INTO TEMPTATION.
Never is man so inflamed with anger, so overflowing with gall against
others, as when he is conscious that he has laid himself open to
animadversions. Anthony was bitter at heart against his wife and against
her uncle, because he was aware, without being ready to acknowledge it,
that he had acted ill towards both.
Why should not Urith have yielded at once to his wishes about the
cradle? How obtuse to all delicate and elevated feeling she was to think
that such a dusty, dingy, worm-eaten crib would suffice for his son, the
representative of the house of Cleverdon--the child who was to be the
means of reconciliation between himself and his father--the heir of
Hall, who would open to him again the internal mansion, and enable him
to return there and escape from Willsworthy, a place becoming daily more
distasteful, and likely to become wholly insupportable! That he had seen
the cradle under disadvantage, in its abandoned, forgotten condition,
and that it could be made to look well when a little feminine skill and
taste had been expended on it, did not occur to him.
Moreover, his wife had no right to resist his wishes. He knew the world
better than she--he knew what befitted one of the station his child
would assume better than she. What might do for an heir to Willsworthy
would be indecent for the heir to Hall--what might have suited a girl
was not adapted to a boy. A wife should not question, but submit; the
wish of her husband ought to be paramount to her, and she should
understand that her husband in requiring a thing acted on his right as
master, and that her place was to bow to his requisition. The old sore
against his father that had partially skinned over broke out again,
festered and hot. He was angry against his father, as he was against
Urith. He was angry also with Mr. Gibbs for having proved a better man
than himself at single-stick. Of old, Anthony had shown himself a
tolerable wrestler, runner, single-stick player, thrower of quoits,
player at bowls, among the young men of his acquaintance, and he had
supposed himself a match for any one. Now he was easily disarmed and
defeated by a half-tipsy old loafer, who had done no good to himself or
any one in his life.
He had gone down in public estimation since his marriage--he who had
been cock of the walk. And now he was not even esteemed in his own
house; resisted by his wife, who set at naught his wishes, played with
and beaten by that sot--her uncle.
There was no one who really admired and looked up to him any longer,
except Julian Crymes.
He had wandered forth in the wet, without a purpose, solely with the
desire to be away from the house where he had met with annoyance, where
he had played--but this he would not admit, though he felt it--so poor a
figure. He took his way to Peter Tavy, and went into the little inn of
the Hare and Hounds at Cudliptown, the first hamlet he reached.
No one was there. Uncle Sol had sat there, and tippled and smoked; but
had finally wearied of the solitariness, and had gone away. Now Anthony
sat down where he had been, and was glad to find no one there, for in
his present humour he was disinclined for company. The landlord came to
him and took his order for _aqua vitæ_, brought it, and seated himself
on a stool near him. But Anthony would not speak, or only answered his
questions shortly, so as to let the man understand that his society was
not desired. He took the hint, rose, and left the young man to his own
thoughts.
Anthony put his head in his hand, and looked sullenly at the table. Many
thoughts troubled him. Here he had sat on that eventful night after his
first meeting and association with Urith on the moor. Here he had sat,
with his heart on fire from her eyes, smouldering with love--just as an
optic-glass kindles tinder. Here he had drunk, and, to show his courage,
had gone forth to the churchyard and had broken down her father's
head-post. He had brought it to this house, thrown it on this
table--there! he doubted not, was the dint made by it when it struck the
board.
How long was it since that night? Only a little over a twelve-month. Did
Urith's eyes burn his heart now? There was a fire in them occasionally,
but it did not make his heart flame with love, but with anger. Formerly
he was the well-to-do Anthony Cleverdon, of Hall, with money in his
pockets, able to take his pleasure, whatever it cost him. Now he had to
reckon whether he could afford a glass before he treated himself to one,
was warned against purchasing a new cradle as a needless expense, a bit
of unpardonable extravagance.
He tossed off his glass, and signed for it to be refilled.
Then he thought of his father, of his rebellion against him, and he
asked whether any good had come to him by that revolt. He, himself, was
like to be a father shortly. Would his son ever set him at defiance, as
he had defied his father? He wondered what his father was thinking of
him; whether he knew how straitened his circumstances were, how clouded
his happiness was, how he regretted the unretraceable step he had taken,
how he was weary of Willsworthy, and how he hungered to hear of and to
see Hall once more. There was little real conscious love of his father
in his heart. He did not regret the breach for his father's sake, think
of the desolation of the old man, with his broken hopes, his
disappointed ambitions; he saw things only as they affected himself; he
was himself the pivot about which all his meditations turned, and he
condoled with, lamented over, himself as the worst-used of men, the man
most buffeted by misfortune.
Anthony kicked the legs of the table impatiently. The host looked at him
and smirked. He had his own opinion as to how matters stood with
Anthony. He knew well enough that the young man was unlike Mr. Gibbs,
was no toper; he had rarely stepped within his doors since his marriage.
As the host observed him, he chuckled to himself and said, "That fellow
will come often here now. He has a worm at the heart, and that worm only
ceases to gnaw when given _aqua vitæ_ or punch."
What if the old Squire were to remain obdurate to the end? What if he
did not yield to the glad news that he was grandfather to a new Anthony
Cleverdon? Anthony's heart turned sick at the thought. His son to be
condemned to a toilful life at Willsworthy! But what if Urith should at
some future time be given a daughter, then her estate would pass away
from the young Anthony, and the representative of the Cleverdons would
be adrift in the land without an acre, with hardly a coin--and Hall
would be held by an alien.
He stamped with rage.
His father was possessed with madness; the whole blame fell on his
father. Why was the old grudge against Richard Malvine to envenom the
life of the son and grandchildren of the Squire? By the course he took
the Squire was not hurting the man whom he hated, who was in his grave
and insensible to injury, but his own living direct descendants! Anthony
was stabbing at his own family, in his insensate malice. He thought over
his quarrel with the old man, and he regretted that he had not spoken
plainer, given his father sharper thrusts than he had--that he had not
dipped his words in pitch, and thrown them blazing into his father's
face.
His cheeks were burning; he clenched his fists and ground his teeth, and
then bowed his hot brow upon his clenched hands. No doubt his father
would hear how absurdly Urith had danced at the Cakes, and would laugh
over it. He held up his head and looked round him, thinking he heard the
cackle of his father, so vividly did he portray the scene to his
imagination. No one was in the room save the taverner; but Anthony
caught his eye fixed on him, and he turned impatiently away.
Urith was not--there was no blinking the matter--a wife suitable to him.
He compared her with his sister. Bessie was sweet, gentle, and with all
her amiability dignified; Urith was rough, headstrong, and sullen. She
was uncouth, unyielding--did not understand what were the tastes and
requirements of a man brought up on a higher plane of refinement. He was
weary of her lowering brow, of her silence, her dark eyes with a sombre,
smouldering fire in them. He wondered how he could ever have admired
her! He never would feel content with her. He had sacrificed for her the
most splendid prospects that any man had, and she did not appreciate the
sacrifice, and bow down before him and worship him for it.
He knocked over his glass and broke it. By heaven! He wished he had
never married Urith.
Anthony stood up, and threw down some coin to pay for his brandy and for
the broken glass. He had knocked over the glass in the gesture and start
of disgust, when he had wished himself unmarried, and now--he must pay
for the glass with money that came to him from Urith. He knew this, it
made him writhe, but he quickly deadened the spasm by the consideration
that for every groat he had of his wife, he had given up a guinea. She
was in debt to him, and the ridiculous little sums placed at his
disposal were but an inadequate acknowledgment of the vast indebtedness
under which she lay.
He stood for a few minutes irresolute in the rain, uncertain in which
direction to turn. Home?--To Willsworthy? To the reproaches of Urith, to
the tedious jests and drawled-out songs of Mr. Gibbs? To the sight of
Urith ostentatiously holding her hand in a sling to let him know that he
had hurt her, when she intercepted the blow aimed at her uncle?
"Pshaw!" said Anthony. "She is not hurt, she cannot be hurt. She caught
the stick in her palm. It stung her, no doubt, but will pass. But what
an outcry and fuss will be made over it."
Yet his heart reproached him for these complaints. He knew that it was
not the way with Urith to make an outcry and a fuss. If he had hurt her,
she would disguise the fact. Anyhow, he resolved not to go back to
Willsworthy.
Should he go on to Peter Tavy, and visit his cousin Luke?
No--he had no desire for the society of a parson. Luke had married him
to Urith; Luke was in part to blame for his present condition of
dissatisfaction. Luke might surely; if he had poked about in his books,
have discovered some canonical reason why the marriage could not have
taken place, at least as early as it did. Then--with delay--his love
might have abated, his head would have become cooler, he would have been
better able to balance loss and gain.
"Loss and gain!" scoffed Anthony; "all loss and no gain!"
Luke would surmise that all was not right, he was keen-sighted--he had
already had the impertinence to give an oblique admonition to Anthony to
be tender and forbearing to his wife. If he went to him now, Luke would
nail him, and hammer remonstrances into him.
By heaven! no--he wanted no sermons preached to him on week-days.
He walked to the door of Farmer Cudlip. The Cudlips had been on that
estate much as the Cleverdons had been at Hall, for centuries, but the
Cudlips had owned their own land, as yeomen, whereas the Cleverdons had
been tenant-farmers. Now the Cleverdons had taken a vast stride up the
ladder, whereas the Cudlips, who had given their name to the hamlet, had
remained stationary. The Cudlips, though only yeomen, were greatly
respected. Some of the gentle families were of mushroom growth compared
with them. It was surmised that the Cudlips had originally been
Cutcliffs, and that this yeoman family had issued from the ancient stock
of Cutcliffe of Damage, in North Devon, which had gone forth like a
scriptural patriarch and made itself a settlement on the verge of the
moor, and called the land after its own name; but there was no evidence
to prove this. It was at one time a conjecture of a Hector of Peter
Tavy, who mentioned it to the Cudlip then at Cudliptown, who shrugged
his shoulders and said, "It might be for ought he knew." In the next
generation the descent was talked about as all but certain, in the third
it was a well-established family tradition.
Anthony stood in the doorway of the old ancestral farm. He had knocked,
but received no answer; no one had come to the door in response. He knew
or guessed the reason, for overhead he heard Mistress Cudlip putting the
youngest child to bed; he had heard the little voice of the child raised
in song, chanting its evening hymn:--
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
Bless the bed that I lay on.
Four angels to my bed,
Two to bottom, two to head;
Two to hear me when I pray,
Two to bear my soul away.
Probably Farmer Cudlip was not within. Had he been, the knock of Anthony
would have been responded to by a loud and hearty call to come in.
Anthony did not repeat the knock. It was of no use his entering that
house if the master were out; he did not want to pass words with women
folk. But he halted where he was in order to make up his mind whither he
should go. He craved for--not exactly flattery, but something of that
adulation which had been lavished on him by all alike--old and young,
men and maids--when he was Anthony Cleverdon of Hall, and which had been
denied him since he had become Anthony Cleverdon of Willsworthy.
Under the humiliation he had received in his own house, under the sense
of disgrace which he had brought on himself, first by his anger over the
cradle, and the breaking it down with a blow of an iron bar; then, by
his hand raised over an old man, defenceless; he felt a real need for
adulation. He could not hold up his head, recover his moral elasticity
till he had encountered some one who did not flaunt and beat him down.
Fox--should he go and see Fox at Kilworthy? Fox was his friend; Fox had
a sharp tongue and could say cutting things that would make him laugh,
would shake the moths out of his fretted brain. Yes, he would go to
Kilworthy and see Fox.
As he formed this resolution he was conscious that he was false to
himself. He did not want to see Fox. Fox would not look up to him with
eyes full of loving devotion. Fox's colour would not flush to the cheek
when he entered. Fox's pulses would not bound when his step was heard
on the gravel. Fox would not in words encourage him to think well of
himself, to esteem himself again as the old cock of the walk in plumage,
instead of a wretched draggled fowl. No--he did not want to see Fox, but
Fox's sister. He would go to Kilworthy to see, to hear Julian Crymes,
but he repeated to himself--"I must have a talk with Fox."
Then he heard the little child's voice upstairs repeating the Prayer of
Prayers after its mother.
"Forgive us our trespasses," said Mistress Cudlip.
"Tespusses," said the child.
"As we forgive them that trespass against us."
"As we 'give them----" a pause. The mother assisted the little one, and
it completed the sentence.
"And lead us not into temptation."
"And lead us not----"
Anthony drew his cloak closer about him, shook the water from Solomon's
hat, that he wore, and set it again on his head.
"Into temptation," said the mother.
"Lead us not into temptation," repeated the child. Anthony bent his
head, and went out into the rain, went heedless of the warning that
hammered at his heart, went wilfully--into temptation.