man exclaimed, “that our two votes may make
the differ? That they may make you or mar you, Squire!”
“Well, I’d rather be marred than see you put out of your place,” Basset
answered. “Think it over, Bosham.”
But Bosham repudiated even thought of it. This vote and his use of it,
this defiance of a lord, was, for the time, his very life. “I’ll not do
it,” he declared. “I couldn’t do it! Nor I won’t!” he repeated. “We’re
freemen o’ Riddsley, and almost the last of the freemen that has votes
as freemen! And while free we are, free we’ll be, and vote as we
choose, Squire! Vote as we choose! I’d not show my face in the town
else! Mr. Stubbs may talk as gallus as he likes—and main ashamed of
himself he looked yesterday—he may talk as gallus as never was, we’ll
not bend to no landlord, nor to no golden image!”
“Then there’s no more to be said,” Basset answered, feeling that he cut
a poor figure. “I don’t wish you to do anything against your
conscience, Bosham, and I’m obliged to you and your brother for your
staunchness. I only wanted you to know that I should understand if you
stayed away.”
“I’d chop my foot off first!” cried the patriot.
After which Basset had no choice but to leave him and to ride on,
feeling that he was himself too soft for the business—that he was a
round man in a square hole. He wondered what his committee would think
of him if they knew, and what Bosham thought of him—who did know. For
Bosham seemed to him at this moment a man of principle, a patriot, nay,
a very Brutus: whereas, Ben was in truth no better than a small man of
large conceit, whose vote was his one road to fame.