THE YOUNGEST SON.
Harry Joscelyn had been said in the nursery to be a sweet-tempered
child; and he had lived upon the reputation through all the impatient
years of youth, during which he had not been sweet-tempered, but
decidedly “contrary,” as all the Joscelyns were. Notwithstanding the
fact that the Joscelyns thought a great deal of themselves, and the
vague grandeur of their ancestry, education had always been a very
doubtful necessity in the house. Ralph Joscelyn himself had been at
school it was supposed in the natural course, and could write and read
and make up his accounts, which was all that was necessary; and it had
not occurred to him that his sons wanted more. Such nervous attempts as
their mother made to secure for them advantages to which she on her
side, as a clergyman’s daughter, attached a value which was more
superstitious than enlightened, only strengthened her husband’s
conviction that the ways of horses were much better worth learning than
anything that could be got out of books. Harry had been the exception;
he was the godson of an old uncle who lived in the nearest town, and who
also had a tidy bit of money to leave behind him, a qualification which
gave him great credit among his kinsfolks, and made his recommendation
potent. He it was who had procured for Harry the education which made
him superior to his brethren. Uncle Henry had gone so far as to permit
the boy to live in his house while he attended school, and as this
seemed a plain indication that the boy was to be his heir there had not
been a word to say against it. As for Mrs. Joscelyn, she had triumphed
sadly in the fate which satisfied her wishes while taking her solace
from her. She thought ever after that if Harry had not been taken from
her at that susceptible period of his life, he would have been a comfort
to her in his later years, and never would have forsaken his mother. But
we are all apt to find out afterwards the disadvantages which attend
every piece of good fortune. At the first proposal it had seemed
something too good to be hoped for. When it was intimated to her that
Harry was to go to the Grammar School at Wyburgh, at Uncle Henry’s cost,
and was to be housed under Uncle Henry’s roof and cared for by his
housekeeper, whose only fault was that she was too kind to the rough
boys--whom she only of all the dependants of the family, insisted upon
calling the young gentlemen--there was a sort of _Nunc Dimittis_ in Mrs.
Joscelyn’s heart. If only she could hope for anything as good for Liddy,
though Liddy was but a baby in those days! But when Harry, the one who
she fondly thought would understand her, was gone, his mother wrung her
hands over that as over so many other troubles. From that time forth she
had never again felt that he understood her. He veered from her side, to
which he had been so constant, and preferred the rough sports of the
other boys, and even to hear his father’s stories of desperate rides,
and cunning mares, and all the adventures of the stable, better than to
walk and talk with her as he had once done. Perhaps it was natural, no
doubt it was quite natural; but what is from one side the thing most
clearly to be expected, is often a most painful revelation on the other.
Harry was for five years in Uncle Henry’s house, during which time his
mother formed many fine visions of what might happen to him. She thought
he would most certainly get the exhibition and go to Cambridge, and
become a scholar like his grandfather, and might then perhaps eventually
become a clergyman, and afford her in the end of her life a refuge of
peaceful sweetness like that once lightly thought of, but now so fondly
looked back upon, sweet peaceful parsonage of her girlhood. But Harry,
as a matter of fact, was never within a hundred miles of the exhibition.
It was won by a lad who was nobody, who had no blood to speak of in his
veins, and nobody to care much whether he succeeded or not. Then Mrs.
Joscelyn thought that Uncle Henry would very likely draw that long
purse, which was supposed much longer at the White House than it was in
reality, and out of family pride, and to give himself the satisfaction
of a nephew at college, would send the boy to Cambridge, even without
the exhibition. But even that was not to be.
Harry himself for his part was not very grateful to Uncle Henry for his
education. He would rather have been at home riding the colts, in the
middle of all the fun. And he was not very fond of the education, any
more than of the old man who gave it to him. He saw the disadvantages
much more than the advantages of his position, as most people, and
especially most young people, do. He had no fervid desire for learning,
though his mother thought so; and to be as quiet as a mouse in that
carefully arranged bachelor’s house was not half so pleasant as rushing
in and out after his own fancy at home. He obeyed while he was a boy,
but he was not grateful; and when he began to be a young man and the end
of his studies approached, he was neither grateful nor obedient. He went
in for all the sports in the neighbourhood, and persistently, though
without any temper, defied his uncle. The result was that instead of
being sent to Cambridge and made a scholar of and Uncle Henry’s avowed
heir, which was all on the cards at one time, Harry was placed in the
office in Liverpool where Uncle Henry had made his money. It was “a fine
opening,” the old man said; but it did not much please anybody
concerned. Mrs. Joscelyn felt as if she had tumbled from the top of the
stairs to the bottom when she heard that all her hopes were to come to
nothing better than this. And Harry himself who had begun to be proud of
his education, though he did not love it, went about with a very grave
countenance, furtively examining the faces of all concerned, that he
might see what hope there was of an alteration in his fate. But his
father had too many sons to quarrel with any provision for the youngest
of them, and his mother had no power whatever, and there was nobody else
who could help him. So he went to Liverpool at last, notwithstanding his
own and his mother’s reluctance, and once there soon began to appreciate
the advantage of his liberty and an income of his own. He had been
frugally bred, and had never known what it was to have money before. His
income seemed a fortune at first, but after a while Harry did not
consider it in this light; and to tell the truth his application to his
father for funds to push his fortune, to get advancement and a
partnership, meant also a something, a little margin to pay sundry debts
which his inexperience had been beguiled into, and which appalled him as
soon as he had discovered that his income was less inexhaustible than
he thought; and he had come home for his yearly holiday with the
determination, by hook or by crook, to get this change in his position
effected, and to be done with debt for ever and ever.
The house in Liverpool where Uncle Henry had made his fortune was by no
means a great house. It had gone on very steadily since the old man
retired from it, and now there was a need for new blood. Harry had
explained all this when he went to see his uncle, and had done all that
was possible to do short of asking for the money to show to Uncle Henry
how highly expedient it was to “come forward” on such an occasion. But
the old gentleman had not taken the hint. And then Harry had spoken to
his mother, urging her to make an effort to get her own little fortune,
if possible, from his father’s hands, and invest it in the business. To
get it from his father’s hands! it would have been as easy to get him
the moon out of the skies. Mrs. Joscelyn would have set out on any
journey, would even have consented to be shot out of a big cannon, like
the hero of M. Jules Verne, in order to get her boy what he wanted. But
get it from his father! She sank back upon herself at the mere
suggestion. Nothing in heaven or earth was less possible.
Then Harry had taken it in hand himself. He was not one who had ever
“got on” with his father. Notwithstanding his long absence from home, as
soon as they met it seemed that they could not avoid jangling. An
impulse to contradict everything his father said seemed somehow the
first thing in Harry’s mind; and Joscelyn himself, always dogmatical,
was never so much so, never so impatient of any expression of opinion as
when it was his youngest son who made it. It may be imagined then if
Mrs. Joscelyn had reason for her alarm when Harry at last took the bull
by the horns, as he said, and ventured to propound to his father the
tremendous idea that he wanted money. The young man was a little alarmed
by it himself. He took the bull by the horns with a weak rush at last,
his mind so deranged by the traditions of the house and the alarming
presence of his father, that his appeal was quite wanting in the
business-like form he had intended to give it. What he meant to say was,
that here was an excellent opportunity for investing a little money,
that it would bring in good interest, and would be perfectly safe, and
would give him a great step in life--all these things together. But
instead of this he blundered and stumbled, and gave his father to
understand that his mother was quite willing and anxious that her money
should be employed in this way, and that the return would be far better
if it were put into his hands than any other possible use of it could
give.
“So you’ve been plotting with your mother,” Joscelvn had said. “What the
blank has she to do with it? What the dash does she mean by interfering?
I’ve a good mind to kick you out of the house--both her and you.”
“It is her money,” said Harry, confronting his father; though, indeed,
had it not been for necessity and opposition the idea of anything
belonging to his mother was the last thought that would have occurred to
him.
“_Her_ money!” Joscelvn had cried out in a tempest of scorn and wrath,
filling the room with whirlwinds of oaths; and what with the fierce
impulse of contradiction in him, and the desire he had to have his way,
Harry had felt his genuine germ of affection for his mother blown up
into red hot heat and passion by all that his father proceeded to say.
“_Her_ money! Let her dare to say it was her money--to a man that had
supported and put up with a dashed useless blank all this time that was
no more good in a house than an old rag! Let her just come and say it
was her money--he would show her the difference; he would tell her whose
money it was that kept up her dashed pretensions. To be sure it was a
lady she was--a parson’s daughter with a fortune of her own. Oh, dash it
all--her money; this was about too much for any man to bear.” Harry had
made a great effort to keep his temper, and he had allowed all this
flood to pour itself out. He was very much in earnest, and anxious, now
that he had opened the question, to get some advantage from it. Then he
tried another expedient.
“I have never cost you a penny,” he said; “the others have all got
something out of you. You have never spent a penny upon me.”
And then the veins swelled upon Joscelyn’s forehead. He swore half a
million of oaths, cursing his son by every possible mode of imprecation.
“Cost me nothing! you dashed puppy!” he cried; “you’ve cost me a deal
more than money, you ----!” (Though it takes away the spirit and energy
of his style, and turns it into tameness, I cannot pretend to report Mr.
Joscelyn’s expletives, having no sufficient knowledge of the variations
to help me in rendering them) “You’ve cost me that woman’s dashed
smirking and smiling, and that old scarecrow’s brags and blows. I’d
sooner you had cost me a fortune. I’ve had that to put up with as I’ll
put up with again from nobody. Made me feel like a beggar, by ----! with
that old blank grinning at me, and poking his advices at me. If it was
for nothing but to spite him you shouldn’t have a penny from me.”
“And do you mean to say,” cried Harry, indignant, “that you will
sacrifice my prospects to show your independence of my uncle? I could
believe a great deal of you, father (which was a wrong thing to say),
but I couldn’t have believed anything so bad as that.”
And then it was that Joscelyn pushed back his chair, and clenched his
fist, and gave his son to understand what he thought of him.
“There’s not one of the others but is worth two of you,” he said,
“they’re a bit like Joscelyns; you’re your mother’s breed, you
white-faced shop-keeping cur. And ask me to put my money in a filthy
concern across a counter, me that have the best blood in all Cumberland
in my veins, and my name to keep up; I’ll see you at--Jericho first;
I’ll see you in the churchyard first. D’ye think I want you to keep up
the family? If you were the heir there might be something to be said.
Heir, yes! and something worth being heir to: Joscelyns. Put your finger
on one blessed peerage in the country that has as good blood as mine to
go with it; but I’ve plenty of lads worth counting on, I don’t want
anything to say to you.”
“Blood won’t do much for us, without a little money,” Harry said.
“That shows what blood you’ve come of; your mother’s milk-and-water, not
mine. I can’t take the name from you----”
“What do you mean?” cried Harry, springing to his feet. He had held
himself in so long that now his passion would have vent, though he knew
very well it was upon a fictitious occasion. “What do you mean?” he
cried; “do you mean to slander my mother?” and faced this domestic
tyrant with blazing eyes.
Joscelyn laughed scornfully.
“You can take it as you please,” he said. “You’re of her breed, not
mine. Flare up as you like, it don’t touch me. You’re a poor, weakly
piece of goods to carry a big name, but I can’t take it from you. Only
mind you what I say, don’t ask a penny from me, for you’ll not get it;
not a sixpence, not a farthing from me.”
“I’ll never trouble you again, that you may be sure. It is now or
never,” cried Harry, worked to a pitch of passion which he could not
restrain. And again, Joscelyn laughed, with a shout that blew into
Harry’s indignant face, and moved his hair.
This sensation half maddened the young man. He pushed away his chair,
throwing it down with a clang that rang over all the house, and crying,
“That’s settled, then!” darted out and flung himself forth, out of the
flush and heat of the quarrel into the cool and wintry freshness of the
night.
Other interviews before this had ended in the same way. It is the worst
of domestic quarrels that they are endless and full of repetition. What
would be decisive between two friends is not decisive between two
members of the same family, who are forced to meet again, and go over
the same ground for scores of times. Harry Joscelyn had felt the same
tingle and thrill as of fire in his veins before now, the same
determination to fling out of sight, out of recollection of this tyrant
who was his father, and who became periodically insupportable to him. He
plunged out into the cold without any upper coat, his body all tingling
with heat and shame, as his mind did. Indeed, he was at a pass in which
body and mind so sympathize with each other as to feel like one. He sped
along the familiar road in the white soft mist of the moonlight. The
great slope of the Fells behind was the only object that loomed through
that faint vaporous atmosphere, in which the light seemed diffused and
disintegrated into a woolly confusing veil. The road lay between two
grey dykes; there were no trees or bushes to interrupt or throw shadows
into the general haze. He seemed to breathe it, as well as move in it;
and after the first minute it chilled him to the very marrow of his
bones. The whiteness made it colder, cold without and within, in the
body and in the mind. And gradually it had upon the heated youth the
effect of a cold bath, quenching out the warmth in him. His steps grew
less hurried, he began to be able to think, not only, with a furious
absorption over all his father’s words and ways, but with a recurring
thought of his overcoat, and all the comfort he might have got out of
it, which, though it was not a great matter, still gradually set up
something to balance the other matter in his mind.
He walked quickly, his rapid youthful steps warning whosoever might be
out and about, of his approach. There was no doubtfulness in these
steps; he was not wandering vaguely, but had a certain end before him,
the parlour of the “Red Lion,” which had made his mother wring her hands
as much as all the other painful circumstances of the night. He had
persuaded himself, as soon as the first novelty of his return home was
over, that he had nowhere else to go. To sit between his mother and Joan
in the parlour, they could not suppose that a young fellow would do
that. Women are unreasonable; they had supposed it, not knowing in their
own accustomedness and unexpectancy how dull it was. There was nothing
very lively going on at the “Red Lion,” and a mother and sister might
have been excused for wondering what charm there was in the dull and
drowsy talk, the slow filling of glasses, the rustic opinions and
confused ideas of the company there. Harry did not find much charm in
it, but it was more congenial than sitting with the women. He was angry
when his father assailed his mother, feeling it a kind of assault upon
his own side, but his father’s ceaseless scorn of her, which he had
known all his life, had influenced him in spite of himself. To sit at
home with two women in a parlour was out of the question. The other
parlour was not entertaining, but it was not home, and that was always
something. The “Red Lion” was in the middle of the village, which lay on
a considerably lower level than that of the White House, clustered upon
the stream which divided the valley. It was quite a small stream
ordinarily, but at present it was swollen with spring rains and with the
melted snow, and made a faint roar in the night as it swept under the
bridge, with here and there a gleam of light reflected in it from the
neighbouring houses. It was not with any very highly raised expectations
that Harry turned his eyes towards these lights. He would get out of the
cold, that was one thing, and into the light, and would see something
different from his father’s furious countenance, or his mother’s pale
one, or Joan’s eyes, that paid attention to everything but her
knitting. How strange it is that home, which is paradise at five, and so
pleasant a place at fifteen, should be intolerable at five-and-twenty!
As he approached the corner at which, coming from his exile at Wyburgh,
he had first caught sight of the lights in the White House, he could not
help remembering the shout of delight he used to send forth. How
pleasant it had been to come home from Uncle Henry’s prim old place! but
what was home to him now? at the best a duty, a weariness. As he began
to think of this a kind of desire, a longing to go far away came over
him. Why shouldn’t he go away? His mother would not like it, but nobody
else would mind. His mother was the only creature, he reflected, whom he
cared for at home; and of course it was his duty to come and see her
from time to time. But an hour at the utmost exhausted what he had to
say to her; indeed, he had never had so much to say to her as it would
take an hour to tell. Half-an-hour, perhaps, now and then--that he would
like to keep up, just to please her; and it would please himself too.
But he did not care for any more. As for all the rest, he did not mind,
not he! if he never saw the White House again.
Thus he was thinking as he hastened along the road, his hasty feet
ringing upon the path notwithstanding that it was somewhat damp and the
atmosphere dull, giving forth no particular echo. Some one else was
coming along the Wyburgh Road, a small uncertain blackness in the white
atmosphere. Harry knew very well at the first glance who it was, as
familiar a figure as any in the country side. Anybody would have known
him by his step even, that peculiar step as of one springy foot and one
shuffling one which gave a one-sided movement to the man, and an
unmistakable rhythm to the sound of him. Perhaps he knew Harry’s step
too, for he paused at the corner, turning his face in the way the young
man was coming.
“Who will that be?” he said, in the obscurity, “if I’m no mistaken an
angry man--”
“It’s I, Isaac,” said Harry, “angry enough if that would do me any
good.”
“It’s you, Mr. Harry! that was what I thought. No, it does little good;
but so long as you wear it off in the feet of ye, my lad, and keep it
out o’ th’ other end--”
“It’s very easy talking! Keep it out of the other end! I would like to
know for my part,” cried the young man, glad of utterance, “why old
folks should go against young folks in the way they do. It’s like a
disease, as if they couldn’t help it. The more reasonable a thing is,
the more they don’t see it. It’s enough to make a fellow break with
everything, and take himself off to the end of the earth.”
“There might be sense in that--if the ends of th’ earth would take ye
from yoursel’, Mr. Harry. But that’s queer talking for the like of you
that have always had your own gate.” He had come close up to the young
man and was gazing keenly up at him. “Have you no had your ain gate? I
dreamt it then. T’ auld maister was o’ that mind.”
“Uncle Henry?--Isaac, you’re a good old fellow--you’ve always been kind
to me; but don’t talk nonsense, if you please. Uncle Henry of that mind!
did he ever let me do anything I wanted to do? from the day I went to
him till the day I left.”
“Tut, tut, Mr. Harry, he always wished you weel--always weel; and if you
have patience, you’ll get it all, every penny; just have patience,” the
new-comer said, patting Harry’s arm coaxingly. And then he drew a little
closer, still with his fingers on Harry’s arm. “And where may you be
going, my braw lad, at this hour of the night with your face turned from
home?”
“Going? what does it matter where I am going. I don’t mind if it was
into the river there, or out of the world. Well, if you will have it,
I’m going to the ‘Red Lion’ to rest a bit and come to myself.”
At this Isaac shook his head; he went on shaking it as if he had been a
little mechanical figure, which could not stop itself if once started.
“T’auld maister would never have allowed that,” he said.
“What do I care for the auld master? I’m my own master, and nobody shall
stand in my way,” cried Harry, putting his hand in his turn on Isaac’s
arm, and swinging him out of the path. He was impatient of the
interruption. “I’ll go where I have a mind and bide where I have a mind,
and I would like to know who’ll stop me,” he cried.
Isaac thus suddenly wheeled about and taken by surprise, went spinning
across the road, recovering himself with an effort. But he did not show
any anger. He stood looking after the young man as soon as he had
recovered his balance with a “Tck--tck--tck” of his tongue against the
roof of his mouth. “It’s my duty to see after him,” old Isaac said, at
length, slowly shuffling along in the young man’s steps. There was a
certain satisfaction in his tone. The “Red Lion” was forbidden
ground--still if there was a motive, a suitable reason for it. “Ay, ay,”
said Isaac to himself, “a plain duty; so far as I can tell, there’s
never a one to look the gate he’s going but only me.”