E-text prepared by Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.
COUSIN HENRY
by
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
First published in serial form in the _Manchester Weekly Times_ and
the _North British Weekly Mail_ in the spring of 1879 and in book
form in October, 1879
CONTENTS
I. Uncle Indefer
II. Isabel Brodrick
III. Cousin Henry
IV. The Squire's Death
V. Preparing for the Funeral
VI. Mr Apjohn's Explanation
VII. Looking for the Will
VIII. The Reading of the Will
IX. Alone at Llanfeare
X. Cousin Henry Dreams a Dream
XI. Isabel at Hereford
XII. Mr Owen
XIII. The _Carmarthen Herald_
XIV. An Action for Libel
XV. Cousin Henry Makes Another Attempt
XVI. Again at Hereford
XVII. Mr Cheekey
XVIII. Cousin Henry Goes to Carmarthen
XIX. Mr Apjohn Sends for Assistance
XX. Doubts
XXI. Mr Apjohn's Success
XXII. How Cousin Henry Was Let Off Easily
XXIII. Isabel's Petition
XXIV. Conclusion
CHAPTER I
Uncle Indefer
"I have a conscience, my dear, on this matter," said an old gentleman
to a young lady, as the two were sitting in the breakfast parlour of
a country house which looked down from the cliffs over the sea on the
coast of Carmarthenshire.
"And so have I, Uncle Indefer; and as my conscience is backed by my
inclination, whereas yours is not--"
"You think that I shall give way?"
"I did not mean that."
"What then?"
"If I could only make you understand how very strong is my
inclination, or disinclination--how impossible to be conquered,
then--"
"What next?"
"Then you would know that I could never give way, as you call it, and
you would go to work with your own conscience to see whether it be
imperative with you or not. You may be sure of this,--I shall never
say a word to you in opposition to your conscience. If there be a
word to be spoken it must come from yourself."
There was a long pause in the conversation, a silence for an hour,
during which the girl went in and out of the room and settled herself
down at her work. Then the old man went back abruptly to the subject
they had discussed. "I shall obey my conscience."
"You ought to do so, Uncle Indefer. What should a man obey but his
conscience?"
"Though it will break my heart."
"No; no, no!"
"And will ruin you."
"That is a flea's bite. I can brave my ruin easily, but not your
broken heart."
"Why should there be either, Isabel?"
"Nay, sir; have you not said but now, because of our consciences?
Not to save your heart from breaking,--though I think your heart
is dearer to me than anything else in the world,--could I marry
my cousin Henry. We must die together, both of us, you and I, or
live broken-hearted, or what not, sooner than that. Would I not do
anything possible at your bidding?"
"I used to think so."
"But it is impossible for a young woman with a respect for herself
such as I have to submit herself to a man that she loathes. Do as
your conscience bids you with the old house. Shall I be less tender
to you while you live because I shall have to leave the place when
you are dead? Shall I accuse you of injustice or unkindness in
my heart? Never! All that is only an outside circumstance to me,
comparatively of little moment. But to be the wife of a man I
despise!" Then she got up and left the room.
A month passed by before the old man returned to the subject, which
he did seated in the same room, at the same hour of the day,--at
about four o'clock, when the dinner things had been removed.
"Isabel," he said, "I cannot help myself."
"As to what, Uncle Indefer?" She knew very well what was the matter
in which, as he said, he could not help himself. Had there been
anything in which his age had wanted assistance from her youth there
would have been no hesitation between them; no daughter was ever more
tender; no father was ever more trusting. But on this subject it was
necessary that he should speak more plainly before she could reply to
him.
"As to your cousin and the property."
"Then in God's name do not trouble yourself further in looking for
help where there is none to be had. You mean that the estate ought to
go to a man and not to a woman?"
"It ought to go to a Jones."
"I am not a Jones, nor likely to become a Jones."
"You are as near to me as he is,--and so much dearer!"
"But not on that account a Jones. My name is Isabel Brodrick. A woman
not born to be a Jones may have the luck to become one by marriage,
but that will never be the case with me."
"You should not laugh at that which is to me a duty."
"Dear, dear uncle!" she said, caressing him, "if I seemed to
laugh"--and she certainly had laughed when she spoke of the luck of
becoming a Jones--"it is only that you may feel how little importance
I attach to it all on my own account."
"But it is important,--terribly important!"
"Very well. Then go to work with two things in your mind fixed as
fate. One is that you must leave Llanfeare to your nephew Henry
Jones, and the other that I will not marry your nephew Henry Jones.
When it is all settled it will be just as though the old place were
entailed, as it used to be."
"I wish it were."
"So do I, if it would save you trouble."
"But it isn't the same;--it can't be the same. In getting back the
land your grandfather sold I have spent the money I had saved for
you."
"It shall be all the same to me, and I will take pleasure in thinking
that the old family place shall remain as you would have it. I can be
proud of the family though I can never bear the name."
"You do not care a straw for the family."
"You should not say that, Uncle Indefer. It is not true. I care
enough for the family to sympathise with you altogether in what you
are doing, but not enough for the property to sacrifice myself in
order that I might have a share in it."
"I do not know why you should think so much evil of Henry."
"Do you know any reason why I should think well enough of him to
become his wife? I do not. In marrying a man a woman should be able
to love every little trick belonging to him. The parings of his nails
should be a care to her. It should be pleasant to her to serve him in
things most menial. Would it be so to me, do you think, with Henry
Jones?"
"You are always full of poetry and books."
"I should be full of something very bad if I were to allow myself to
stand at the altar with him. Drop it, Uncle Indefer. Get it out of
your mind as a thing quite impossible. It is the one thing I can't
and won't do, even for you. It is the one thing that you ought not to
ask me to do. Do as you like with the property,--as you think right."
"It is not as I like."
"As your conscience bids you, then; and I with myself, which is the
only little thing that I have in the world, will do as I like, or as
my conscience bids me."
These last words she spoke almost roughly, and as she said them she
left him, walking out of the room with an air of offended pride.
But in this there was a purpose. If she were hard to him, hard and
obstinate in her determination, then would he be enabled to be so
also to her in his determination, with less of pain to himself. She
felt it to be her duty to teach him that he was justified in doing
what he liked with his property, because she intended to do what
she liked with herself. Not only would she not say a word towards
dissuading him from this change in his old intentions, but she would
make the change as little painful to him as possible by teaching him
to think that it was justified by her own manner to him.
For there was a change, not only in his mind, but in his declared
intentions. Llanfeare had belonged to Indefer Joneses for many
generations. When the late Squire had died, now twenty years ago,
there had been remaining out of ten children only one, the eldest,
to whom the property now belonged. Four or five coming in succession
after him had died without issue. Then there had been a Henry Jones,
who had gone away and married, had become the father of the Henry
Jones above mentioned, and had then also departed. The youngest, a
daughter, had married an attorney named Brodrick, and she also had
died, having no other child but Isabel. Mr Brodrick had married
again, and was now the father of a large family, living at Hereford,
where he carried on his business. He was not very "well-to-do" in the
world. The new Mrs Brodrick had preferred her own babies to Isabel,
and Isabel when she was fifteen years of age had gone to her bachelor
uncle at Llanfeare. There she had lived for the last ten years,
making occasional visits to her father at Hereford.
Mr Indefer Jones, who was now between seventy and eighty years old,
was a gentleman who through his whole life had been disturbed by
reflections, fears, and hopes as to the family property on which he
had been born, on which he had always lived, in possession of which
he would certainly die, and as to the future disposition of which
it was his lot in life to be altogether responsible. It had been
entailed upon him before his birth in his grandfather's time, when
his father was about to be married. But the entail had not been
carried on. There had come no time in which this Indefer Jones had
been about to be married, and the former old man having been given to
extravagance, and been generally in want of money, had felt it more
comfortable to be without an entail. His son had occasionally been
induced to join with him in raising money. Thus not only since he had
himself owned the estate, but before his father's death, there had
been forced upon him reflections as to the destination of Llanfeare.
At fifty he had found himself unmarried, and unlikely to marry.
His brother Henry was then alive; but Henry had disgraced the
family,--had run away with a married woman whom he had married after
a divorce, had taken to race courses and billiard-rooms, and had been
altogether odious to his brother Indefer. Nevertheless the boy which
had come from this marriage, a younger Henry, had been educated at
his expense, and had occasionally been received at Llanfeare. He
had been popular with no one there, having been found to be a sly
boy, given to lying, and, as even the servants said about the place,
unlike a Jones of Llanfeare. Then had come the time in which Isabel
had been brought to Llanfeare. Henry had been sent away from Oxford
for some offence not altogether trivial, and the Squire had declared
to himself and others that Llanfeare should never fall into his
hands.
Isabel had so endeared herself to him that before she had been
two years in the house she was the young mistress of the place.
Everything that she did was right in his eyes. She might have
anything that she would ask, only that she would ask for nothing. At
this time the cousin had been taken into an office in London, and had
become,--so it was said of him,--a steady young man of business. But
still, when allowed to show himself at Llanfeare, he was unpalatable
to them all--unless it might be to the old Squire. It was certainly
the case that in his office in London he made himself useful, and it
seemed that he had abandoned that practice of running into debt and
having the bills sent down to Llanfeare which he had adopted early in
his career.
During all this time the old Squire was terribly troubled about
the property. His will was always close at his hand. Till Isabel
was twenty-one this will had always been in Henry's favour,--with
a clause, however, that a certain sum of money which the Squire
possessed should go to her. Then in his disgust towards his nephew he
changed his purpose, and made another will in Isabel's favour. This
remained in existence as his last resolution for three years; but
they had been three years of misery to him. He had endured but badly
the idea that the place should pass away out of what he regarded as
the proper male line. To his thinking it was simply an accident that
the power of disposing of the property should be in his hands. It
was a religion to him that a landed estate in Britain should go from
father to eldest son, and in default of a son to the first male heir.
Britain would not be ruined because Llanfeare should be allowed to go
out of the proper order. But Britain would be ruined if Britons did
not do their duty in that sphere of life to which it had pleased God
to call them; and in this case his duty was to maintain the old order
of things.
And during this time an additional trouble added itself to those
existing. Having made up his mind to act in opposition to his own
principles, and to indulge his own heart; having declared both to his
nephew and to his niece that Isabel should be his heir, there came
to him, as a consolation in his misery, the power of repurchasing
a certain fragment of the property which his father, with his
assistance, had sold. The loss of these acres had been always a sore
wound to him, not because of his lessened income, but from a feeling
that no owner of an estate should allow it to be diminished during
his holding of it. He never saw those separated fields estranged from
Llanfeare, but he grieved in his heart. That he might get them back
again he had saved money since Llanfeare had first become his own.
Then had come upon him the necessity of providing for Isabel. But
when with many groans he had decided that Isabel should be the heir,
the money could be allowed to go for its intended purpose. It had
so gone, and then his conscience had become too strong for him, and
another will was made.
It will be seen how he had endeavoured to reconcile things. When
it was found that Henry Jones was working like a steady man at the
London office to which he was attached, that he had sown his wild
oats, then Uncle Indefer began to ask himself why all his dearest
wishes should not be carried out together by a marriage between the
cousins. "I don't care a bit for his wild oats," Isabel had said,
almost playfully, when the idea had first been mooted to her. "His
oats are too tame for me rather than too wild. Why can't he look any
one in the face?" Then her uncle had been angry with her, thinking
that she was allowing a foolish idea to interfere with the happiness
of them all.
But his anger with her was never enduring; and, indeed, before the
time at which our story commenced he had begun to acknowledge to
himself that he might rather be afraid of her anger than she of his.
There was a courage about her which nothing could dash. She had grown
up under his eyes strong, brave, sometimes almost bold, with a dash
of humour, but always quite determined in her own ideas of wrong
or right. He had in truth been all but afraid of her when he found
himself compelled to tell her of the decision to which his conscience
compelled him. But the will was made,--the third, perhaps the fourth
or fifth, which had seemed to him to be necessary since his mind had
been exercised in this matter. He made this will, which he assured
himself should be the last, leaving Llanfeare to his nephew on
condition that he should prefix the name of Indefer to that of Jones,
and adding certain stipulations as to further entail. Then everything
of which he might die possessed, except Llanfeare itself and the
furniture in the house, he left to his niece Isabel.
"We must get rid of the horses," he said to her about a fortnight
after the conversation last recorded.
"Why that?"
"My will has been made, and there will be so little now for you, that
we must save what we can before I die."
"Oh, bother me!" said Isabel, laughing.
"Do you suppose it is not dreadful to me to have to reflect how
little I can do for you? I may, perhaps, live for two years, and we
may save six or seven hundred a year. I have put a charge on the
estate for four thousand pounds. The property is only a small thing,
after all;--not above fifteen hundred a year."
"I will not hear of the horses being sold, and there is an end of it.
You have been taken out about the place every day for the last twenty
years, and it would crush me if I were to see a change. You have done
the best you can, and now leave it all in God's hands. Pray,--pray
let there be no more talking about it. If you only knew how welcome
he is to it!"