THE NEW HEIR.
They had heard from Charlie, who had already set out upon his journey;
they had heard from Louis, whom Mr Foggo desired to take into his office
in Charlie’s place in the mean time; they had heard again and again from
Miss Anastasia’s solicitor, touching their threatened property; and to
this whole family of women everything around seemed going on with a
singular speed and bustle, while they, unwillingly detained among the
waning September trees, were, by themselves, so lonely and so still. The
only one among them who was not eager to go home was Agnes. Bellevue and
Islington, though they were kindly enough in their way, were not meet
nurses for a poetic child;--this time of mountainous clouds, of wistful
winds, of falling leaves, was like a new life to Agnes. She came out to
stand in the edge of the wood alone, to do nothing but listen to the
sweep of the wild minstrel in those thinning trees, or look upon the big
masses of cloud breaking up into vast shapes of windy gloom over the
spires of the city and the mazes of the river. The great space before
and around--the great amphitheatre at her feet--the breeze that came in
her face fresh and chill, and touched with rain--the miracles of tiny
moss and herbage lying low beneath those fallen leaves--the pale autumn
sky, so dark and stormy--the autumn winds, which wailed o’ nights--the
picturesque and many-featured change which stole over
everything--carried a new and strange delight to the mind of Agnes. She
alone cared to wander by herself through the wood, with its crushed
ferns, its piled faggots of firewood, its yellow leaves, which every
breeze stripped down. She was busy with the new book, too, which was
very like to be wanted before it came; for all these expenses, and the
license which their supposed wealth had given them, had already very
much reduced the little store of five-pound notes, kept for safety in
Papa’s desk.
One afternoon during this time of suspense and uncertainty, the Rector
repeated his call at the Lodge. The Rector had never forgiven Agnes that
unfortunate revelation of her authorship; yet he had looked to her
notwithstanding through those strange sermons of his, with a
constantly-increasing appeal to her attention. She was almost disposed
to fancy sometimes that he made special fiery defences of himself and
his sentiments, which seemed addressed to her only; and Agnes fled from
the idea with distress and embarrassment, thinking it a vanity of her
own. On this day, however, the Rector was a different man--the cloud was
off his brow--the apparent restraint, uneasy and galling, under which he
had seemed to hold himself, was removed; a flash of aroused spirit was
in his eye--his very step was eager, and sounded with a bolder ring upon
the gravel of the garden path--there was no longer the parochial bow,
the clergymanly address, or the restless consciousness of something
unreal in both, which once characterised him; he entered among them
almost abruptly, and did not say a word of his parishioners, but
instead, asked for Louis--told Rachel his sister wished to see her--and,
glancing with unconcealed dislike at poor Agnes’s blotting-book, wished
to know if Miss Atheling was writing now.
“Mr Rivers does not think it right, mamma,” said Agnes. She blushed a
little under her consciousness of his look of displeasure, but smiled
also with a kind of challenge as she met his eye.
“No,” said the young clergyman abruptly; “I admire, above all things,
understanding and intelligence. I can suppose no appreciation so quick
and entire as a woman’s; but she fails of her natural standing to me,
when I come to hear of her productions, and am constituted a
critic--that is a false relationship between a woman and a man.”
And Mr Rivers looked at Agnes with an answering flash of pique and
offence, which was as much as to say, “I am very much annoyed; I had
thought of very different relationships; and it is all owing to you.”
“Many very good critics,” said Mrs Atheling, piqued in her turn--“a
great many people, I assure you, who know about such things, have been
very much pleased with Agnes’s book.”
The Rector made no answer--did not even make a pause--but as if all this
was merely irrelevant and an interruption to his real business, said
rapidly, yet with some solemnity, and without a word of preface, “Lord
Winterbourne’s son is dead.”
“Who?” said Agnes, whom, unconsciously, he was addressing--and they all
turned to him with a little anxiety. Rachel became very pale, and even
Marian, who was not thinking at all of what Mr Rivers said, drew a
little nearer the table, and looked up at him wistfully, with her
beautiful eyes.
“Lord Winterbourne’s son, George Rivers, the heir of the family--he who
has been abroad so long; a young man, I hear, whom every one esteemed,”
said the Rector, bending down his head, as if he exacted from himself a
certain sadness, and did indeed endeavour to see how sad it was--“he is
dead.”
Mrs Atheling rose, greatly moved. “Oh, Mr Rivers!--did you say his son?
his only son? a young man? Oh, I pray God have pity upon him! It will
kill him;--it will be more than he can bear!”
The Rector looked up at the grief in the good mother’s face, with a look
and gesture of surprise. “I never heard any one give Lord Winterbourne
credit for so much feeling,” he said, looking at her with some
suspicion; “and surely he has not shown much of it to you.”
“Oh, feeling! don’t speak of feeling!” cried Mrs Atheling. “It is not
that I am thinking of. You know a great many things, Mr Rivers, but you
never lost a child.”
“No,” he said; and then, after a pause, he added, in a lower tone, “in
the whole matter, certainly, I never before thought of Lord
Winterbourne.”
And there was nobody nigh to point out to him what a world beyond and
above his philosophy was this simple woman’s burst of nature. Yet in his
own mind he caught a moment’s glimpse of it; for the instant he was
abashed, and bent his lofty head with involuntary self-humiliation; but
looking up, saw his own thought still clearer in the eye of Agnes, and
turned defiant upon her, as if it had been a spoken reproof.
“Well!” he said, turning to her, “was I to blame for thinking little of
the possibility of grief in such a man?”
“I did not say so,” said Agnes, simply; but she looked awed and grave,
as the others did. They had no personal interest at all in the matter;
they thought in an instant of the vacant places in their own family, and
stood silent and sorrowful, looking at the great calamity which made
another house desolate. They never thought of Lord Winterbourne, who was
their enemy; they only thought of a father who had lost his son.
And Rachel, who remembered George Rivers, and thought in the tenderness
of the moment that he had been rather kind to her, wept a few tears
silently.
All these things disconcerted the Rector. He was impatient of excess of
sympathy--ebullitions of feeling; he was conscious of a restrained, yet
intense spring of new hope and vigour in his own life. He had
endeavoured conscientiously to regret his cousin; but it was impossible
to banish from his own mind the thought that he was free--that a new
world opened to his ambition--that he was the heir!
And he had come, unaware of his own motive, to share this overpowering
and triumphant thought with Agnes Atheling, a girl who was no mate for
him, as inferior in family fortune and breeding as it was possible to
imagine--and now stood abashed and reproved to see that all his simple
auditors thought at once, not of him and his altered position, but of
those grand and primitive realities--Death and Grief. He went away
hastily and with impatience, displeased with them and with himself--went
away on a rapid walk for miles out of his way, striding along the quiet
country roads as if for a race; and a race it was, with his own
thoughts, which still were fastest, and not to be overtaken. He knew the
truths of philosophy, the limited lines and parallels of human logic and
reason; but he had not been trained among the great original truths of
nature; he knew only what was true to the mind,--not what was true to
the heart.