UNCLE HARRY’S ADVICE.
Mr. Joscelyn returned from the Club to lunch, which was not very usual
for him. After all, at the bottom of his heart, there was a vein of
kindness in him for the boy whom he had trained. After his little anger
wore off, Harry’s face, so tragical in its expression, came back to his
mind with a mixture of amusement and compassion. It was tragic-comic to
Mr. Henry; but there was no comic element in it to the young man. He
came home by no means intending to put himself in the breach, and
replace for Harry’s benefit that thousand pounds of his mother’s money,
which the young fellow had calculated upon; but still with an impulse of
kindness. A thousand pounds! That was a pretty sort of fortune for the
woman who married Joscelyn of White House. It made him laugh with angry
scorn. Little insignificant woman, whose pretty face even was nothing
out of the way, a kind of prettiness that faded, a sort of parson’s
daughter’s gentility, not even anything that could be called beauty, or
that would last. Mr. Henry Joscelyn had been absent from the district,
he had not yet retired from “the world,” as he called it, when his
nephew married, and he had never known before exactly how bad a match it
was. Ralph was a clown to be sure, in himself worthy no better fate; but
the head of the Joscelyns, Mr. Henry reflected with a bitter smile,
might certainly have been worth something more than a thousand pounds.
It was ridiculous, it was exasperating; he did not wonder that Ralph had
been angry when his son had asked for this paltry thousand pounds.
Considered as a fee for the privilege of entering the Joscelyn family,
it was ridiculously inadequate--and as a fortune! He laughed aloud as he
crossed the street to the Club, an angry laugh. After all it was not
much wonder that Ralph had deteriorated. A wife with a faded face, no
ancestors, and a thousand pounds--poor Ralph! if he had not been so
insufferable his uncle would have been sorry for him. And now here was
the boy asserting a claim to this enormous fortune; probably Mrs.
Joscelyn herself thought it a great sum of money, enough to set up Harry
in business, and do a great deal for him. Tck-tck! how mean and petty it
all was, not like the old ways of the house, which were not small
whatever they were. The Joscelyns in their day had gone into debt in a
princely manner; and they had married money in their day; but to come to
such a point that the mother’s great fortune of a thousand pounds was
worth fighting about, between father and son! Tck-tck, tck-tck, what a
wonderful thing it was!
Nevertheless as Harry, poor boy, had been brought up within that limited
horizon, he could not help being sorry for him. It was sad for a young
man. He was rather fond of the boy; so far as he did give in to the
prejudice that because a boy was your grand-nephew you ought to be fond
of him, Harry, it certainly was, that was the object of his affections.
After all he was a Joscelyn, and, as Joscelyns went in the present
generation, as good a specimen as any. This was not saying very much,
but still it was something to say; for though the Joscelyns of a former
generation were in every way superior, yet it was clear that it was
impossible to go back to them. However much we may prefer the past we
must all have, it is evident, to put up with the present. Mr. Joscelyn
transacted his Club business, and went very closely into that question
about the waste-paper. The waste-paper at the Club was of a very
superior kind. It was chiefly made up of letters and circulars printed
on fine paper, and the _brouillons_ of replies, which even the rural
magnates, who frequented the place, liked to write out once before they
actually produced the autograph which was to go to their correspondents;
it brought a far better price than the usual refuse of a house. But this
the present major-domo had failed to grasp; he had treated these choice
scraps as if they had been old newspapers. Mr. Joscelyn fully proved his
mistake to the reluctant functionary, who was disposed to sneer at the
whole business.
“After all, Sir, it is only five shillings difference--and I don’t mind
if I paid that out of my own pocket, sooner than make a fuss;” said the
flippant official. Mr. Joscelyn looked at him with eyes from which the
finest London butler, much less a trifling person in the country, might
have shrunk.
“My man,” he said, “the difference is seven and sixpence, and I don’t
know what your pocket has to do with it. The state of your pocket is a
matter of perfect indifference to the Club; but it is my business to see
that our property is not wasted. I hope I shall not have to make a
complaint on this subject again.” When he had said this he went home,
with some little complacency to see Harry, feeling that his time had not
been wasted, and that the property of the Club was not likely to be
neglected in this manner again. As for Harry he had not left the house.
He had resisted all Mrs. Eadie’s exhortations to send a note to his
mother, telling her where he was, or even to send for his luggage,
declaring that he would have nothing to do with them, that he would take
nothing out of the house, nor ever return to it. And since he could not
show himself in Uncle Henry’s high collars, Mrs. Eadie had gone out to
the best shop there was in Wyburgh to get some linen for him, and a few
necessary articles; while he himself sat in the tranquil house, the
peaceful old man’s habitation, where everything was adapted for comfort,
every chair an easy-chair, every passage and stair carpeted and
noiseless, and the atmosphere kept up to one regular warmth by the
thermometer. Harry sat in his uncle’s snuggery, half stifled by the want
of air, half asleep in the drowse of warmth and comfort. He had rarely
entered these rooms when he was a school-boy--in those days he had been
much more at home with Eadie than with her master--and to sit there now
had a strange sort of Sunday feeling, a suggestion of silent ease and
contemplative leisure. He could understand Uncle Henry liking it. If you
were an old man with ever so much to look back upon, it would, no doubt
(he thought) be pleasant to sit in these arm-chairs for hours together,
and review the past, turning everything over, and living it through once
more; but at Harry’s age, with so little to look back upon, and so much
to look forward to, this slumbrous calm would have been intolerable but
for the strange feverish weariedness of that _nuit blanche_ which he had
spent in wandering over the dark country, and which made the present
warmth and quiet at once oppressive and luxurious. He dropped asleep
half-a-dozen times in the course of the morning, waking up more
uncomfortable and feverish than ever, and ashamed of himself to boot.
What would have done him more good would have been to go out and walk
off his drowse; but then the thought of the high collar, which cut his
cheek, and of all the acquaintances to whom this masquerade would have
to be explained, made the idea of going out still more insupportable;
while on the other hand to think that he was here under a kind of
hiding, skulking indoors, not wishing to be seen, was terrible to the
unsophisticated youth, who had never before known what it was to shrink
from the eye of day.
All these things worked bitterly in Harry’s mind as he sat and turned
them over, falling into vague feverish moments of forgetfulness, rousing
up again to more angry and uncomfortable consciousness than before. Of
course, he could not think of any other subject. He took up the
newspaper and tried to read it, but after he had gone over a sentence or
two, some scene from the last twenty-four hours would glide in over the
page and obliterate everything--his father’s furious face lowering upon
him, or that pale glare in the window of the house which was now shut up
and closed to him for ever; or the confused darkness of the shed in
which Joan (old Joan, a kind soul after all, as he said, in his boyish
jargon) had tried to comfort him--or it might be merely an incident of
his night’s walk, the sound of the water running below him as he stopped
on the bridge, only its sound betraying it in the darkness, or the
sudden graze of his hand against a wall as he made his way through the
gloom, or the dogs barking, baying against him on all sides. These
scenes came flashing before him one by one; and then his young cheeks
would grow red and hot as he remembered how he shrank from the
policeman’s lantern, and avoided the eye of the carter driving his
cabbages to the market in the grey of the morning. He had done nothing
to be ashamed of, and yet he had been made to feel guilty and ashamed;
what greater wrong could be done to a youth in the beginning of his
career?
All this went through his mind, not in any formal succession--now one
scene, now another touching his sore and angry soul to sudden
exasperation. That he should have to remain all the long day inactive
after this convulsion which had changed his life, was an additional
irritation to him. Since Uncle Henry had failed to show him any
sympathy, what he would have liked would have been to rush out on the
moment and post away somewhere out of reach, he did not mind where. In
old days, or in primitive places, when a man could hire a horse or a
carriage and set out at once, there must have been a wonderful solace in
that possibility of instant action; but to wait for a train is a
terrible aggravation of the impatience of an angry or anxious mind, even
though the train arrives much sooner at its destination than the other
could do. The long hours of daylight which must pass ere that train came
up seemed to be years to him. He longed for the clang and the movement
as for the only comfort that remained to him. After, he did not know
what would happen. He would go back to Liverpool; he could realise the
arrival there, but he did not know what would follow. Was he to accept
his defeat quietly, to sit down upon his stool and continue his work,
and see some one else, unfamiliar to the office, enter and pay his
money, and take the place which Harry was to have had? All this made the
blood mount to his cheeks again in successive waves. Could he bear it?
could he put up with it? Sometimes the blood seemed to boil in his veins
and swell as if they would burst; and there came upon him, as upon so
many others, that wild sudden burst of longing--oh! to have wings like a
dove, to fly away! It is not always an elevating or noble longing; it
is the natural outcry of that sense of the intolerable which is in all
unaccustomed to trouble. To escape from it is the first impulse of the
undisciplined mind. Even when experience has taught us that we cannot
escape from it, nature still suggests that cry, that desire. Oh to have
wings like a dove! oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness! oh to turn
our backs upon our pain and all its circumstances, and flee away! And
the less this impulse is spiritual and visionary, the less it is
restrained by that deeper knowledge so soon acquired that we can rarely
escape from our troubles by any summary road, seeing that we can never
escape from ourselves. Harry began to get bewildered by the rising fever
in his heart of this longing to escape. Why should not he escape? cut
all the bonds of which so many had already been rent asunder for him,
throw family, and home (which had rejected him), and duty, and custom,
and the life he knew, and the circumstances which had hitherto shaped
it, all away with one effort, and emancipate himself?
He had roused a little under the influence of this suggestion when his
uncle returned. Mr. Joscelyn had a compunction in his mind which made
him very conciliatory to Harry. To give him what he seemed to want, to
subtract so much, even if not very much, from his own possessions in
order to give to Harry, was an idea which he would not contemplate. If
Harry waited long enough he would get it; but in the meantime, a demand
upon him was like a warning that he had lived long enough, and that his
money was wanted for a new generation, which was as intolerable to Uncle
Henry as young Harry’s troubles were to him. He would not take upon
himself the burden of setting his grand-nephew up in life, but at the
same time he felt it was a hardship that the young fellow should not
have some one to set him up in life, and was conciliatory and soothing
by a kind of generous instinct, an instinct not generous enough to go
further. He came in in a mood which was much more agreeable to Harry
than that in which he had gone out, and which raised Mrs. Eadie’s hopes
high, who knew that her master did not often come back in this way, or
show himself so amiable. Mr. Joscelyn told Harry all the story of the
waste-paper, and gave him great insight into the workings of the Club.
“If you are faithful to your native county, as I have been, I daresay
you will end by being a member of it,” he said.
“It is not very likely, Sir,” said Harry. “I don’t care if I were never
to see the old place again.”
“That is nonsense,” said his uncle, promptly. “That’s a question of age
entirely. At your time of life you think that all that is to be desired
is to be in the world, and you don’t understand that the world is not in
one place as much as another, not the grand world in London, or the
business world in Liverpool, but is just your world wherever you may
happen to be.”
This was above Harry, who gaped slightly, and opened his eyes with
curiosity and wonder.
“You will scarcely say that this is the world like London,” he said,
with that smile of youthful comment upon the mysterious obtuseness of
their elders which is general to every new generation.
“But this is just what I do say, my boy; you have your little world
round about you, and neither is it bigger in the noise of a big place,
nor smaller in the quiet of a little one. We are capable just of so
much, and that we get wherever we are.”
Harry opened his eyes a little more; but he thought it just as well to
say nothing. He thought no doubt this was a kind of dotage; but resorted
quickly to his own concerns, which were so much more important than any
philosophy of his uncle’s.
“I don’t think,” he said, “if I were once out of it that I should want
to come back.”
“Ah, well, I should probably have said the same thing at your age. One’s
ideas change from twenty to seventy,” said Mr. Henry, feeling that
perhaps after all it was expedient to steer clear of generalities. “Let
us see what Eadie has sent us for luncheon. I don’t often eat lunch
myself; when one breakfasts rather late, as I do, it is as well to
reserve one’s self till dinner; but you were a great deal earlier,
Harry, and besides at your age you are always hungry--blessed provision
of nature.”
“I don’t think I’m always hungry; in the office one can’t indulge in
much eating,” said Harry, a little resentful.
“When I was like you we used to go out to a little tavern. I daresay
it’s gone now. I could show you the place--I could go there blindfold, I
believe--where they made the most excellent chops. Ah! there are no such
chops now. Mrs. Eadie sends us very nice cutlets, but it is not the
same thing. We made our dinner of them, and when we got back to our
lodgings, in my time, we had tea.”
“So most of us have now,” said Harry, “it saves a great deal of trouble;
it’s a big dining place now, there’s a grill-room as big as the
Market--”
Mr. Henry held up his hands in anxious deprecation.
“Don’t tell me anything about it. I know; a place like a
railway-station; the very railway-station itself has been invented since
my time. Your world has become a great deal busier and more hurried; but
it is not so comfortable, Harry. I am fond of good cookery, but I never
got anything better than those chops. As for the tea it always appeared
to me about the worst thing in the shape of a meal that a depraved
imagination could invent--very bad for the digestion, and neither
nourishing nor nice.”
“But you can’t get your people in your lodgings to cook dinner for you,”
said Harry, entering into this question with feeling, “they don’t know
how--and then they won’t--they are dreadfully independent. So we have to
do the best we can. And I am not like you, Uncle Henry; in your time I
suppose the Joscelyns were swells? but they never were, you know, in my
day. I was brought up like that.”
“The Joscelyns of my time, Harry, would never have recognized themselves
in your description. They would not have known what swells meant,” said
Mr. Henry, rather severely; but he did not enter into details, for
indeed, though they were “swells,” the living had always been very plain
at the White House.
Then there was a little pause, and Harry felt better after two or three
of Mrs. Eadie’s cutlets. He said in a moment of repose,
“I am going off, Uncle Harry, by the train to-night.”
“Are you so? but what are you to do about your luggage? you can’t go
without your luggage.”
“But I shall--I’ll ask nothing. I’ll take nothing out of that house.”
“This is foolish, Harry. You should rather take everything you can get;
but, however, I hope I know better than to argue with an angry man--or
boy. You are quite right to get back to your work.”
“It is about the only thing I have got left,” said Harry, somewhat
tragically.
“And you could not have a better thing. But you will not always feel
like that. If you would like it, though I don’t know that it is a very
hopeful office, I would see your father, Harry.”
“Nobody need see my father on my account,” cried Harry; his lips
quivered a little, but nothing save wrath was in his face; “that’s all
over. For my part I shouldn’t mind if it were all over together. I hate
Liverpool just as I hate Cumberland. I have a great mind to go clean
off--”
“Abroad? and the very best thing you could do. Show yourself fit to keep
up the credit of your employers abroad, and it’s the best stepping stone
to advancement at home. I am very glad to hear you have such an
enlightened notion.”
Harry was not pleased to have the ground thus cut from under his feet.
To be told, when you hint at what seems a desperate resolution, that it
is the best thing you can do, is exasperating. He withdrew with dignity
from the field and proffered no more confidence. The cutlets gave him a
safer outlet, for though he was in trouble he was hungry. It was a long
time since six o’clock; he had resisted Eadie’s offers of a “snack”
between, and the cutlets, though very nice, were not more than a
mouthful to Harry. Mr. Joscelyn trifled with one on his plate; but he
supplied his nephew with a liberal hand.
“I shan’t be here, I am afraid, to see you away. I am dining out, as I
told you--it is unfortunate. But you are used to looking after
yourself.”
“I would need to be,” said Harry, bitterly, and then he added, “I’ll say
goodbye to you now, Uncle Henry. Very likely I’ll never see you again. I
don’t know what I’m going to do, or where I may be going. You’ve always
been very kind to me; a fellow does not think anything of that at the
time--it seems all just a matter of course, you know. But I see now
you’ve always been very kind. I shall remember it as long as I live. I
said last night, he had never done anything for me, it was all Uncle
Henry. So it is, though I’m not sure that I ever thought of it before.”
Mr. Joscelyn smiled, but he was touched.
“Well, well, Harry,” he said; “that was natural; but now you show a very
nice feeling. And I always was glad to do what I could for you. As
schoolboys go you were not at all objectionable, and though you are a
little out of temper now things will come round. Put that in your
pocket. It’s only a trifle; but I daresay you may want some little
things, especially if you’re going abroad. That’s all. Let me hear how
you are going on from time to time. I shall always be glad to hear.”
And then he began to talk of the news, and what the Duke was going to do
in the prospect of a new election for the county. “If Lord Charles does
not get in, it will be ridiculous--worse than wrong, absurd, considering
the stake they have in the county.” But it may be supposed that, in the
present crisis of his affairs, Harry Joscelyn cared very little for Lord
Charles. He replied civilly to his uncle’s talk; but as a matter of fact
he was very anxious to see what was in the envelope which Mr. Joscelyn
had insisted he should put in his pocket. It was not likely it would be
anything of an exciting character; but yet there was no telling. When,
however, Uncle Henry was gone, and Harry was free to examine this
envelope, it proved to contain two crisp ten pound notes--no more. He
was very much disappointed at first, thinking (foolishly) that it might
even be the capital he wanted--the thousand pounds to set him up. But
after a while, and somewhat grudgingly, Harry allowed to himself that
it was kind. Sometimes there is more pleasure to be got out of twenty
pounds than out of a thousand. Uncle Henry meant it very kindly. The
young man’s heart was a little softened and warmed, almost against his
will, by the gift.
And when evening came, and with it the train which roars along between
that deep cutting under the fells, between two high walls of living
stone, to “the South” and the world, Harry, with a little portmanteau,
in which Mrs. Eadie had packed the things she had bought for him, walked
down to the station, boldly passing both lamps and policemen, and went
away. The little portmanteau was not half full; but Eadie thought it was
“more respectable.” He felt so himself. To have gone without any luggage
at all would have given him a thrill of shame. It was with a strange
forlorn feeling that he lounged about the station, looking at everything
as if he might never see it again. Strangely enough he seemed to find
out features in the place which he had never noticed before, in that
last look round, things which his indifferent eye had seen, without
noticing, ever so often; but which now at last he perceived, and would
recollect as part of Wyburgh, should he never see it again. He was glad
that it was dark when the train swept through the valley in which the
White House was. Though he could not see anything, yet he went to the
other side of the carriage, and so plunged along, passing all those
familiar places without seeing them, yet more vividly conscious of them
than, he thought, he had ever been before. What were they thinking, he
wondered? Would they have any suspicion that he was passing, going
away--for ever. For ever! something else seemed to say this in the air
about him, not his own voice. Was it possible that he might never pass
this way again?