_THE SQUIRE'S WILL._
Throughout his life Mr. Fairfax had guided his actions by a certain rule
of justice that satisfied himself. The same rule was evident in his last
will. His granddaughter had given him to understand that she should
return to the Forest and cast in her lot with the humble friends from
amongst whom he had taken her, and the provision he made for her was
consonant with that determination. He bequeathed to her a sum of five
thousand pounds--a sufficient portion, as he considered, for that rank
in life--and to Mr. Cecil Burleigh he bequeathed the handsome fortune
that it was intended she should bring him in marriage. He had the dower
without the bride, and though Lady Angleby and his sister quietly
intimated to astonished friends that they had good reason to hope Miss
Fairfax would ultimately be no loser by her grandfather's will, her
uncle Laurence was not the only person by many who judged her unkindly
and unfairly treated. But it was impossible to dispute the old squire's
ability to dispose of his property, or his right to dispose of it as he
pleased. He had been mainly instrumental in raising Mr. Cecil Burleigh
to the position he occupied, and there was a certain obligation incurred
to support him in it. If Mr. Fairfax had chosen to make a son of him, no
one had a right to complain. No one did complain; the expression of
opinion was extremely guarded.
Bessie was informed of the terms of her grandfather's will in the first
shock of surprise; afterward her uncle Laurence reflected that it would
have been wise to keep them from her, but the deed was done. She
received the news without emotion: she blushed, put up her eyebrows, and
smiled as she said, "Then I am a poor young woman again." She saw at
once what was absurd, pathetic, vexatious in her descent from the
dignity of riches, but she was not angry. She never uttered a word of
blame or reproach against her grandfather, and when it was indignantly
recalled to her that Mr. Cecil Burleigh was put into possession of what
ought to have been hers, she answered, "There is no ought in the matter.
Grandpapa had a lively interest in Mr. Cecil Burleigh's career, for the
sake of the country as well as for his own sake, and if you ask me my
sentiments I must confess that I feel the money grandpapa has left him
is well bestowed. It would be a shame that such a man should be hampered
by mean cares and insufficient fortune."
"Oh, if you are satisfied that is enough," was the significant
rejoinder, and Lady Angleby's hopes had a wider echo.
To Mr. Cecil Burleigh his old friend's bequest was a boon to be thankful
for, and he was profoundly thankful. It set him above troublesome
anxieties and lifted his private life into the sphere of comfort. But
his first visit to Abbotsmead and first meeting with Miss Fairfax after
it was communicated to him tried his courage not a little. The intimacy
that had been kept up, and even improved during Mr. Fairfax's decline,
had given him no grounds for hoping better success with Elizabeth as a
lover than before, and yet he was convinced that in leaving him this
fine fortune the squire had continued to indulge his expectations of
their ultimate union. That Elizabeth would be inclined towards him in
the slightest degree by the fact of his gaining the inheritance that she
had forfeited, he never for one moment dreamed; the contrary might be
possible, but not that. Amongst the many and important duties and
interests that engaged him now he had neither leisure nor desire for
sentimental philandering. He was a very busy man of the world, and
wished for the rest of a home. Insensibly his best thoughts reverted to
his dear Julia, never married, still his very good friend. He approved
the sweet rosy face of Elizabeth Fairfax, her bright spirit and loving,
unselfish disposition, but he found it impossible to flatter himself
that she would ever willingly become his wife. Lady Angleby insisted
that honor demanded a renewal of his offer, but Elizabeth never gave him
an opportunity; and there was an end of his uncertainties when she said
one day to his sister (after receiving an announcement of her own
approaching marriage to Mr. Forbes), "And there is nothing now to stand
between your brother and Miss Julia Gardiner. I am truly glad grandpapa
left him an independence, they have been so faithful to each other."
Miss Burleigh looked up surprised, as if she thought Bessie must be
laughing at them. And Bessie was laughing. "Not quite constant perhaps,
but certainly faithful," she persisted. But Mr. Cecil Burleigh had
probably appreciated her blossoming youth more kindly than his dear
Julia had appreciated her autumnal widower. Bessie meant to convey that
neither had any right to complain of the other, and that was true. Miss
Burleigh carried Miss Fairfax's remarks to her brother, and after that
they were privately agreed that it would be poor Julia after all.
Mr. Laurence Fairfax insisted that his niece should live at Abbotsmead,
and continue in possession of the white suite until she was of age. He
was her guardian, and would take no denial.
"It wants but three months to that date," she told him.
"Your home is here until you marry, Elizabeth," he rejoined in a tone
that forbade contradiction. "You shall visit Lady Latimer, but subject
to permission. Remember you are a Fairfax. Though you may go back to the
Forest, it is a delusion to imagine that you can live comfortably in the
crowded household where you were happy as a child. You have been six
years absent; three of them you have spent in the luxurious ease of
Abbotsmead. You have acquired the tastes and habits of your own class--a
very different class. You must look to me now: your pittance is not
enough for the common necessaries of life."
"Not so very different a class, Uncle Laurence, and fortunately I am not
in bondage to luxurious ease," Bessie said. "But I will not be perverse.
Changes come without seeking, and I am of an adaptable disposition. The
other day I was supposed to be a great heiress--to-day I have no more
than a bare competence."
"Not even that, but if you marry suitably you may be sure that I shall
make you a suitable settlement," rejoined her kinsman. Bessie speculated
in silence and many times again what her uncle Laurence might mean by
"suitably," but they had no explanation, and the occasion passed.
Bessie's little fortune was vested in the hands of trustees, and settled
absolutely to her own use. She could not anticipate her income nor make
away with it, which Mr. Carnegie said was a very good thing. Beyond that
remark, and a generous reminder that her old nest under the thatch was
ready for her whenever she liked to return and take possession, nothing
was said in the letters from Beechhurst about her grandfather's will or
her new vicissitude. She had some difficulty in writing to announce her
latest change to Harry Musgrave, but he wrote back promptly and
decisively to set her heart at rest, telling her that to his notions her
fortune was a very pretty fortune, and avowing a prejudice against being
maintained by his wife: he would greatly prefer that she should be
dependent upon him. Bessie, who was a loving woman far more than a proud
or ambitious one, was pleased by his assurance, and in answering him
again she confessed that would have been her choice too. Nevertheless,
she became rather impatient to see him and talk the matter over--the
more so because Harry manifested little curiosity to learn anything of
her family affairs unless they immediately affected herself. He told her
that he should be able to go down to Brook at the end of August, and he
begged her to meet him there. This she promised, and it was understood
between them that if she was not invited to Fairfield she would go to
the doctor's house, even though the boys might be at home for their
holidays.
Bessie was long enough at Abbotsmead after her grandfather's death to
realize how that event affected her own position there. The old servants
had been provided for by their old master, and they left--Jonquil,
Macky, Mrs. Betts, and others their contemporaries. Bessie missed their
friendly faces, and dispensed with the services of a maid. Then Mrs.
Fairfax objected to Joss in the house, lest he should bite the children,
and Janey and Ranby were not entirely at her beck and call as formerly.
The incompetent Sally, who sang a sweet cradle-song, became quite a
personage and sovereign in the nursery, and was jealous of Miss
Fairfax's intrusion into her domain. It was inevitable and natural, but
Bessie appreciated better now the forethought of her grandfather in
wishing to provide her with a roof of her own. Abbotsmead under its new
squire, all his learning and philosophy notwithstanding, promised to
become quite a house of the world again, for his beautiful young wife
was proving of a most popular character, and attracted friends about her
with no effort. Instead of old Lady Angleby, the Hartwell people and the
Chivertons, came the Tindals, Edens, Raymonds, Lefevres, and Wynards;
and Miss Fairfax felt herself an object of curiosity amongst them as the
young lady who had been all but disinherited for her obstinate refusal
to marry the man of her grandfather's choice. She was generally liked,
but she was not just then in the humor to cultivate anybody's intimacy.
Mrs. Stokes was still her chief resource when she was solitary.
She had a private grief and anxiety of her own, of which she could speak
to none. One day her expected letter from Harry Musgrave did not come;
it was the first time he had failed her since their compact was made.
She wrote herself as usual, and asked why she was neglected. In reply
she received a letter, not from Harry himself, but from his friend
Christie, who was nursing him through an attack of inflammation
occasioned by a chill from remaining in his wet clothes after an upset
on the river. She gathered from it that Harry had been ill and suffering
for nearly a fortnight, but that he was better, though very weak, and
that if Christie had been permitted to do as he wished, Mrs. Musgrave
would have been sent for, but her son was imperative against it. He did
not think it was necessary to put her to that distress and
inconvenience, and as he was now in a fair way of recovery it was his
particular desire that she should not be alarmed and made nervous by any
information of what he had passed through. But he would not keep it from
his dear Bessie, who had greater firmness, and who might rest assured he
was well cared for, as Christie had brought him to his own house, and
his old woman was a capital cook--a very material comfort for a
convalescent.
With a recollection of the warnings of a year and a half ago, Bessie
could not but ponder this news of Harry's illness with grave distress.
She wrote to Mr. Carnegie, and enclosed the letter for his opinion. Mr.
Carnegie respected her confidence, and told her that from the name of
the physician mentioned by Christie as in attendance on his patient he
was in the best possible hands. She confessed to Harry what she had
done, and he found no fault with her, but his next letter was in a vein
of melancholy humor from beginning to end. He was going back, he said,
to his dismal chambers, his law-books and his scribbling, and she was to
send him a very bright letter indeed to cheer him in his solitude. How
Bessie wished she could have flown herself to cheer him! And now, too,
she half regretted her poverty under her grandfather's will, that
deferred all hope of his rescue from London smoke and toil till he had
made the means of rescue for himself. But she gave him the pleasure of
knowing what she would do if she could.
Thus the summer months lapsed away. There was no hiatus in their
correspondence again, but Harry told her that he had a constant fever on
him and was longing for home and rest. Once he wrote from Richmond,
whither he had gone with Christie, "The best fellow in the
universe--love him, dear Bessie, for my sake"--and once he spoke of
going to Italy for the winter, and of newspaper letters that were to pay
the shot. He was sad, humorous, tender by turns, but Bessie missed
something. There were allusions to the vanity of man's life and joy, now
and then there was a word of philosophy for future consolation, but of
present hope there was nothing. Her eyes used to grow dim over these
letters: she understood that Harry was giving in, that he found his life
too hard for him, and that he was trying to prepare her and himself for
this great disappointment.
When Parliament rose Mr. Cecil Burleigh came down to Norminster and paid
a visit to Abbotsmead. He was the bearer of an invitation to Brentwood
and his sister's wedding, but Miss Fairfax was not able to accept it.
She had just accepted an invitation to Fairfield.