FATHER AND SON ARRANGE ACCOUNTS.
A LAMP was brightly burning in the sick-room, with a shade over it,
and so placed as not to dazzle the invalid’s eyes. The Sister had
left the room when Jerome entered; and there was a stillness as of
death over everything. Jerome went up to the bedside, and stooped
over the motionless figure lying back, nerveless and exhausted, after
the agonies of pain which had shaken the already feeble frame. The
face upon which the lamplight shone was, or had been, a fine one, as
regarded features. These bore little resemblance to those of his son,
though they, like Jerome’s, were finely cut, pale, and clear. Now,
they were wasted and waxen in their languid weariness. A high, somewhat
bald forehead, a long, slender, grey moustache gave a thoroughly
un-English appearance to the whole countenance. As Jerome’s hands
pressed the bedclothes, and he stooped without speaking over the
pillow, the large closed eyelids were raised, and a pair of strange
bright blue eyes were discovered, such eyes as are often the token of a
cool, self-seeking disposition—eyes which contained a light and a life
which not even this day of mortal pain had been able utterly to quench.
Face of father and face of son were near together; the one evidently
near death, the other scarcely less pale, quite as still and composed,
yet eloquent of health and strength, and early manhood’s pride and
power.
‘Ah, Jerome, it is you?’ came in a feeble voice from the patient.
‘I am thankful to hear that you are out of pain, sir. My sister and I
have passed some anxious hours.’
‘Yes; I feel easier now.’
He spoke so slowly, so languidly, and so faintly, that the voice was
scarce audible.
‘You sent for me; at least, Dr. Reichhardt said you wished to see me.’
‘Yes; I have something to say to you. Sit down.’
Jerome seated himself on a chair which stood beside the bed, and
waited. Since opening his eyes, and seeing his son stooping over
him, Mr. Wellfield had not closed them again. They looked restlessly
round—at the ceiling, the wall, the window—anywhere, except into his
son’s face. It was some little time before he spoke again; what he had
to say seemed to require a considerable effort of some kind. At last,
in a voice which had suddenly gained strength, he said:
‘You don’t know what caused me to be so suddenly taken ill to-day.’
‘I had not thought of the cause. I was disturbed at the fact.’
‘I had a severe shock, after you went out this morning.’
‘Indeed!’ said Jerome, with some animation; ‘I hope no carelessness——’
‘None at all, except the carelessness of circumstances, which is apt to
be astonishing sometimes, especially to those who suffer from it,’ he
retorted, a sarcastic flavour in his voice. ‘I ought to have spoken to
you long ago—long ago.’
Again he paused, and again Jerome waited. He had not the faintest, most
conjectural idea of the subject upon which his father desired to speak
to him. He was beginning now to wonder vaguely what it could be. They
had no confidences, this father and son. Their tastes, habits, and
dispositions had always been utterly dissimilar. The elder Wellfield
had gone his own way, had led his life of aimless travel from place
to place, generally from one fashionable foreign invalid colony to
another, accompanied by his daughter and her maid, and by his own
manservant. His son had enjoyed the fullest liberty to do the same;
to live exactly as seemed good in his own eyes, only receiving long
ago the curt recommendation to remember who he was, and that there
were some things that a gentleman could never do. ‘No need to tell a
gentleman what these things are,’ he had further been informed. ‘If
he be a gentleman, he will very soon learn them for himself; if not,
scorpions could not whip the knowledge into him.’
Furnished with such a formula, or creed, as the basis of his ethical
system, Jerome Wellfield had been left to his own devices. Three times
since his father’s second marriage, Jerome had met and stayed with that
father. The first time Avice had been a baby, on the other occasions
she had been visiting friends unknown to her brother. Jerome and his
father had always agreed together perfectly well. Each was conscious
that the other had tastes and habits and views of life which to himself
would have been most distasteful. Each had had civilisation and _savoir
vivre_ enough to ignore that altogether during their brief glimpses of
one another. They had never quarrelled—they had never been friends.
Mr. Wellfield had enjoyed his life of idle valetudinarianism—his lazy
days, his evenings at cards, or in reading-rooms, or lighted gardens.
Jerome had enjoyed his life—his pleasant search after the harmonious
and the beautiful in life, in art, in nature. He had gradually shut
himself up in his own reserve; in his over-refined cultivation and
fastidiousness; he had ‘built his soul a lordly pleasure-house,
wherein at ease for aye to dwell,’ till now what was ugly and coarse
made him shudder, and gave him pain that was almost physical. All
this refinement, he often told himself, was not essential to him;
he could do without it; poverty would not be anything to dread, for
one could have simplicity therewith; the real bane of existence was
common, rampant, triumphant philistinism. Wherever he went, he had been
well received, and generally flattered: his beauty, his voice, the
charm of his manner alone, would have made him the despair of prudent
mothers, even as a detrimental; but when to those advantages was added
the primary one, that he was an only son, heir to a fine estate, of
unimpeachably good and ancient name and lineage, an impartial judge
must confess that it was a great thing that Jerome Wellfield had come
out of the ordeal, at least outwardly, unscathed, calm, unperturbed,
unvulgarised.
Open admiration and adulation had revolted his fastidious soul. Till
he met Sara Ford, he had never gone further than a mild flirtation
with any girl, for he was hard to please. But, having met her, all was
changed. Her beauty, her pride, her indifference, calm and smiling,
to what other women so eagerly sought after—the fact that she was no
easy prize, despite her loneliness and her poverty, had fired him.
He had loved with a rapidity and a passion which showed the strange
blending of north and south, of Italy and England, that was in him,
and that made him what he was. And he, as little as anyone, knew what
he was. In him there were two natures; he only knew one, for up to now
his mother’s side alone had grown and flourished; he little knew the
modifications of southern character which he inherited from that man
beside whose bed he sat, waiting for the disclosure which he struggled
to utter.
Born beneath southern skies, brought up in his very early childhood
in Italian cities, these influences engraved themselves deeply,
indelibly upon his nature. The mother’s blood streaked every thought,
every impulse, with a mixture of passion and indolence, fire and
superstition. That mother had been the beautiful daughter of an old,
impoverished Sicilian house—a house which had never before married out
of its own nation and its own sphere. To her son she bequeathed her
own hereditary tendencies—she had had much of the indolence, all the
superstition of that glorious, yet degraded race of Magna Græcia.
In after-days, when Jerome looked up into the murky skies of
Lancashire—those skies which gloomed over the grey walls of his
father’s house—those deep, unspeakably blue heavens whose glory
bathed the marbles of Venice, the quays of Naples, the ruins of Rome,
the pictures of Florence, whose glamour lent itself to the whispering,
rustling grey of the olives on Mediterranean coast terraces, and made
the yellow sand more yellow, the blue sea more deeply violet, the
white sail more dazzling—this remembered heaven used to rush to his
recollection with a light that was almost lurid, and scattered tones
of a speech that was music seemed to ring melodiously in his ears.
Italy had faded, yet her finger-mark remained ineffaceable upon his
innermost heart, as his mother’s beauty remained upon earth, stamped
in the beauty of his own face and the melody of his voice, which, so
long as voice or feature remained, should visibly and audibly attest
the presence upon earth of a land where skies are warmer, where love is
fiercer, where passions run more quickly into white-hot rages than in
this humid isle of ours.
Another influence had been almost as strong as that of Italy—as strong
as any influence which is not already in a man’s natural tendencies
can be—and that influence was Germany. After a brief stay in England,
during which his father’s second marriage had taken place, he had
been sent to the gymnasium of ——, where he had gone through all the
courses, and, besides the regular school-training, had been trained
also in the school of music.
In that land his voice and his musical powers formed a passport. By
degrees, the Italian ditties, with their oily sweetness, slipped away,
as they have the trick of doing, from his tongue, and the rougher,
deeper songs of the Fatherland grew at home there. Casting himself with
eagerness into the art, he grew more and more devoted to it, and but
for one thing he often felt as if he would never care to leave this
_Deutschland_, this home of mighty harmonies, this adopted country.
That one thing was the remembrance of his home itself—of the weird,
ancient Abbey, with its dark, quaint gardens, its cloisters beside the
river; and the still more ancient church which he dimly remembered.
Since his love for Sara Ford had arisen, he had thought and dreamed
still oftener of this ancient place. Now he knew—he had thought of it
when he spoke to Avice that morning—that with her by his side there
was no place he would so gladly go to, and stay there. What a life they
might lead—she with her art, and he with his—and with their love!
He felt a thrill—felt the blood course quickly on, as he pictured
her—it was the first time he had seen the picture clearly—with him at
Wellfield—his wife.
‘Perhaps, when you know, you may blame me; and yet—where would you
have been all these years if I had acted differently? Did you know that
Wellfield had ever been entailed?’
‘I think I have heard something about it,’ said Jerome, surprised at
the abruptness of the question, and roused from his dream.
‘It was entailed until my father’s time. He and your great-grandfather
agreed to cut it off.’
‘Did they? Why?’
‘Because the estate was thoroughly embarrassed, and deep in debt, and
they wanted to restore it.’
‘Then they succeeded?’ asked Jerome, to whom this was news, but who
concluded that they must have succeeded. Had there been embarrassments,
surely he would have heard of them before now.
‘No; they did not. Neither of them had the faintest notion of
business’—it is to be presumed that Mr. Wellfield was conscious of
himself possessing business talents of a superior order. ‘They got
money, but that wasn’t improving the estate. They did not retrench, and
they spent nothing on improvements. When I came into possession, I was
worse off than any Wellfield had ever been before.’
‘I had no idea of that,’ said Jerome.
‘Of course you had not. How could you have? It is a fact, nevertheless.
I went through some bitter experiences. I had all their pride, and
none of their resources. I saw no way out of it. Your mother once
saw the place, and screamed at the very idea of living there. She
said she would die if she had to live out of Italy. It was therefore
impossible for me to live on my estate, and retrench, as almost any
other man might have done under the circumstances. Knowing this, I
kept you as much away from the place as possible, lest you should get
fond of it. Things got worse and worse. After your sister’s mother
died, my own health failed, and it became impossible for me to live
in England. I saw ruin staring me in the face. I saw you, whom I
wished never to be troubled with sordid cares and anxieties, growing
up utterly unconscious of the kind of lot that was hanging over you.
I seemed to see Avice, your sister, stinted of common comforts, and
perhaps reduced, as she grew up, to earn her living as a governess,
_she_—ordered about by strange people, and breaking her heart with
fretting.’
‘Good God, sir! What must you have gone through! And why did you not
confide in me? Anything in my power——’
‘But there was nothing in your power—that is exactly it. I did the
only thing that could be done. I looked my circumstances full in the
face, and the sight was not inspiriting. Presently came a man with what
I wanted—money—any amount of money. I—I sold Wellfield.’
‘Sold it!’ echoed the young man, in a voice of horror and incredulity
combined, as he started from his chair, and looked into his father’s
face. ‘You are dreaming. You are delirious. Let me call Sister
Ursula—you——’
‘Sit down again!’ said his father, turning upon him eyes so calm and
lucid in their perfect reasonableness and self-possession, that Jerome
felt his very heart give way within him.
This sin had been committed. He had dreamed no ugly dream. He dropped
into his chair again, propped his head upon his hands, and tried to
take in what his father went on to say.
‘I sold it for forty thousand pounds to a man called Bolton, who had
a wild desire to have it. He had some odd crotchet about it. It was a
dream of his to have the old place——’
‘But for you to dream of selling it,’ interrupted the young man, with
suppressed passion.
‘Needs must when the devil drives. Had you been in my position—but
there, I won’t argue. I did it. I sold it. I invested the money,
and——’
‘If the money is there, all is well,’ interrupted Jerome, eagerly. ‘It
can be bought back again. That is what you mean, I suppose. You want
to explain why Avice and I shall be poor and straitened after you have
gone. Never mind, sir; there will be a pittance, I daresay. I am young.
I can work, and I will do so. When Wellfield is ours again, we shall be
content with very little else. Do not reproach yourself.’
‘What are you talking about?’ retorted the other in a voice almost of
anger, and the drops stood on his brow, for it was hard work to brave
it out. ‘Do you suppose I should have made all this circumstance about
it if the money had been there? I tell you the money is gone. It was
invested—half in mortgages, and half in the Mutual Liability Bank of
——. The bank is gone—the newspaper—this morning. It was there I saw
it—made me ill. The bank is limited, but the other half—liable—ah!’
His eyes closed; he sank back, his face very pale. For a moment Jerome
did not move, but sat still, staring at the white face with a blank,
stupid gaze. Then he said, quite audibly, for he had a vague impression
that his father was unconscious:
‘Sold it! I would as soon have thought of selling my wife or my sister.’
‘Would you?’ replied his father, opening his eyes unexpectedly upon
Jerome. ‘When misfortune has resulted from any course, it is the
easiest thing in the world to say you would never have done it. Had I
not done it, you would have been a beggar years ago. For purchasing you
years of enjoyment and prosperity, you reproach me. I have my reward.’
There was a flash in this of the more than dissimilarity of tastes
which had, _au fond_, existed always between father and son—the
absolute antagonism—until now delicately glazed over into a semblance
of indifference, but ready to burst forth the moment that really deep
feelings were touched.
An angry, bitter retort was upon Jerome’s tongue—the retort that
his father, in purchasing those ‘years of prosperity and enjoyment,’
of which he made such a merit, had incidentally purchased with them
years of something else—which years the young man seemed to see now
very clearly unrolling themselves before him—drear and bitter. But
his father was about to leave the world—there could be little doubt
of that—and there certainly was something in his manner of doing it
very strongly suggestive of his having done the best for himself
while he lived—denied himself no luxury, made no sacrifice, not even
that very commonly necessary sacrifice of early avowing an unpleasant
truth because it is right to do so—and of his then quietly slipping
away, and leaving the son whom he had never accustomed to work, and
the daughter whom he had taught to look upon luxury and refinement
as matters of course, to battle as best they might with adverse
circumstances. This view of the case certainly did rush very strongly
over Jerome’s mind. His hot southern blood drove some very bitter,
sarcastic comments to his lips; but suddenly another feeling prevailed
over them—a feeling of cool, calm calculation; a sense that there must
be some way out of all this coil, and a private resolve that this man
who had the Abbey now, should not keep it very long. Mastering his hot
and furious anger, he said coldly:
‘It would be useless to dispute the matter. The damage, it appears, is
done. Wellfield has passed away from us, and the poor money you got
for it has passed away too. But I suppose your affairs are in the hands
of some man of business?’
‘Yes; Netley of Manchester knows all my concerns. No doubt there will
be a letter from him immediately. He will have to give you information,
and settle it all up.’
‘Netley of Manchester!’ said Jerome, deliberately making a note of it.
‘Where does he live?’
‘His offices are at 57, Canongate.’
Another note. Then Jerome said:
‘Have you any idea whether everything will go—whether not even a
pittance will be left?—enough for Avice to live upon, while I try to
find something to do?’
He spoke coldly and hardly, and in a matter-of-fact tone; but as he
uttered the words, a vision rose before him of Sara Ford; of her eyes,
as he had whispered to her, ‘And do you understand?’ He shivered a
little. Mr. Wellfield, too, was moved by his words; by this stern
bringing to reality and commonplace of the whole affair. He gave a
slight groan as he turned his head restlessly, saying:
‘I don’t know. O God! I know nothing about it. But’—his voice grew
almost fierce—‘remember, sir, as long as you have a penny, your sister
remains with you.’
‘I hope I know my duty towards my sister, sir, as well as you appear to
have known yours to your daughter,’ returned Jerome, in a voice of some
astringency; ‘and——’
They had been parting words. The deathly expression upon his father’s
face alarmed him. He rang the bell, and Sister Ursula answered it.
Restoratives were applied, but in vain. The flame did not flicker up
again. In a very short time Jerome knew that the face upon which he
looked was dead—the eternal repose had settled upon the features.
Clouds and tempests were over for him; rocks and shoals of life beset
the path of him who was left. He who was taken had slipped comfortably
away. The pain of want, of narrow circumstances, the smarting for
the sins of his fathers, had never been his, nor the joy begotten
of self-abnegation—the peace that comes to one weary with a burden
gallantly borne.
* * * * *
Jerome went into the salon again. The lamp had been lighted. Avice sat
on a couch, her hands folded before her, her eyes anxiously turned
towards the door. She sprang up as he came in.
‘Jerome, is he better? Has he gone to sleep?’
‘He has gone to sleep, my love; but he will never awaken again. He died
just now.’
‘Oh! is he dead?’
She clung to him, looking up into his face, in which she saw nothing
but a pale, fixed calmness.
‘Dead, Avice. And you must brace yourself up, and prepare for a trial,
and that a sore one. You asked me if we were rich, dear, and I told
you we had ample means. It was not true, though I did not know it. We
have now either nothing, or next to nothing. You asked me if we should
go back to Wellfield, and I promised that you should soon go there. I
cannot keep my promise. Wellfield is no longer ours. We have no home.
To-morrow I will explain. To-night I can only tell you the facts. You
said that your life had been happier since you knew me. What do you say
to your brother and his kindness now?’
Her eyes were eloquent as she looked up at him, and said, gravely and
calmly:
‘I love my brother for trusting in me. And he shall never hear a murmur
from my lips if he will continue to trust me and guide me.’
As they stood together, they kissed one another with a kind of
solemnity. Life was changed, but they still remained to sustain one
another.
[Illustration]