This, however, was after all but a small matter; it was not actual
misfortune. Patty, indeed, felt it much, partly on account of Jerningham
and the other servants, who she felt must triumph in this
non-recognition of her claims; and also a little for herself, for it was
an extraordinary change from the perpetual coming and going of the Seven
Thorns, and all the admiration and respect which she had there, the
jokes, and the laughter and the talk, which if not refined, were good
enough for Patty Hewitt--to the condition of having no one to speak to,
not a soul--except old Sir Giles and her own Softy, whose conversation
clever Patty could not be said to have enjoyed at any time. It was very
dull work going on from day to day with nothing better than poor old Sir
Giles’ broken talk, which was about himself and his affairs--not about
her, naturally the most interesting subject to Patty. Many times she was
tempted to go upstairs and sit with Jerningham to unbosom herself and
relieve her mind of all the unspoken talk, and make a companion and
_confidante_ of her maid. Jerningham was a person much better trained
and educated than Patty. She could have instructed her in many of the
ways of the fine ladies which Mrs. Piercey could only guess at, or
painfully copy out of novels; but perhaps, if her mistress had yielded
to this impulse it would have been Jerningham who would have held back,
knowing her place and desiring no confidences. Patty, however, also knew
her place, and that to confide in a servant was a fatal thing, so that
she never yielded to this temptation. But how dull it was! It is a fine
thing to be the mistress of a great house, to have a large household
under your orders, to be served hand and foot, as Patty herself would
have said; but never to have a gossip, never a jest with any one, she
for whom every passer-by had once had a cheerful word, to have nobody to
admire either herself or her dresses, to envy her good fortune, to
wonder at her grandeur! that takes the glory out of any victory. Would
Cæsar have cared to come back with all the joy and splendour of a
triumphal procession had there been nobody to look at him? Patty had
succeeded to the extent of her highest dreams, but, alas! there was
nobody to see.
That, however, was merely negative, and there was always the hope that
it might not last. She took her seat in the drawing-room every day with
perennial expectation, still believing that somebody must come; and, no
doubt, in the long run, her expectation would have come true. But Patty
soon had actual trouble far more important than any mere deprivation.
She had been afraid of Sir Giles, over whom her victory had been easy,
and she had been afraid of the servants, whom she had now completely
under her foot; but she never had any fear about the Softy, her husband,
who had been her dog--a slave delighted with his chains--who had desired
nothing better than to do what she told him, and to follow her about
wherever she went. That Gervase should become the only rebel against
her, that he should escape her authority and influence, and take his own
way in opposition to hers, was a thing which had not entered into any of
her calculations--Gervase, whose devotion had been too much, who had
wearied her out with his slavish dependence on her, how had he
emancipated himself? It was inconceivable to Patty. She had felt sure
that whatever happened she could always control him, always keep him in
subjection, guide him with a look, be absolute mistress of his mind and
all his wishes. The first revelation of something more in Softy which
she had not calculated upon had come when she first found the difficulty
of amusing him in the long evenings (lit with so many wax candles,
surrounded with so many glories!). Then it was revealed to Patty that
she was not enough even for that fool. Then it began to dawn upon her
faintly that the Seven Thorns itself had something to do with the
attraction, and the excitement of the suspense, and the restraint and
expectation in which she had held him: all these adjuncts were over now;
he had Patty all his own, and he did not find Patty enough. Was that
possible? could it be true?
Perhaps there was something in the very ease of Patty’s triumph that had
to do with this. Had his mother lived, and had Gervase experienced that
protection of having a wife to stand by him, which he had anticipated,
it is very likely that this result would have been long delayed, if,
indeed, it had ever appeared at all. But there was nobody now against
whom Gervase required to be protected. His father had never opposed him,
and now that Sir Giles was, like everybody else in the house, under
Patty’s sway, not even the faint excitement of a momentary struggle with
him chequered the Softy’s well-being. The consequence was that he, as
well as Patty, found it dull. He had no one to play with him, he longed
for the movement of the alehouse, the sound of the carts and carriages,
the slow jokes in the parlour, the smoke and the fun--also the beer; and
perhaps that most of all. It was hard work even when Patty was devoted
to his constant amusement, for the Softy had no intervals; he wanted to
be entertained all the time: and when she flagged for a moment, he
became sullen and tugged at his chain. But when Sir Giles came on the
scene, and Patty’s attention was distracted and her cares given to the
old man, offence and sullen disgust arose in the mind of Gervase. He
would not join in the game, as Patty called him to do; neither father
nor son indeed wanted a third in the game: and Gervase, duller than ever
and angry too, went to sleep for a night or two, tried to amuse himself
another evening or two with cat’s cradle or the solitaire board--then
flung these expedients aside in impatience, and finally strolled off,
through the soft, warm darkness of the night, to the Seven Thorns. The
Seven Thorns! it was poetic justice upon Patty, but that made it only
the harder to bear.
Then there came upon Patty one of those curses of life which fall upon
women with a bitterness and horror of which probably the inflictors of
the pain are never fully aware. It would have been bad enough if this
had befallen her in her natural position as the wife of a country
tradesman or small farmer. Domestic misery is the same in one class as
in another; yet it would be vain to deny the aggravations that a higher
position adds to primitive anguish of this kind. The cottager is not so
much ashamed of her husband’s backslidings. In many cases they are the
subject of the long monologue of complaint that runs through her life.
They cannot be hid, and they become a sort of possession, the readiest
excuse for every failing of her own. But that the young master should
stumble night after night up to Greyshott; that he should be seen by all
the neighbourhood drinking among the dull rustics at the Seven Thorns;
that a crowd of servants should listen and peep to hear his unsteady
step, and his boisterous laugh, and the stammerings of excuse or
explanations, or worse still, of noisy mirth, bursting from him in the
middle of the quiet night--was something more terrible still. Patty--on
that first occasion, when, long after every one else was in bed, she
stole downstairs to admit him by that little door near the beech avenue,
to which his unsteady footsteps naturally turned--was horrified and
angry beyond description; but she did not doubt she could put a stop to
it. Not for a moment did she hesitate as to her power. It should never
happen again, she said to herself. Once was nothing. Henceforward she
would be on her guard. He should not escape from her another time. She
did not even upbraid Gervase--it was her own fault, who had never
thought of that, taken no precautions; but it should never, never, she
said to herself, with, perhaps unnecessary asseverations, happen again.
Gervase, upbraided as in sport by his laughing wife for forsaking her,
as if he had been a naughty child, did nothing but laugh and triumph in
reply. “Weren’t they just astonished to see me!” he said: “your father
opened his mouth like this,” opening his own large mouth with the moist
hanging under-lip. “You should ha’ seen him, you should ha’ seen him,
Patty--like I was a ghost! ‘Hallo!’ said he, and ‘Hallo!’ said I, ‘here
I am, you see.’ There wasn’t one of them could say a word; but
afterwards I stood treat, and we had a jolly night.”
“And, oh, how you did smell of beer, you naughty fellow, when you came
in!”
“Did I? Well, not without reason, neither,” said Gervase, with his loud
laugh; “a set of jolly old cocks when you set them going. We only wanted
you there in your old blue dress and your apron.”
“That you will never see again, I can tell you; and it isn’t very nice
of you, Gervase, wishing your wife in such a place.”
“It’s a good enough place, and it’s where you came from,” said Gervase.
“But I told ’em,” he said, nodding his head, “what an awful swell you
have grown--nothing good enough for you. Didn’t the old fellows laugh
and nod their old heads. Ho, ho! He, he!”
“Gervase, dear,” said his wife, “you won’t go there again? you won’t go
and leave me all by myself, longing and wondering when you’d come back?
I thought you’d gone and fallen asleep somewhere. I thought every minute
you’d come into the room. You won’t go again, Gervase, dear, and leave
your poor Patty alone?”
“Why, you had father,” Gervase said.
“Oh, papa; yes, dear, and I kept on playing to amuse him, dear old
gentleman, and to keep it from him that you had gone out. If he had
known where you were, it would have vexed him sadly, you know it would.”
“It vexed them both,” said Gervase, “when I went there after you; but I
didn’t mind--nor you either, Patty.”
“A young single man has to have his liberty,” said Patty, “but when he’s
married---- You wouldn’t have gone off and left me--your Patty, whom you
said you were so fond of--in those days?”
“Ah,” said the Softy, with the wisdom of his kind, “but I’ve got you now
fast, Patty, at home waiting for me; so I can take my pleasure a bit,
and have you all the same.” He looked at her with a cynical light in
his dull eyes. He, and she also, felt the strength of the argument. No
need to please her now, and conciliate her in her own ideas about beer
and the parlour of the Seven Thorns. She could no longer cast him off,
or leave him in the lurch. Consequently, Gervase felt himself free to
indulge his tastes in his own way, whatever Patty might think. She was
struck silent by that new light in his eyes. He was not capable of
argument, or of anything but sticking to what he had once said, with all
the force of his folly. She looked at him, and, for the first time, saw
what was before her. It had never occurred to her before that he had the
strength to resist her, or that she could not call him to her like a dog
when her better sense saw it to be necessary. A docile fool is sometimes
contemptible enough; but a fool resistant, a being whom reason cannot
teach, who has no power of being convinced! Patty felt a cold dew come
over her forehead. She saw what was before her with momentary giddiness,
as if she had looked over the edge of a precipice. But she did not lose
hope. She sent next day an imperative note to her father requiring his
attendance: that he either should resist or refuse her call did not come
into her mind. “Come up to Greyshott,” she wrote, “at once, for I have
something to say to you;” as she might have written to one of her
servants. But Richard Hewitt was not a man who could be defied with
impunity. He never appeared in obedience to her summons; he took no
notice of it. He replied only by that silence which is the most
terrible of all kinds of resistance. And it was not long before Gervase
disappeared again. After the second catastrophe, Patty swept down upon
the Seven Thorns in her carriage--an imposing figure in her silk and
crape. But Hewitt was not impressed even by the sight of her grandeur.
“I’ll not refuse no customer for you--there! and you needn’t think you
can come over me,” he cried. “By George! to order me about--what I’m to
do and whom I’m to have in this house. It’s like your impudence; but I
tell you, Miss, I’ll see you d----d first,” the angry man roared,
bringing his clenched fist down upon the table, and making all the
glasses ring. Patty was cowed, and had not a word to say.
And then there began for the triumphant young woman an ordeal enough to
daunt the stoutest heart. It was true that she had not, like many a wife
in such circumstances, the anguish of love to give a sting to
everything. Patty had used the Softy partly as the instrument of her own
elevation; but his folly had not disgusted or pained her as it might
have done under other circumstances. She had a sober affection for him
even, as her own property, a thing that belonged to her, and felt
strongly the impulse of protecting him from scandal and injury: more, he
was so involved still in all her hopes of advancement, that she was as
much alarmed for the betrayal of his bad behaviour, as if (like so many)
she had feared the loss of a situation or work which brought in the
living of the family. And it must be added for Patty that she did her
very best to keep all knowledge of Gervase’s conduct from his father.
She sat and played his game of backgammon, inventing almost every
evening a new excuse. “Isn’t he a lazy boy? He’s gone to sleep again,”
was at first the easiest explanation. But Patty felt that would not do
always. “What do you think, dear papa? Gervase has taken to reading,”
she said; “I gave him a nice novel, all hunting and horses, and he got
so interested in it.” “He never was any good outside a horse himself,”
Sir Giles said, with a little grumble. But he was easily satisfied. He
asked nothing more than to have his mind relieved from that care for
Gervase which Lady Piercey had always insisted he should share. “He’s
got his wife to look after him, now,” Sir Giles said, when Dunning
hinted a doubt that Mr. Gervase was sometimes out of an evening. He was
thankful to wash his hands of all responsibility. That apparent
selfishness of old age, which consists very much of weariness and
conscious inability to bear the burden, came over him more and more
every day. Had such a thing been possible as that Gervase should have
married a girl in his own position, and made her miserable, the good in
Sir Giles would have been roused to support and uphold the victim. But
Patty knew very well what she was doing. Patty had accepted all the
responsibilities. She was able to take care of herself. He had his wife
to take care of him, and to keep him off his father. Patty accepted her
share of that tacit bargain honestly; and, as for Sir Giles, it must be
said that he was easily satisfied--received her explanations, and gave
her as little trouble as possible. He nodded his head, and went on with
his game. Perhaps, if truth had been told, it was a relief to the old
man when the Softy--strolling about restlessly from place to place,
interfering with the play, calling off his wife’s attention, always
troublesome and always ungainly--was not there.