A SUSPENDED SOLUTION.
It seemed to matter very little to John that Mr. Cattley met him in the
evening with what he thought good news. In the absence of anything
better, it was good news. May had been very amiable, as was the manner
of that hopeless but good-humoured and philosophical unfortunate. He
declared that nothing on earth would induce him to injure his children
by attaching himself to them: he had come back to John’s room only to
return those papers which he had taken with the intention of disposing
of them on his son’s account, meaning no harm. He had never meant any
harm. He had intended, perhaps, to secure to himself a share of the
profit, but never to harm the boy. ‘Though he’s sadly changed, if ever
he was my little chap,’ he said.
Mr. Cattley did not tell Jack, but he confided to Susie that he had
offered to take that smiling and gentle-mannered reprobate to live with
‘us’ in the new parish where nobody would have known. But May would not
listen to any such proposal. He was very wise and foreseeing, and full
of consideration.
‘There is no saying who might turn up,’ he said; ‘at the last,
everything gets known; and perhaps a parson’s house would be too much
for me,’ he had added, with a twinkle in his eyes. ‘I don’t know that
I’m good enough for that. I might fall into temptation, don’t you know!
And I couldn’t live with a blunderbuss always at my head, which would be
the case if I were with that son of mine--if he is my son. And Susie
would be worse, with her eyes. I remember her eyes long ago--they were
harder to meet than all her mother’s talk. They’re all very good, Mr.
Cattley. A man might be very happy among them; but not my kind. I’m not
worthy of such company. No, I’ve got a plan of my own.’
This plan, when it was stated, was to the effect that May had made up
his mind to emigrate. He thought he would go to the far West of America,
or to California.
‘I don’t want to go to a place where there’s no fun,’ he avowed,
candidly. ‘I want to see a little life. If I stay here, I’ll get into
mischief.’
Mr. Cattley (against his own wishes) had done his best to persuade him
to depart from this determination, but in vain; and finally he had been
authorised to treat with the family for the passage-money of the two
travellers, for Mr. Cattley had found the faithful Joe in attendance,
and had not been able to persuade May that this was not a fit companion
for him.
‘He has been all the company I’ve had. Perhaps he’s not fit for
respectable society,’ said May, looking at the slouching ruffian with
eyes that were almost affectionate, ‘but I’m not respectable myself, and
why should I pretend to be better than he is? I’m not better, I’m worse,
if the truth was known; for of course I know a great deal better, and
ought to have avoided what was wrong, if anything is really wrong or
right in this world. It depends so much on your point of view.’
‘But why should you not be respectable?’ the curate had said. ‘There is
a home waiting for you, and better company than Joe.’
The unteachable, the never-to-be-convinced, shook his head. ‘Joe will
suit me best,’ he said. And thus the bargain was made. He was to have a
moderate allowance, his passage-money, and his outfit. He was shipped
off with his friend, decently clothed, well fitted out as he desired,
and disappeared into the West. When his children, half-glad,
half-miserable, went to see him off, he bade them be cheerful and not
fret. ‘For there is no telling when the fancy may take me, and I may
turn up again,’ he said. The hearts of Susie and John sank within them
at this last blessing which he flung at them over the side of the ship,
which was already beginning to churn the water on her passage
outward-bound. They did not see the twinkle in his eye, nor know that he
meant it for a joke in the humorous simplicity of his heart.
Susie married her curate shortly after, very quietly, without any fuss,
in London, an event which caused much excitement in Edgeley, but none
where it took place. The Rev. Percy Spencer never mentioned it at all,
or allowed that he knew of it. But he spoke of ‘that fool Cattley,’ and
was so violent about the late curate’s mismanagement of the parish that
even the mild rector, who never made any appearance save in extremity,
took up the cudgels on behalf of the absent.
‘It will be well for you if you do half as much for the parish in your
day as Cattley did in his,’ the rector said; and his son aghast at this
unexpected defence ventured to say no more. Mrs. Egerton treated the
matter in the contrary way. She made, perhaps, too great a joke of it,
talking to everybody on the subject. ‘Such a good thing for him,’ she
said, ‘going into a new place: and a good little nonentity of a wife who
will adore him, which is what our good Mr. Cattley was little used to.’
But she sent the pair a wedding present, and was what Susie called very
kind. This marriage was no help to Elly, however, in the arduous piece
of work which she found she had before her when she got home. It made
matters a little worse. It turned Percy into an open and violent foe,
and it shook a little the wavering sympathy which Mrs. Egerton always
accorded her. And as for the rector, whom Elly had declared her faith
in, he did not respond as she had hoped. He was a true gentleman, he was
as good as Chaucer’s ‘very parfit gentle knight’--he was all his
daughter had claimed for him to be. But he, too, shuddered at the name
of the convict. Like all the older people, he remembered May’s story,
and all about him: and to permit his daughter, the quintessence of the
family excellence and pride, the flower of all the kindred, to connect
herself with such a race was more than Mr. Spencer’s generosity, or his
kindness, or even Elly’s influence could bring him to. He retired into
that stronghold of silence which is so redoubtable. He would not argue
nor give his reasons; he would not enter into the abstract question. He
acknowledged, or at least he did not contest, the merits of John. But,
when all was said that Elly’s fervid eloquence could say, the rector
remained unresponsive and unshaken.
‘One might as well try to get an answer out of a stone wall,’ Elly
cried, in hot exasperation to her aunt.
‘Oh, my dear, didn’t I tell you so? I told poor Jack so and he believed
me, but you would not believe me. He will never, never consent.’
‘Then he shall never, never be asked any more!’ cried Elly, in her
indignation.
But this was a thing which it was not practicable to carry out. He was
asked again and again, and continued to be asked until the time when
Elly should come of age, and then she was determined to take her own
way.
‘I am disappointed in papa,’ she wrote to John, ‘but it is not out of
his heart he does it. He has not a word to say for himself. When I have
showed him the question in a just light, and proved that all their
objections are prejudice and nonsense, he just goes back to where he was
at first and shakes his head. But never mind. In two years’ (in a year
and a half--in a year--according as time went on, for this formula was
repeated on several occasions) ‘I shall be of age. You cannot say that I
don’t know the world or that I am too young _then_; and they all know
what I am going to do.’
John could not refuse to take comfort from this repeated and unwavering
pledge. He had plunged into the preliminaries of his work without a
moment’s delay, and very soon, at an age when in England most young men
are only beginning to wonder what they shall do, he found himself at the
head of one of the greatest undertakings in the country, the centre of
endless activity. Such advancement perhaps, everything favouring, comes
sooner in his profession than in any other. But nobody, except those who
had seen him grow up, suspected how young Mr. Sandford really was, and
even those who did know it could scarcely believe in the accuracy of
their own memory. He had always been older than his years, and the great
shock he had received in the discovery of his father threw him so far
apart from all the thoughts and occupations of youth, that it seems to
John himself like half-a-century, that age of doubt and of misery, when
everything was at its lowest ebb, before the upspringing of new hope.
That grave youth matured under the fire of suffering into something
like a precocious middle-age, or at least the steadiest, sternest
manhood. He grew to be both respected and feared before he was
five-and-twenty. And, what was curious, the resemblance to his father,
which had been chiefly, perhaps, in the imagination of the elders, died
completely away. He became like Mrs. Sandford in these days of strong
activity and doubtful hope: not severe to his men, the multitude of
work-people of all classes who now laboured under him, a whole little
world of clerks, engineers, artisans, and labourers in every grade. He
was not severe ever: it was said indeed that he took circumstances into
consideration and tempered justice with mercy when any fault was pointed
out at the office or among the men, far more than most masters do, and
was slow to lose patience with any young culprit; but he looked severe,
which is the same thing--nay, is better as a deterrent. The people under
him were afraid of the stern look of his youthful unimpeachable virtue:
whereas, if he had been as severe in fact as in looks, a natural
antagonism, the protest of nature against harshness, would have speedily
evolved itself.
There are some things, however, which John has not been able to do,
notwithstanding his great success. He has never been able to move his
mother from the position in which she has so firmly placed herself. Mrs.
Sandford spoke no more of her husband than was inevitable; she never
recurred to the subject with John, never mentioned it to Susie except on
that one morning when Mr. Cattley was first introduced to her: but she
took upon herself all the arrangements that were made by Mr. Cattley for
May’s comfort, not permitting either son or daughter to interfere. Susie
was proud of this fact, while John with a grudge understood it at
least--that the proud woman could speak more freely to a stranger than
to her children, of the man who had been the ruin of her own life. She
would not see her husband, however, and never spoke of him, nor gave the
least indication of any knowledge on the subject. If she was aware of
the time of his departure, she made no sign of knowing it. There was no
relenting in her, no affection, only a horror beyond words. And she
would not allow John, when he began to grow rich, to remove her from the
laborious post which it seemed no longer right that the mother of a
rising man, with plenty of money at his disposal, should continue to
hold. She smiled at the suggestion, and dismissed it with a wave of her
hand. To return to the little house at Edgeley among all the village
people, which was what John in youthful ignorance, notwithstanding his
precocious middle-age, would have liked her to do, was indeed
impossible. What would she have done there? unless, indeed, the cholera
had broken out, or some tremendous epidemic, when she could have
organised hospitals. John, however, here let us allow, with a great want
of perception, was annoyed that she should not have accepted this
proposal of his, and retired and given herself repose after her
hard-working life. But Mrs. Sandford was not one of the people who long
for rest. ‘The wages of going on’ was what pleased her most, and work,
and her own way. John was not pleased; it would have soothed him to
think that his mother was resting and doing nothing in that little
house, which he kept up always with an obstinate determination that it
should be, if not a grateful retirement for anyone, at least the shrine
of departed innocence and peace.
We will not conceal from the reader that Elly is now twenty-one and
more, but that the marriage has not yet taken place. There has been
sickness and trouble at Edgeley, and the only daughter of the house has
not been able to withdraw from the post of duty: but since she became of
age she and her betrothed have corresponded fully. She knows everything
that goes on at the works, and all the new steps John is taking, and
received telegrams three or four times a day when that dreadful
catastrophe occurred which everyone has read of, when the machinery
broke down and the water poured back into the old channels, and for a
moment everything seemed in jeopardy. John dragged her into that as if
she had been his head clerk: he demanded her sympathy at every moment,
clamouring in her ears with his telegrams, in a way which excited all
the village. Indeed, there has been no political convulsion, no
contested election, no crime or accident for fifty years, which has
thrilled through Edgeley like that supposed collapse of the works in
the Thames Valley. When all was right, the whole community began to
breathe again. Dick, who was at home on furlough, trudged backward and
forward between the rectory and the post-office for several days, too
impatient to wait for the telegraph boy: and when it was all over he was
the man who electrified the rectory and all the community by saying,
‘This will never do.’ Dick was a man of few words, like his father; an
easy-going man who let other people manage most of his affairs for him;
but when much enforced he would say a word of weight all the more
startling from its rarity. He said these words one evening after dinner
in the midst of the family, suddenly when nobody expected it. He brought
down his hand upon the table, not roughly, but with sufficient sound to
call attention, and he said,
‘This will never do. This business about Elly and Jack. He is a better
man than any of us. What does it matter who was his father? He’s his own
father, and all his relations. And that Mrs. Cattley’s a sweet little
woman. Don’t let’s have any more nonsense about it,’ said Dick.
The rector gasped, and Mrs. Egerton fell a-crying, and Percy rose and
left the table. But Elly held out her hand to her big brother, and the
thing was as good as settled from that day.
Let it be a comfort to all virtuous young persons in a similar position
that, as long as they hold out and are firm and constant, some one will
always arise at the end and face all obstructions with the verdict of
good sense and honest sympathy, saying in face of all unnecessary
objections, whether of birth or of money: ‘This will never do.’
But with all his success, and with the happiness which is about to come,
one great cloud remains on John Sandford’s life, a fear which sometimes
takes his breath away and makes his heart sick, the fear that some day
when he suspects nothing, some sweet day--it might be his marriage
morning, it might be any happy anniversary--there will suddenly appear
round a corner a stumbling, shambling figure, never without a certain
attractiveness even in its degradation, a sort of charm of careless
innocence in the midst of guilt. Sometimes when he goes through the
works with perhaps a little elation in the greatness of his undertaking
and the consciousness of the crowd which looks up to him as master,
surrounding him with that veiled obsequiousness which makes the head of
great industrial enterprises like a little king--the sight of some
shadow in the distance will take all the strength and courage out of
him.
‘There is no telling when the fancy may take me.’ These words come back
to his ears with a meaning far more than was ever intended. But as a
matter of fact there is cause enough to fear. For May never meant
anything steadily or for long all his life. And when the fun to which he
looked forward is exhausted--which is a thing that soon happens on the
shady side of life--who can tell that the fancy may not take him to
bring the remnants of his worn-out existence home? Poor wretch, for whom
love and honour do not exist, but only fear and pity! the good man, the
prosperous and happy, who has deserved his prosperity, as well as the
other deserved his misery, is still the Son of His Father, and still
bound for ever in this world at least, wretchedness to well-being,
honour to shame.
There is, however, one way in which this piece of personal history may
be safely made to end like a fairy-tale. Susie and her curate went home
to their new parish like a pair of doves to their nest. And these two
lived happy ever after, if ever any pair did so in this troubled yet not
always miserable world.
THE END.
LONDON: PRINTED BY DUNCAN MACDONALD, BLENHEIM HOUSE.