That evening's report of the demeanour of the young Irish secretary in
harness was not so exhilarating as John Mattock had expected, and he
inclined to think his sister guilty of casting her protecting veil
over the youth. It appeared that Mr. O'Donnell had been studious of his
duties, had spoken upon no other topic, had asked pertinent questions,
shown no flippancy, indulged in no extravagances. He seemed, Jane said,
eager to master details. A certain eagerness of her own in speaking
of it sharpened her clear features as if they were cutting through
derision. She stated it to propitiate her brother, as it might have
done but for the veracious picture of Patrick in the word 'eager,' which
pricked the scepticism of a practical man. He locked his mouth, looking
at her with a twinkle she refused to notice. 'Determined to master
details' he could have accepted. One may be determined to find a needle
in a dust-heap; one does not with any stiffness of purpose go at a
dust-heap eagerly. Hungry men have eaten husks; they have not betrayed
eagerness for such dry stuff. Patrick's voracity after details exhibited
a doubtfully genuine appetite, and John deferred his amusement until the
termination of the week or month when his dear good Jane would visit
the office to behold a vacated seat, or be assailed by the customary
proposal. Irishmen were not likely to be far behind curates in besieging
an heiress. For that matter, Jane was her own mistress and could very
well take care of herself; he had confidence in her wisdom.
He was besides of an unsuspicious and an unexacting temperament. The
things he would strongly object to he did not specify to himself because
he was untroubled by any forethought of them. Business, political,
commercial and marine, left few vacancies in his mind other than for
the pleasures he could command and enjoy. He surveyed his England with
a ruddy countenance, and saw the country in the reflection. His England
saw much of itself in him. Behind each there was more, behind the
country a great deal more, than could be displayed by a glass. The
salient features wore a resemblance. Prosperity and heartiness; a ready
hand on, and over, a full purse; a recognised ability of the second-rate
order; a stout hold of patent principles; inherited and embraced, to
make the day secure and supply a somniferous pillow for the night;
occasional fits of anxiety about affairs, followed by an illuminating
conviction that the world is a changing one and our construction not of
granite, nevertheless that a justifiable faith in the ship, joined to
a constant study of the chart, will pull us through, as it has done
before, despite all assaults and underminings of the common enemy and
the particular; these, with the humorous indifference of familiarity and
constitutional annoyances, excepting when they grew acute and called for
drugs, and with friendliness to the race of man of both colours, in the
belief that our Creator originally composed in black and white, together
with a liking for matters on their present footing in slow motion,
partly under his conductorship, were the prominent characteristics of
the grandson of the founder of the house, who had built it from a spade.
The story of the building was notorious; popular books for the inciting
of young Englishmen to dig to fortune had a place for it among the
chapters, where we read of the kind of man, and the means by which the
country has executed its later giant strides of advancement. The first
John Mattock was a representative of his time; he moved when the
country was moving, and in the right direction, finding himself at the
auspicious moment upon a line of rail. Elsewhere he would have moved,
we may suppose, for the spade-like virtues bear their fruits; persistent
and thrifty, solid and square, will fetch some sort of yield out of any
soil; but he would not have gone far. The Lord, to whom an old man of a
mind totally Hebrew ascribed the plenitude of material success, the
Lord and he would have reared a garden in the desert; in proximity to an
oasis, still on the sands, against obstacles. An accumulation of upwards
of four hundred thousand pounds required, as the moral of the popular
books does not sufficiently indicate, a moving country, an ardent
sphere, to produce the sum: and since, where so much was done, we are
bound to conceive others at work as well as he, it seems to follow that
the exemplar outstripping them vastly must have profited by situation at
the start, which is a lucky accident; and an accident is an indigestible
lump in a moral tale, real though the story be. It was not mentioned in
the popular books; nor did those worthy guides to the pursuit of wealth
contain any reminder of old John Mattock's dependence upon the conjoint
labour of his fellows to push him to his elevation. As little did they
think of foretelling a day, generations hence, when the empty heirs
of his fellows might prefer a modest claim (confused in statement) to
compensation against the estate he bequeathed: for such prophecy as that
would have hinted at a tenderness for the mass to the detriment of the
individual, and such tenderness as that is an element of our religion,
not the drift of our teaching.
He grumbled at the heavy taxation of his estate during life: yearly this
oppressed old man paid thousands of pounds to the Government. It was
poor encouragement to shoulder and elbow your way from a hovel to a
mansion!
He paid the money, dying sour; a splendid example of energy on the road,
a forbidding one at the terminus. And here the moral of the popular
books turned aside from him to snatch at humanity for an instance of our
frailness and dealt in portentous shadows:--we are, it should be known,
not the great creatures we assume ourselves to be. Six months before his
death he appeared in the garb of a navvy, humbly soliciting employment
at his own house-door. There he appealed to the white calves of his
footmen for a day's work, upon the plea that he had never been a
democrat.
The scene had been described with humanely-moralising pathos in the
various books of stories of Men who have come to Fortune, and it had
for a length of seasons an annual position in the foremost rank (on the
line, facing the door) in our exhibition of the chosen artists, where,
as our popular words should do, it struck the spectator's eye and his
brain simultaneously with pugilistic force: a reference to the picture
in the catalogue furnishing a recapitulation of the incident. 'I've
worked a good bit in my time, gentlemen, and I baint done yet':--SEE
PROFESSOR SUMMIT'S 'MEN WHO HAVE COME TO FORTUNE.' There is, we perceive
at a glance, a contrast in the bowed master of the Mansion applying
to his menials for a day's work at the rate of pay to able-bodied
men:--which he is not, but the deception is not disingenuous. The
contrast flashed with the rapid exchange of two prizefighters in a ring,
very popularly. The fustian suit and string below the knee, on the
one side, and the purple plush breeches and twinkling airy calves
(fascinating his attention as he makes his humble request to his own,
these domestic knights) to right and left of the doorway and in front,
hit straight out of the canvas. And as quickly as you perceive the
contrast you swallow the moral. The dreaded thing is down in a trice, to
do what salutary work it may within you. That it passed into the blood
of England's middle-class population, and set many heads philosophically
shaking, and filled the sails of many a sermon, is known to those
who lived in days when Art and the classes patronising our Native Art
existed happily upon the terms of venerable School-Dame and studious
pupils, before the sickly era displacing Exhibitions full of meaning for
tricks of colour, monstrous atmospherical vagaries that teach nothing,
strange experiments on the complexion of the human face divine--the
feminine hyper-aethereally. Like the first John Mattock, it was formerly
of, and yet by dint of sturdy energy, above the people. They learnt from
it; they flocked to it thirsting and retired from it thoughtful, with
some belief of having drunk of nature in art, as you will see the
countless troops of urchins about the one cow of London, in the Great
City's Green Park.
A bequest to the nation of the best of these pictures of Old John, by
a very old Yorkshire collector, makes it milk for all time, a perpetual
contrast, and a rebuke. Compared with the portrait of Jane Mattock in
her fiery aureole of hair on the walls of the breakfast-room, it marks
that fatal period of degeneracy for us, which our critics of Literature
as well as Art are one voice in denouncing, when the complex overwhelms
the simple, and excess of signification is attempted, instead of letting
plain nature speak her uncorrupted tongue to the contemplative mind.
Degeneracy is the critical history of the Arts. Jane's hair was of a
reddish gold-inwoven cast that would, in her grandfather's epoch, have
shone unambiguously as carrots. The girl of his day thus adorned by
Nature, would have been shown wearing her ridiculous crown with some
decent sulkiness; and we should not have had her so unsparingly crowned;
the truth would have been told in a dexterous concealment--a rope of
it wound up for a bed of the tortoise-shell comb behind, and a pair of
tight cornucopias at the temples. What does our modern artist do but
flare it to right and left, lift it wavily over her forehead, revel in
the oriental superabundance, and really seem to swear we shall admire
it, against our traditions of the vegetable, as a poetical splendour.
The head of the heiress is in a Jovian shower. Marigolds are in her
hand. The whole square of canvas is like a meadow on the borders of
June. It causes blinking.
Her brother also is presented: a fine portrait of him, with clipped
red locks, in blue array, smiling, wearing the rose of briny breezes, a
telescope under his left arm, his right forefinger on a map, a view
of Spitzbergen through a cabin-window: for John had notions about the
north-west passage, he had spent a winter in the ice, and if an amateur,
was not the less a true sailor.
With his brass-buttoned blue coat, and his high coloured cheeks, and his
convict hair--a layer of brickdust--and his air of princely wealth, and
the icebergs and hummocks about him, he looks for adventure without a
thought of his heroism--the country all over.
There he stands, a lover of the sea, and a scientific seaman and
engineer to boot, practical in every line of his face, defying mankind
to suspect that he cherishes a grain of romance. On the wall, just above
his shoulder, is a sketch of a Viking putting the lighted brand to his
ship in mid sea, and you are to understand that his time is come and
so should a Viking die: further, if you will, the subject is a modern
Viking, ready for the responsibilities of the title. Sketches of
our ancient wooden walls and our iron and plated defences line the
panellings. These degenerate artists do work hard for their money.
The portrait of John's father, dated a generation back, is just the man
and little else, phantomly the man. His brown coat struggles out of the
obscurity of the background, but it is chiefly background clothing him.
His features are distinguishable and delicate: you would suppose
him appearing to you under the beams of a common candle, or cottage
coalfire--ferruginously opaque. The object of the artist (apart from
the triumph of tone on the canvas) is to introduce him as an elegant and
faded gentleman, rather retiring into darkness than emerging. He is the
ghost of the painter's impasto. Yet this is Ezra Mattock, who multipled
the inheritance of the hundreds of thousands into millions, and died,
after covering Europe, Asia, and the Americas with iron rails, one of
the few Christians that can hold up their heads beside the banking
Jew as magnates in the lists of gold. The portrait is clearly no
frontispiece of his qualities. He married an accomplished and charitable
lady, and she did not spoil the stock in refining it. His life passed
quietly; his death shook the country: for though it had been known
that he had been one of our potentates, how mightily he was one had not
entered into the calculations of the public until the will of the
late Ezra Mattock, cited in our prints, received comments from various
newspaper articles. A chuckle of collateral satisfaction ran through the
empire. All England and her dependencies felt the state of cousinship
with the fruits of energy; and it was an agreeable sentiment, coming
opportunely, as it did, at the tail of articles that had been discussing
a curious manifestation of late--to-wit, the awakening energy of the
foreigner--a prodigious apparition on our horizon. Others were energetic
too! We were not, the sermon ran, to imagine we were without rivals
in the field. We were possessed of certain positive advantages; we had
coal, iron, and an industrious population, but we were, it was to be
feared, by no means a thrifty race, and there was reason for doubt
whether in the matter of industry we were quite up to the mark of our
forefathers. No deterioration of the stock was apprehended, still the
nation must be accused of a lack of vigilance. We must look round us,
and accept the facts as they stood. So accustomed had we become to the
predominance of our position that it was difficult at first to realise a
position of rivalry that threatened our manufacturing interests in their
hitherto undisputed lead in the world's markets. The tale of our exports
for the last five years conveys at once its moral and its warning.
Statistics were then cited.
As when the gloomy pedagogue has concluded his exhortation, statistics
birched the land. They were started at our dinner-tables, and scourged
the social converse. Not less than in the articles, they were perhaps
livelier than in the preface; they were distressing nevertheless; they
led invariably to the question of our decadence. Carthage was named; a
great mercantile community absolutely obliterated! Senatorial men were
led to propose in their thoughtfullest tones that we should turn our
attention to Art. Why should we not learn to excel in Art? We excelled
in Poetry. Our Poets were cited: not that there was a notion that poems
would pay as an export but to show that if we excel in one of the
Arts we may in others of them. The poetry was not cited, nor was it
necessary, the object being to inflate the balloon of paradox with
a light-flying gas, and prove a poem-producing people to be of their
nature born artists; if they did but know it. The explosion of a
particular trade points to your taking up another. Energy is adapted to
flourish equally in every branch of labour.
It is the genius of the will, commanding all the crossroads. A country
breeding hugely must prove its energy likewise in the departments of the
mind, or it will ultimately be unable to feed its young--nay, to feast
its aldermen! Let us be up and alive.--Such was the exhortation of a
profound depression. Outside these dismal assemblies, in the streets,
an ancient song of raven recurrence croaked of 'Old England a-going down
the hill'; for there is a link of electricity between the street-boy and
the leading article in days when the Poles exchange salutations.
Mr. Ezra's legacy of his millions to son and daughter broke like a
golden evening on the borders of the raincloud. Things could not be so
bad when a plain untitled English gentleman bequeathed in the simplest
manner possible such giant heaps, a very Pelion upon Ossa, of wealth to
his children. The minds of the readers of journals were now directed
to think of the hoarded treasures of this favoured country. They
might approximately be counted, but even if counted they would be past
conception, like the sidereal system. The contemplation of a million
stupefies: consider the figures of millions and millions! Articles were
written on Lombard Street, the world's gold-mine, our granary of energy,
surpassing all actual and fabulous gold-mines ever spoken of: Aladdin's
magician would find his purse contracting and squeaking in the
comparison. Then, too, the store of jewels held by certain private
families called for remark and an allusion to Sindbad the sailor, whose
eyes were to dilate wider than they did in the valley of diamonds. Why,
we could, if we pleased, lie by and pass two or three decades as jolly
cricketers and scullers, and resume the race for wealth with the rest
of mankind, hardly sensible of the holiday in our pockets though we were
the last people to do it, we were the sole people that had the option.
Our Fortunatus' cap was put to better purposes, but to have the cap,
and not to be emasculated by the possession, might excuse a little
reasonable pride in ourselves.
Thus did Optimism and Pessimism have their turn, like the two great
parties in the State, and the subsiding see-saw restored a proper
balance, much to the nation's comfort. Unhappily, it was remembered,
there are spectators of its method of getting to an equipoise out of
the agitation of extremes. The peep at our treasures to regain composure
had, we fear, given the foreigner glimpses, and whetted the appetite of
our masses. No sooner are we at peace than these are heard uttering low
howls, and those are seen enviously glaring. The spectre, Panic, that
ever dogs the optimistic feast, warns us of a sack under our beds, and
robbers about to try a barely-bolted door... Then do we, who have so
sweetly sung our senses to sleep, start up, in their grip, rush to the
doctor and the blacksmith, rig alarums, proclaim ourselves intestinally
torn, defenceless, a prey to foes within and without. It is discovered
to be no worse than an alderman's dream, but the pessimist frenzy of
the night has tossed a quieting sop to the Radical, and summoned the
volunteers to a review. Laudatory articles upon the soldierly 'march
past' of our volunteers permit of a spell of soft repose, deeper than
prudent, at the end of it, India and Ireland consenting.
So much for a passing outline of John Bull--the shadow on the wall
of John Mattock. The unostentatious millionaire's legacy to his two
children affected Mr. Bull thrillingly, pretty nearly as it has here
been dotted in lining. That is historical. Could he believe in the
existence of a son of his, a master of millions, who had never sighed
(and he had only to sigh) to die a peer, or a baronet, or simple Knight?
The downright hard-nailed coffin fact was there; the wealthiest man
in the country had flown away to Shadowland a common Mr.! You see the
straight deduction from the circumstances:--we are, say what you will,
a Republican people! Newspaper articles on the watch sympathetically for
Mr. Bull's latest view of himself, preached on the theme of our peculiar
Republicanism. Soon after he was observed fondling the Crown Insignia.
His bards flung out their breezy columns, reverentially monarchial. The
Republican was informed that they were despised as a blatant minority. A
maudlin fit of worship of our nobility had hold of him next, and English
aristocracy received the paean. Lectures were addressed to democrats;
our House of Lords was pledged solemnly in reams of print. We were told
that 'blood' may always be betted on to win the race; blood that is blue
will beat the red hollow. Who could pretend to despise the honour of
admission to the ranks of the proudest peerage the world has known! Is
not a great territorial aristocracy the strongest guarantee of national
stability? The loudness of the interrogation, like the thunder of Jove,
precluded thought of an answer.
Mr. Bull, though he is not of lucid memory, kept an eye on the owner of
those millions. His bards were awake to his anxiety, and celebrated John
Mattock's doings with a trump and flourish somewhat displeasing to a
quietly-disposed commoner. John's entry into Parliament as a Liberal
was taken for a sign of steersman who knew where the tide ran. But
your Liberals are sometimes Radicals in their youth, and his choice
of parties might not be so much sagacity as an instance of unripe
lightheadedness. A young conservative millionaire is less disturbing.
The very wealthy young peer is never wanton in his politics, which seems
to admonish us that the heir of vast wealth should have it imposed on
him to accept a peerage, and be locked up as it were. A coronet steadies
the brain. You may let out your heels at the social laws, you are
almost expected to do it, but you are to shake that young pate of yours
restively under such a splendid encumbrance. Private reports of John,
however, gave him credit for sound opinions: he was moderate, merely
progressive. When it was added that the man had the habit of taking
counsel with his sister, he was at once considered as fast and safe, not
because of any public knowledge of the character of Jane Mattock. We pay
this homage to the settled common sense of women. Distinctly does
she discountenance leaps in the dark, wild driving, and the freaks of
Radicalism.
John, as it happened, had not so grave a respect for the sex as for the
individual Jane. He thought women capable of acts of foolishness; his
bright-faced sister he could thoroughly trust for prudent conduct. He
gave her a good portion of his heart in confidence, and all of it in
affection. There were matters which he excluded from confidence, even
from intimate communication with himself. These he could not reveal;
nor could she perfectly open her heart to him, for the same reason. They
both had an established ideal of their personal qualities, not far above
the positive, since they were neither of them pretentious, yet it was a
trifle higher and fairer than the working pattern; and albeit they were
sincere enough, quite sincere in their mutual intercourse, they had,
by what each knew at times of the thumping organ within them, cause for
doubting that they were as transparent as the other supposed; and
they were separately aware of an inward smile at one another's partial
deception; which did not thwart their honest power of working up to the
respected ideal. The stroke of the deeper self-knowledge rarely shook
them; they were able to live with full sensations in the animated
picture they were to the eyes best loved by them. This in fact was
their life. Anything beside it was a dream, and we do not speak of
our dreams--not of every dream. Especially do we reserve our speech
concerning the dream in which we had a revelation of the proud frame
deprived of a guiding will, flung rudderless on the waves. Ah that
abject! The dismantled ship has the grandeur of the tempest about it,
but the soul swayed by passion is ignominiously bare-poled, detected,
hooted by its old assumption. If instinct plays fantastical tricks when
we are sleeping, let it be ever behind a curtain. We can be held
guilty only if we court exposure. The ideal of English gentleman and
gentlewoman is closely Roman in the self-repression it exacts, and that
it should be but occasionally difficult to them shows an affinity with
the type. Do you perchance, O continental observers of the race, call it
hypocritical? It is their nature disciplined to the regimental step of
civilisation. Socially these island men and women of a certain middle
rank are veterans of an army, and some of the latest enrolled are the
stoutest defenders of the flag.
Brother and sister preserved their little secrets of character apart.
They could not be expected to unfold what they declined personally to
examine. But they were not so successful with the lady governing the
household, their widowed maternal aunt, Mrs. Lackstraw, a woman
of decisive penetration, and an insubordinate recruit of the army
aforesaid. To her they were without a mask; John was passion's slave,
Jane the most romantic of Eve's daughters. She pointed to incidents of
their youth; her vision was acutely retrospective. The wealth of her
nephew and niece caused such a view of them to be, as she remarked,
anxious past endurance. She had grounds for fearing that John, who might
step to an alliance with any one of the proudest houses in the Kingdom,
would marry a beggar-maid. As for Jane, she was the natural prey of
a threadbare poet. Mrs. Lackstraw heard of Mr. Patrick O'Donnell,
and demanded the right to inspect him. She doubted such perfect
disinterestedness in any young man as that he should slave at
account-keeping to that Laundry without a prospect of rich remuneration,
and the tale of his going down to the city for a couple of hours each
day to learn the art of keeping books was of very dubious import in a
cousin of Captain Con O'Donnell. 'Let me see your prodigy,' she said,
with the emphasis on each word. Patrick was presented at her table. She
had steeled herself against an Irish tongue. He spoke little, appeared
simple, professed no enthusiasm for the Laundry. And he paid no
compliments to Jane: of the two he was more interested by the elder
lady, whose farm and dairy in Surrey he heard her tell of with a shining
glance, observing that he liked thick cream: there was a touch of
home in it. The innocent sensuality in the candid avowal of his tastes
inspired confidence. Mrs. Lackstraw fished for some account of his home.
He was open to flow on the subject; he dashed a few sketches of mother
and sisters, dowerless girls, fresh as trout in the stream, and of his
own poor estate, and the peasantry, with whom he was on friendly terms.
He was an absentee for his education. Sweet water, pure milk, potatoes
and bread, were the things he coveted in plenty for his people and
himself, he said, calling forth an echo from Mrs. Lackstraw, and
an invitation to come down to her farm in the Spring. 'That is, Mr.
O'Donnell, if you are still in London.'
'Oh, I'm bound apprentice for a year,' said he.
He was asked whether he did not find it tiresome work.
'A trifle so,' he confessed.
Then why did he pursue it, the question was put.
He was not alive for his own pleasure, and would like to feel he was
doing a bit of good, was the answer.
Could one, Mrs. Lackstraw asked herself, have faith in this young
Irishman? He possessed an estate. His brogue rather added to his air
of truthfulness. His easy manners and the occasional streak of correct
French in his dialogue cast a shadow on it. Yet he might be an ingenuous
creature precisely because of the suspicion roused by his quaint
unworldliness that he might be a terrible actor. Why not?--his heart was
evidently much more interested in her pursuits than in her niece's. The
juvenility of him was catching, if it was indeed the man, and not one of
the actor's properties. Mrs. Lackstraw thought it prudent to hint at the
latter idea to Jane while she decided in her generosity to embrace the
former. Oh! if all Irishmen shared his taste for sweet water, pure milk
and wholesome bread, what a true Union we should have! She had always
insisted on those three things as most to be desired on earth for the
masses, and she reminded Jane of it as a curious fact. Jane acquiesced,
having always considered it a curious fact that her aunt should combine
the relish of a country life with the intensest social ambition--a
passion so sensitive as to make the name her husband had inflicted on
her a pain and a burden. The name of Mattock gave her horrors. She spoke
of it openly to prove that Jane must marry a title and John become a
peer. Never was there such a name to smell of the soil. She declared her
incapacity to die happy until the two had buried Mattock. Her own
one fatal step condemned her, owing to the opinion she held upon the
sacredness of marriage, as Lackstraw on her tombstone, and to Lackstraw
above the earthly martyr would go bearing the designation which marked
her to be claimed by him. But for John and Jane the index of Providence
pointed a brighter passage through life. They had only to conquer the
weakness native to them--the dreadful tendency downward. They had, in
the spiritual sense, frail hearts. The girl had been secretive about the
early activity of hers, though her aunt knew of two or three adventures
wanting in nothing save boldness to have put an end to her independence
and her prospects:--hence this Laundry business! a clear sign of some
internal disappointment. The boy, however, had betrayed himself in
his mother's days, when it required all her influence and his father's
authority, with proof positive of the woman's unworthiness, to rescue
him from immediate disaster.
Mrs. Lackstraw's confidences on the theme of the family she watched over
were extended to Patrick during their strolls among the ducks and fowls
and pheasants at her farm. She dealt them out in exclamations, as much
as telling him that now they knew him they trusted him, notwithstanding
the unaccountable part he played as honorary secretary to that Laundry.
The confidences, he was aware, were common property of the visitors
one after another, but he had the knowledge of his being trusted as
not every Irishman would have been. A service of six months to the
secretaryship established his reputation as the strange bird of a queer
species: not much less quiet, honest, methodical, than an Englishman,
and still impulsive, Irish still; a very strange bird.
The disposition of the English to love the children of Erin, when not
fretted by them, was shown in the treatment Patrick received from the
Mattock family. It is a love resembling the affection of the stage-box
for a set of favourite performers, and Patrick, a Celt who had schooled
his wits to observe and meditate, understood his position with them as
one of the gallant and amusing race, as well as the reason why he had
won their private esteem. They are not willingly suspicious: it agitates
their minds to be so; and they are most easily lulled by the flattery
of seeing their special virtues grafted on an alien stock: for in this
admiration of virtues that are so necessary to the stalwart growth of
man, they become just sensible of a minor deficiency; the tree, if we
jump out of it to examine its appearance, should not be all trunk. Six
months of ungrudging unremunerated service, showing devotion to the good
cause and perfect candour from first to last, was English, and a poetic
touch beyond: so that John Mattock, if he had finished the sentence
instead of lopping it with an interjection, would have said: 'These
Irish fellows, when they're genuine and first rate!--are pretty well
the pick of the land.' Perhaps his pause on the interjection expressed
a doubt of our getting them genuine. Mr. O'Donnell was a sort of
exceptional Irishman, not devoid of practical ability in a small way--he
did his duties of secretary fairly well; apparently sincere--he had
refrained from courting Jane; an odd creature enough, what with his
mixture of impulsiveness and discretion; likeable, pleasant to entertain
and talk to; not one of your lunatics concerning his country--he could
listen to an Englishman's opinion on that head, listen composedly to
Rockney, merely seeming to take notes; and Rockney was, as Captain Con
termed him, Press Dragoon about Ireland, a trying doctor for a child of
the patient.
On the whole, John Mattock could shake his hand heartily when he
was leaving our shores. Patrick was released by Miss Grace Barrow's
discovery at last of a lady capable of filling his place: a circumstance
that he did not pretend to regret. He relinquished his post and stood
aside with the air of a disciplined soldier. This was at the expiration
of seven months and two weeks of service. Only after he had gone, upon
her receiving his first letter from the Continent, did Jane distinguish
in herself the warmth of friendliness she felt for him, and know that
of all around her she, reproaching every one who had hinted a doubt, had
been the most suspicious of his pure simplicity. It was the vice of her
condition to be suspicious of the honesty of men. She thought of her
looks as less attractive than they were; of her wealth she had reason
to think that the scent transformed our sad sex into dogs under various
disguises. Remembering her chill once on hearing Patrick in a green lane
where they botanised among spring flowers call himself her Irish cousin,
as if he had advanced a step and betrayed the hoof, she called him
her Irish cousin now in good earnest. Her nation was retrospectively
enthusiastic. The cordiality of her letter of reply to the wandering
Patrick astonished him on the part of so cool a young lady; and Captain
Con, when he heard Miss Mattock speak of Patrick to his wife, came to
the conclusion that the leery lad had gone a far way toward doing the
trick for himself, though Jane said his correspondence was full of the
deeds of his brother in India. She quite sparkled in speaking of this
boy.
She and the captain had an interchange of sparklings over absent
Patrick, at a discovery made by Miss Colesworth, the lady replacing
him, in a nook of the amateur secretary's official desk, under heaps of
pamphlets and slips, French and English and Irish journals, not at all
bearing upon the business of the Laundry. It was a blotting-pad stuffed
with Patrick's jottings. Jane brought it to Con as to the proper keeper
of the reliquary. He persuaded her to join him in examining it, and
together they bent their heads, turning leaf by leaf, facing, laughing,
pursuing the search for more, sometimes freely shouting.
Her inspection of the contents had previously been shy; she had just
enough to tell her they were funny. Dozens of scraps, insides of torn
envelopes, invitation-cards, ends of bills received from home, whatever
was handy to him at the moment, had done service for the overflow of Mr.
Secretary's private notes and reflections; the blotting-paper as well;
though that was devoted chiefly to sketches of the human countenance,
the same being almost entirely of the fair. Jane fancied she spied
herself among the number. Con saw the likeness, but not considering it
a complimentary one, he whisked over the leaf. Grace Barrow was
unmistakeable. Her dimpled cushion features, and very intent eyes gazing
out of the knolls and dingles, were given without caricature. Miss
Colesworth appeared on the last page, a half-length holding a big key,
demure between curls. The key was explained by a cage on a stool, and a
bird flying out. She had unlocked the cage for Patrick.
'He never seemed anxious to be released while he was at work,' said
Jane, after she and the captain had spelt the symbolling in turns.
'And never thirsted to fly till he flew, I warrant him,' said Con.
A repeated sketch of some beauty confused them both; neither of them
could guess the proud owner of those lineaments. Con proclaimed it to be
merely one of the lad's recollections, perhaps a French face. He thought
he might have seen a face rather resembling it, but could not call to
mind whose face it was.
'I dare say it's just a youngster's dream on a stool at a desk, as
poets write sonnets in their youth to nobody, till they're pierced by
somebody, and then there's a difference in their handwriting,' he said,
vexed with Patrick for squandering his opportunity to leave a compliment
to the heiress behind him.
Jane flipped the leaves back to the lady with stormy hair.
'But you'll have the whole book, and hand it to him when he returns;
it 'll come best from you,' said Con. 'The man on horseback, out of
uniform, 's brother Philip, of course. And man and horse are done to the
life. Pray, take it, Miss Mattock. I should lose it to a certainty; I
should; I can't be trusted. You'll take it!'
He pressed her so warmly to retain the bundle in her custody that she
carried it away.
Strange to say the things she had laughed at had been the things which
struck her feelings and sympathies. Patrick's notes here and there
recalled conversations he had more listened to than taken part in
between herself and Grace Barrow. Who could help laughing at his ideas
about women! But if they were crude, they were shrewd--or so she thought
them; and the jejuneness was, to her mind, chiefly in the dressing of
them. Grace agreed with her, for Grace had as good a right to inspect
the papers as she, and a glance had shown that there was nothing of
peculiar personal import in his notes: he did not brood on himself.
Here was one which tickled the ladies and formed a text for discussion.
'Women must take the fate of market-fruit till they earn their own
pennies, and then they 'll regulate the market. It is a tussle for money
with them as with us, meaning power. They'd do it as little by oratory
as they have done by millinery, for their oratory, just like their
millinery, appeals to a sentiment, and to a weaker; and nothing solid
comes of a sentiment. Power is built on work.'
To this was appended: 'The better for mankind in the developing process,
ay, and a bad day for us, boys, when study masks the charming eyes in
gig-lamps, and there is no pretty flying before us. Good-night to Cupid,
I fear. May be I am not seeing far enough, and am asking for the devil
to have the loveliest women as of old. Retro S. M.'
The youthful eye on their sex, the Irish voice, and the perceptible
moral earnestness in the background, made up a quaint mixture.