FATHER AND SON.
Mr. Ogden came downstairs in the middle of the day, and ordered
breakfast and dinner in one meal. He asked especially for Sarah's
small-beer, and drank two or three large glasses of it. He did not eat
much, and used an unusual quantity of pepper. He was extremely taciturn,
contrarily to his ordinary habit, for he commonly talked very freely
with old Sarah whilst she served him. When his repast was finished, he
expressed a wish to see little Jacob.
"Good morning, papa! I hope you are better. Sarah says you were poorly
last night when Feorach barked so."
"Oh, she says I was poorly, does she? Then she lies: I wasn't poorly,--I
was drunk. I want you to read to me."
"Must I read in that book Mr. Prigley gave me when he came?"
"Read what you please."
So little Jacob opened for the first time a certain volume which will be
recognized by every reader when he begins:--
"'The way was long, the wind was cold.
The minstrel was infirm and old.'"
"That would be difficult," said Mr. Ogden.
"What, papa?"
"I say, it would be difficult."
Little Jacob felt rather frightened. He did not understand in what the
supposed difficulty consisted, and yet felt that he was expected to
understand it. He did not dare to ask a second time for enlightenment on
the point, so he stood quite still and said nothing. His father waited
a minute in perfect silence, and then burst out,--
"Why, you little confounded blockhead, I mean that it would be difficult
for a man to be infirm and bold at the same time! Infirm people are
timid, commonly."
"Please, papa, it doesn't say infirm and bold--it says infirm and
old--see, papa;" and little Jacob pointed with his finger to the place.
"Then you read damned badly, for you read it 'bold,' and it's 'old.' I
expect you to read better than that--you read badly, damned badly."
"Please, papa, I read it 'old' the first time, and not 'bold.'"
"Then you mean to say I cannot trust my own ears, you little impertinent
monkey. I say you read it 'bold,' and I heard you."
An elder person would have perceived that Mr. Ogden was ill, and humored
him; and a child of a more yielding disposition would have submitted to
the injustice, and acquiesced. But little Jacob had an instinctive
hatred of injustice, and his whole nature rose in revolt. He had also
made up his mind never to tell lies--less perhaps from principle than
from a feeling that it was cowardly. The present was an occasion which
roused these feelings in all their energy. He was required to utter a
falsehood, and submit to an injustice.
"No, papa, I said 'old.' I didn't say 'bold' at all. It was you that
heard wrong."
Mr. Ogden became white with anger. "Oh, _I_ was mistaken, was I? Do you
mean to say that I am deaf?"
"No, papa."
"Well, then, if I'm not deaf I have been lying. I am a liar, am I?"
The state of extreme nervous depression, in combination with
irritability, under which Mr. Ogden's system was laboring that day, made
him a dangerous man to contradict, and not by any means a pleasant
antagonist in argument. But he was not altogether lost; he still kept
some control over himself, in proof of which may be mentioned the fact
that he simply dismissed little Jacob without even a box on the ear. "He
deserves a good thrashing," said Mr. Ogden; "but if I were to begin with
him I should nearly kill him, the little impudent scoundrel!"
The afternoon was exceedingly dull and disagreeable to Mr. Ogden. He
walked out into his fields and round the pond. He had made a small
footpath for his walks, which, after leaving the front-door first, went
all round the pond, and then up to the rocks that overlooked the little
valley, and from which he enjoyed a very extensive view. There were
several springs in the little hollow, but before Mr. Ogden's settlement
they had contented themselves with creating those patches of that
emerald grass, set in dark heather, which are so preciously beautiful in
the scenery of the moors. At each of these springs Mr. Ogden had made a
circular stone-basin, with a water-duct to his pond, and it was his
fancy to visit these basins rather frequently to see that they were kept
clean and in order. He did so this afternoon, from habit, and by the
time he had finished his round it was nearly dark.
He was intensely miserable. Twistle Farm had been sweet and dear to him
because he had jealously guarded the purity of the associations that
belonged to it. Neither in the house nor in the little undulating fields
that he had made was there a single object to remind him of his weakness
and his sin, and therefore the place had been a refuge and a sanctuary.
It could never again be for him what it had been; this last lamentable
failure had broken down the moral defences of his home, and invaded it
and contaminated it for ever. Whatever the future might bring, the event
of the past night was irrevocable; he had besotted himself with drink;
he had brought the mire of the outer world into his pure dwelling, and
defiled it. Isaac Ogden felt this the more painfully that he had little
of the support of religion, and few of the consolations and
encouragements of philosophy. A religious mind would have acknowledged
its weakness and repented of its sin, yet in the depths of its
humiliation hoped still for strength from above, and looked and prayed
for ultimate deliverance and peace. A philosophic mind would have
reflected that moral effort is not to be abandoned for a single relapse,
or even for many relapses, and would have addressed itself only the more
earnestly to the task of self-reformation that the need for effort had
made itself so strikingly apparent. But Mr. Ogden had neither the faith
which throws itself on the support of Heaven, nor the faculty of judging
of his own actions with the impartiality of the independent intellect.
He was simply a man of the world, so far as such a place as Shayton
could develop a man of the world, and had neither religious faith nor
intellectual culture. Therefore his misery was the greater for the
density of the darkness in which he had stumbled and fallen. What he
needed was light of some sort; either the beautiful old lamp of faith,
with its wealth of elaborate imagery, or the plainer but still bright
and serviceable gas-light of modern thought and science. Mr. Prigley
possessed the one, and the Doctor gave his best labor to the maintenance
of the other; but Mr. Ogden was unfortunate in not being able to profit
by the help which either of these friends would have so willingly
afforded.
No one except Dr. Bardly had suspected the deplorable fact that Mr.
Ogden was no longer in a state of mental sanity. The little incident
just narrated, in which he had mistaken one word for another, and
insisted, with irritation, that the error did not lie with him, had been
a common one during the last few weeks, whenever little Jacob read to
him. If our little friend had communicated his sorrows to the Doctor,
this fact would have been a very valuable one as evidence of his
father's condition; but he never mentioned it to any one except his
grandmother and old Sarah, who both inferred that the child had read
inaccurately, and saw no reason to suspect the justice of Mr. Ogden's
criticism. The truth was, that by a confusion very common in certain
forms of brain-disease, a sound often suggested to Mr. Ogden some other
sound resembling it, or of which it formed a part, and the mere
suggestion became to him quite as much a fact as if he had heard it with
his bodily ears. Thus, as we have seen, the word "old" had suggested
"bold;" and when, as in that instance, the imagined word did not fit in
very naturally with the sense of the passage, Mr. Ogden attributed the
fault to little Jacob's supposed inaccuracy in reading. Indeed he had
now a settled conviction that his son was unpardonably careless, and no
sooner did the child open his book to read, than his father became
morbidly expectant of some absurd mistake, which, of course, never
failed to arrive, and to give occasion for the bitterest reproaches.
On his return to the house Mr. Ogden desired his son's attendance, and
requested him to resume his reading. Little Jacob took up his book
again, and this time, as it happened, Mr. Ogden heard the second line
correctly, and expressed his satisfaction. But in the very next
couplet--
"His withered cheek and tresses gray
Seemed to have known a better day"--
Mr. Ogden found means to imagine another error. "It seems to me
curious," said he, "that Scott should have described the minstrel as
having a 'withered cheek and tresses gay;' there could be little gayety
about him, I should imagine."
"Please, papa, it isn't gay, but gray."
"Then why the devil do you read so incorrectly? I have always to be
scolding you for making these absurd mistakes!"
If little Jacob had had an older head on his shoulders he would have
acquiesced, and tried to get done with the reading as soon as possible,
so as to make his escape. But it was repugnant to him to admit that he
had made a blunder of which he was innocent, and he answered,--
"But, papa, I read it right--I said _gray_; I didn't say _gay_."
Mr. Ogden made a violent effort to control himself, and said, with the
sort of calm that comes of the intensest emotion,--
"Then you mean to say I am deaf."
Little Jacob had really been thinking that his father might be deaf, and
admitted as much.
"Fetch me my riding-whip."
Little Jacob brought the whip, expecting an immediate application of it,
but Mr. Ogden, still keeping a strong control over himself, merely took
the whip in his hands, and began to play with it, and look at its silver
top, which he rubbed a little with his pocket-handkerchief. Then he took
a candle in his right hand, and brought the flame quite close to the
silver ornament, examining it with singular minuteness, so as apparently
to have entirely ceased to pay attention to his son's reading, or even
to hear the sound of his voice.
"Is this my whip?"
"Yes, papa."
"Well, then, I am either blind or I have lost my memory. My whip was
precisely like this, except for one thing--my initials were engraved
upon it, and I can see no initials here."
Little Jacob began to feel very nervous. A month before the present
crisis he had taken his father's whip to ride with, and lost it on the
moor, after dark, where he and Jim had sought for it long, and vainly.
Little Jacob had since consulted a certain saddler in Shayton, a friend
of his, as to the possibility of procuring a whip of the same pattern as
the lost one, and it had fortunately happened that this saddler had
received two precisely alike, of which Mr. Isaac Ogden had bought one,
whilst the other remained unsold. There was thus no difficulty in
replacing the whip so as to deceive Mr. Ogden into the belief that it
had never been lost, or rather so as to prevent any thought or suspicion
from presenting itself to his mind. When the master of a house has
given proofs of a tyrannical disposition, or of an uncontrollable and
unreasonable temper, a system of concealment naturally becomes habitual
in his household, and the most innocent actions are hidden from him as
if they were crimes. Some trifling incident reveals to him how
sedulously he is kept in ignorance of the little occurrences which make
up the existence of his dependants, and then he is vexed to find himself
isolated and cut off from their confidence and sympathy.
Mr. Ogden continued. "This is _not_ my whip; it is a whip of the same
pattern, that some people have been buying to take me in. Fetch me my
own whip--the one with my initials."
Little Jacob thought the opportunity for escaping from the room too good
to be thrown away, and vanished. Mr. Ogden waited quietly at first, but,
after ten minutes had escaped, became impatient, and rang the bell
violently. Old Sarah presented herself.
"Send my son here."
On his reappearance, little Jacob was in that miserable state of
apprehension in which the most truthful child will lie if it is in the
least bullied or tormented, and in which indeed it is not possible to
extract pure truth from its lips without great delicacy and tenderness.
"Have you brought my whip?"
"Please, papa," said little Jacob, who began to get very red in the
face, as he always did when he told a downright fib--"please, papa,
that's your whip." There was a mental reservation here, slightly
Jesuitical; for the boy had reflected, during his brief absence, that
since he had given that whip to Mr. Ogden, it now, of course, might
strictly be said to belong to him.
"What has become of my whip with I. O. upon it?"
"It's that whip, papa; only you--you told Jim to clean the silver top,
and--and perhaps he rubbed the letters off."
"You damned little lying sneaking scoundrel, this whip is perfectly
new; but it will not be new long, for I will lay it about you till it
isn't worth twopence."
The sharp switching strokes fell fast on poor little Jacob. Some of them
caught him on the hands, and a tremendous one came with stinging effect
across his lips and cheek; but it was not the first time he had endured
an infliction of this sort, and he had learned the art of presenting his
body so as to shield the more sensitive or least protected places. On
former occasions Mr. Ogden's anger had always cooled after a score or
two of lashes, but this time it rose and rose with an ever-increasing
violence. Little Jacob began to find his powers of endurance exhausted,
and, with the nimble ingenuity of his years, made use of different
articles of furniture as temporary barriers against his enemy. For some
time he managed to keep the table between Mr. Ogden and himself, but his
father's arm was long, and reached far, and the child received some
smarting cuts about the face and neck, so then he tried the chairs. Mr.
Ogden, who was by this time a furious madman, shivered his whip to
pieces against the furniture, and then, throwing it with a curse into
the fire, looked about him for some other means of chastisement. Now
there hung a mighty old hunting-whip in a sort of trophy with other
memorials of the chase, and he took this down in triumph. The long
knotted lash swung heavily as he poised it, and there was a steel hammer
at the end of the stick, considered as of possible utility in replacing
lost nails in the shoes of hunters.
A great terror seized little Jacob, a terror of that utterly hopeless
and boundless and unreasoning kind that will sometimes take possession
of the nervous system of a child--a terror such as the mature man does
not feel even before imminent and violent death, and which he can only
conceive or imagine by a reference to the dim reminiscences of his
infancy. The strong man standing there menacing, armed with a whip like
a flail, his eyes glaring with the new and baleful light of madness,
became transfigured in the child's imagination to something
supernatural. How tall he seemed, how mighty, how utterly irresistible!
When a Persian travels alone in some wide stony desert, and sees a
column of dust rise like smoke out of the plain and advance rapidly
towards him, and believes that out of the column one of the malignant
genii will lift his colossal height, and roll his voice of thunder, and
wield his sword of flame, all that that Persian dreads in the utmost
wildness of his credulous Oriental imagination this child felt as a
present and visible fact. The Power before him, in the full might and
height of manhood, in the fury of madness, lashing out the great thong
to right and left till it cracked like pistol-shots--with glaring eyes,
and foaming lips out of which poured curses and blasphemies--was this a
paternal image, was it civilized, was it human? The aspect of it
paralyzed the child, till a sharp intolerable pain came with its fierce
stimulus, and he leaped out from behind his barricade and rushed towards
the door.
The lad had thick fair hair in a thousand natural curls. He felt a
merciless grip in it, and his forehead was drawn violently backwards.
Well for him that he struggled and writhed! for the steel hammer was
aimed at him now, and the blows from it crashed on the furniture as the
aim was continually missed.
The man-servant was out in the farm-buildings, and old Sarah had been
washing in an out-house. She came in first, and heard a bitter cry. Many
a time her heart had bled for the child, and now she could endure it no
longer. She burst into the room, she seized Ogden's wrist and drove her
nails into it till the pain made him let the child go. She had left both
doors open. In an instant little Jacob was out of the house.
Old Sarah was a strong woman, but her strength was feebleness to
Ogden's. He disengaged himself quite easily, and at every place where
his fingers touched her there was a mark on her body for days. The
child heard curses following him as he flew over the smooth grass. The
farm was bounded by a six-foot wall. The curses came nearer and nearer;
the wall loomed black and high. "I have him now," cried Ogden, as he saw
the lad struggling to get over the wall.
Little Jacob felt himself seized by the foot. An infinite terror
stimulated him, and he wrenched it violently. A sting of anguish crossed
his shoulders where the heavy whip-lash fell,--a shoe remained in
Ogden's hand.