Mr. Stamford, having fulfilled his home duties temporarily in this
liberal and satisfactory manner, felt himself at liberty to enter upon
justifiable recreations with an easy conscience. He was by no means a
person of luxurious tastes. But there had been always certain dainty
meats, intellectually speaking, which his soul loved. These are rarely
to be met with save in large cities. It had been an abiding regret with
this man that his narrow circumstances had shut him out from the inner
circles of art and literature. Now, he promised himself, at any rate, a
taste of these long-forbidden repasts.
On this memorable afternoon he betook himself only to the sea-marge,
where he lay dreaming in the shade of an overhanging fig-tree during the
closing hours of day. What an unutterable luxury was it to his
desert-worn soul thus to repose with the rhythmic roll of the surges in
his ear—before his half-shut eyes the wondrous, ever-changing magic
mirror of the ocean!
“What an alteration,” thought he, “had a single day wrought in his
destiny! What a different person was he from the care-burdened,
desponding man who had seen no possible outlet from the path of sorrow
and disaster, at the end of which lay the grisly form of Ruin, like some
fell monster watching for prey. Now the airs of Paradise were around
him. The fresh salt odours of the deep, the whispering breezes which
fanned his cheek, which cooled his throbbing brow, how strangely
contrasted were these surroundings with the shrivelled, arid waste, the
burning sun-blast, the endless monotony of pale-hued woodland, which he
had so lately quitted!”
As the low sun fell beneath the horizon verge, he watched the golden
wavelet and the crimson sky mingle in one supreme colour study. He heard
the night wind come moaning up from misty unknown seas of the farthest
South, where the hungry billow lay hushed to rest in eternal ice-fields,
where dwelt the mystery and dread of polar wastes.
* * * * *
Then, with the darkening eve, the pageant glided into the vestibule of
night and Mr. Stamford somewhat hastily arose, bethinking himself of the
dining hour at Chatsworth House. He had not overmuch time to spare, but
a few minutes before the appointed hour his cab deposited him beside the
Pompeian mosaic which composed the floor of the portico. A wide, cool
hall, gay with encaustic tiles, received him, thence to be ushered by
the accurately-costumed footman into the drawing-room, already fairly
astir with the expected company.
He was not an unfamiliar guest, but his present temper inclined him to
consider more closely the curious inequalities of life—the various modes
in which persons, not widely differing in tastes and aspirations, are
socially encircled. What a contrast was there between the abounding
luxury here heaped up, pressed down and running over, and the homely
surroundings of his own home, from which nevertheless the danger of
departure had well-nigh driven him mad. The parquet floors, the
glittering treasures of the overmantels, the lounges, the dado, the
friezes, the rare china, the plaques, the antique and the modern
collections, each a study, the cost of which would have gone nigh to buy
halt Windāhgil.
When the hostess was informed by the imposing butler that dinner was
served, and the guests filed into the dining-room, Mr. Stamford was
nearly as much astonished by the magnificence of the repast and the
concomitants thereof as if he had for the first time in his life beheld
such splendours. In earlier days, now almost forgotten, such repasts had
been to him sufficiently familiar. But these latter seasons of drought
and despair had wholly, or in great part, excluded all thought of the
pomps and vanities of life. So he smiled to himself, as he took the arm
of Miss Crewit the _passée_ society damsel to whom, by the fiat of Mrs.
Grandison, he had been allotted, to find that his first thought was of
startled surprise—his second of the habitudes which came to him as by
second nature, and a conviction that he must have witnessed such
presentments in a former state of existence.
All was very splendid, beyond denial. What was otherwise was
æsthetically rare and almost beyond price. Antique carved furniture,
mediæval royal relics, a sideboard which looked like an Egyptian
sarcophagus, contrasted effectively with the massiveness of the plate,
the glory of the glass, the triumph of the matchless Sèvres
dinner-service. In perfect keeping was the quiet assiduity of the
attendants, the quality of the iced wines, the perfection and finish of
the whole entertainment.
“Rather a contrast to the tea-table at Windāhgil!” Harold Stamford said
to himself; “not but what I should have been able to do things like this
if I could have held on to those Kilbride blocks for another year. Only
another year!” and he sighed involuntarily. “It is very fine in its way,
though I should be sorry to have to go through this ordeal every
evening. Grandison doesn’t look too happy making conversation with that
deaf old dowager on his right. He was brighter looking in the old
working-time, when he used to drop in at Din Din, where we had a glass
of whisky before bedtime with a smoke and a good talk afterwards. Bob
certainly read more or less then. He begins to look puffy too; he
doesn’t see much of the library now, I’m afraid, except to snore in it.”
Here his fair neighbour, who had finished her soup and sipped her
sherry, began to hint an assertion of social rights.
“Don’t you think dear Josie looks a little pale and thin, though she is
exquisitely dressed as usual? But I always say no girls can stand the
ceaseless excitement, the wild racketing of a Sydney season. Can they,
now?”
“To my eye she looks very nice, pale if you like; but you don’t expect
roses and lilies with the thermometer at 80° for half the year, except
when it’s at 100°.”
“Well, perhaps you’re right; but it isn’t the climate altogether in her
case, I should say. It’s the fearfully exciting life girls of her
_monde_ seem to lead nowadays. It’s that which brings on the wrinkles.
You notice her face when she turns to the light.”
“Are women worse than they used to be, do you think; or is Josie more
dissipated than the rest of her age and sex?” queried Stamford.
“I don’t know that, though they do say that she is the fastest of a very
fast set; and between you and me, there have been some rather queer
stories about her, not that I believe a word of them. But the girls
nowadays do go such awful lengths; they say and do such things, you
don’t know _what_ to believe.”
“Ah! well, she’s young and happy, I suppose, and makes the most of her
opportunities of enjoyment. My old friend, Bob Grandison, has been
lucky, and his family seem to have everything they can possibly want.”
“Everything, indeed, and more besides. (Chablis, if you please!) Then I
suppose you knew Mr. Grandison when he was not quite so well off? They
say he got into society rather suddenly; but I’m afraid it doesn’t do
the young people quite as much good as it might. There’s the eldest son,
Carlo, as they call him—he used to be Charlie when I first knew them.”
“Why, what about him? Nothing wrong, is there? He seems a fine lad.”
“Well, nothing wrong yet. Not yet; oh, no! Only he spends half his time
at the club, playing billiards from morning till night, and he’s always
going about with that horrid gambling Captain Maelstrom. They do say—but
you won’t let it go further—that he was one of that party at loo when
young Weener lost five thousand pounds, and such a scandal arose out of
it.”
“Good heavens! You horrify me! A mere boy like that! It can’t be true;
surely not.”
“I heard it on good authority, I assure you, and other stories too,
which I can’t repeat—really too shocking to talk about. See how
_empresse_ he is with that Mrs. Loreleigh! What men see in that women I
really can’t think.”
“My old friend had both sense and right feeling once upon a time,” said
Stamford. “He can’t be so weak as to allow all this.”
“He does all he can, poor old gentleman; but Mrs. Grandison is so
absurdly vain about Carlo’s good looks, and the fine friends he goes
about with, that she can’t see any danger. Lord Edgar Wildgrave and that
Sir Harry Falconer who was here last year (you know they do say that
Josie broke her heart about Lord Edgar, and that makes her so reckless).
But I know his father is very uneasy about him, and well he may be. I’m
afraid Ned bids fair to follow in his brother’s footsteps. Thanks—I will
take an olive.”
“What a wretched state of things!” groaned Mr. Stamford, almost audibly.
“I must hope, for the sake of my friend’s family, that matters may be
exaggerated.”
“I wish they are, with all my heart,” said the candid friend. “They
always have such delicious fruit here, haven’t they? I must say they do
things well at Chatsworth House. I always enjoy a dinner here. I see
Mrs. Grandison making a move. Thanks!”
And so Miss Crewitt followed the retreating file of ladies that, headed
by Mrs. Grandison’s stately form, quitted the dining-room, leaving Mr.
Stamford much disordered with the unpleasant nature of the ideas which
he had perforce absorbed with his dinner. He could not forgive his late
neighbour for introducing them into his system.
“Confounded, venomous, ungrateful cat!” he said in his righteous wrath.
“How she enjoyed every mouthful of her dinner, pouring out malice and
all uncharitableness the while! Serves Mrs. Grandison right, all the
same. If she’d picked me out a nice girl, or a good motherly dame, I
should not have heard all this scandal about her household. But what a
frightful pity it seems! I must talk to Grandison about it.”
At this stage Mr. Stamford was aroused by his host’s voice. “Why,
Harold, old man, where have you got to? Close up, now the women are
gone. Bring your chair next to Carlo.”
He walked up as desired, the other guests having concentrated themselves
in position nearer the head of the table, and found himself next to the
heir of the house, Mr. Carlo Grandison. That young gentleman, whom he
had observed during dinner talking with earnestness to a lady no longer
young, but still handsome and interesting, in spite of Miss Crewitt’s
acidulated denial of the fact, did not trouble himself to be over
agreeable to his father’s old friend.
He devoted himself, however, with considerable assiduity to the
decanters as they passed, and drank more wine in half an hour than Mr.
Stamford had ever known Hubert to consume in a month.
He did talk after a while, but his conversation was mainly about the
last Melbourne Cup, upon which he admitted that he had wagered heavily,
and “dropped in for,” to use his own expression, “a beastly facer.”
“Was not that imprudent?” asked Mr. Stamford, as he looked sadly at the
young man’s flushed face. “Don’t you think it a pity to lose more than
you can afford?”
“Oh! the governor had to stand the racket, of course,” he said, filling
his glass; “and a dashed row he made about it—very bad form, I told
him—just as if a thousand or two mattered to him. Do you know what we
stood to win?”
“Well, but you didn’t win!”
“I suppose in the bush, Mr. Stamford, you don’t do much in that way,”
answered the young man with aristocratic hauteur, “but Maelstrom and I,
Sir Harry Falconer and another fellow, whose name I won’t mention, would
have pulled off forty-five thousand if that infernal First Robber hadn’t
gone wrong the very day of the race. Think of that! He was poisoned, I
believe. If I had my will I’d hang every blessed bookmaker in the whole
colony. Never mind, I’ll land them next Melbourne Spring.”
“If there were no young gentlemen who backed the favourite, there would
be fewer bookmakers,” replied Stamford, peaceably. “But don’t you think
it a waste of time devoting so much of it to horseracing?”
“What can a fellow do? There’s coursing, to be sure, and they’re getting
up a trotting match. I make believe to do a little work in the
governor’s office, you know, but I’m dead beat to get through the day as
it is.”
“Try a year in the bush, my dear boy. You could soon learn to manage one
of your father’s stations. It would be a healthy change from town life.”
“By Jove! It _would_ be a change indeed! Ha, ha! ‘Right you are, says
Moses.’ But I stayed at Banyule one shearing, and I give you my word I
was that sick of it all that I should have suicided if I had not been
let come to town. The same everlasting grind—sheep, supers, and
saltbush; rides, drives, wire fences, dams, dampers, and dingoes—day
after day. At night it was worse—not a blessed thing to amuse yourself
with. I used to play draughts with the book-keeper.”
“But you could surely read! Books are easy to get up, and there are
always neighbours.”
“I couldn’t stand reading out there, anyhow; the books we had were all
dry stuff, and the neighbours were such a deuced slow lot. Things are
not too lively in Sydney, but it’s heaven compared with the bush. I want
the governor to let me go to Europe. I should fancy Paris for a year or
so. Take another glass of this Madeira; it’s not an everyday wine. No!
Then I will, as I see the governor’s toddlin’.”
In the drawing-room matters were in a general way more satisfactory. A
lady with a voice apparently borrowed from the angelic choir was singing
when they entered, and Mr. Stamford, passionately fond of music, moved
near the grand piano to listen. The guests disposed themselves _au
plaisir_.
Master Carlo, singling out Mrs. Loreleigh, devoted himself to her for
the rest of the evening, with perfect indifference to the claims of the
other lady guests.
“What a lovely voice Mrs. Thrushton has!” said his hostess to Stamford,
as soon as the notes of enchantment came to an end.
“Lovely indeed!” echoed he; “it is long since I have heard such a song,
if ever—though my daughter Laura has a voice worth listening to. But
will not Miss Grandison sing?” he said after a decent interval.
“Josie has been well taught, and few girls sing better when she likes,”
said her mother with a half sigh; “but she is so capricious that I can’t
always get her to perform for us. She has got into an argument with
Count Zamoreski, that handsome young Pole you see across the room, and
she says she’s not coming away to amuse a lot of stupid people. Josie is
quite a character, I assure you, and really the girls are so dreadfully
self-willed nowadays, that there is no doing anything with them. But you
must miss society so much in the bush! Don’t you? There are very few
nice men to be found there, I have heard.”
“We are not so badly off as you suppose, Mrs. Grandison. People even
there keep themselves informed of the world’s doings, and value art and
literature. I often think the young people devote more time to mental
culture than they do in town.”
“Indeed! I should hardly have supposed so. They can get masters so
easily in town, and then again the young folks have such chances of
meeting the best strangers—people of rank, for instance, and so on—that
they never can dream of even _seeing_, away from town. Mr. Grandison
wanted me to go into the bush when the children were young; and indeed
one of his stations, Banyule, was a charming place, but I never would
hear of it.”
“A town life fulfilled all your expectations, I conclude.”
“Yes, really, I think so; very nearly, that is to say. Josie has such
ease of manner and is so thoroughly at home with people in every rank of
life that I feel certain she will make her mark some day.”
“And your son Carlo?”
“Well, I don’t mind telling you, as an old friend, Mr. Stamford, that
Mr. Grandison is uneasy about him sometimes, says he won’t settle down
to anything, and is—well not really dissipated, you know, but inclined
to be fast. But I tell him that will wear off as he gets older. Boys
will be boys. Besides, see what an advantage it is to him to be in the
society of men like Captain Maelstrom, Sir Harry Falconer, and people of
that stamp.”
“I am not so sure of that, but I trust all will come right, my dear Mrs.
Grandison. It is a great responsibility that we parents undertake. There
is nothing in life but care and trouble, it seems to me, in one form or
another. And now, as I hear the carriages coming up, I will say good
night.”
Mr. Stamford went home to his hotel, much musing on the events of the
evening, nor was he able to sleep, indeed, during the early portion of
the night, in consequence of the uneasiness which the unsatisfactory
condition of his friend’s family caused him.
“Poor Grandison!” he said to himself. “More than once have I envied him
his easy circumstances. I suppose it is impossible for a man laden with
debt and crushed with poverty to avoid that sort of thing. But I shall
never do so again. With all my troubles, if I thought Hubert and Laura
were likely to become like those two young people as a natural
consequence, I would not change places with him to-morrow. The boy, so
early _blasé_, with evil knowledge of the world, tainted with the
incurable vice of gambling, too fond of wine already, what has he to
look forward to? What will he be in middle age? And the girl, selfish
and frivolous, a woman of the world, when hardly out of her teens,
scorning her mother’s wishes, owning no law but her own pleasure,
looking forward but to a marriage of wealth or rank, if her own
undisciplined feelings stand not in the way! Money is good, at any rate,
as far as it softens the hard places of life; but if I thought that
wealth would bring such a blight upon my household, would so wither the
tender blossoms of hope and faith, would undermine manly endeavour and
girlish graces, I would spurn it from me to-morrow. I would—--”
With which noble and sincere resolve Mr. Stamford fell asleep.
Upon awaking next morning, he was almost disposed to think that the
strength of his disapproval as to the younger members of the Grandison
family might only have been enthusiasm, artificially heightened by his
host’s extremely good wine. “That were indeed a breach of hospitality,”
he said to himself. “And after all, it is not, strictly speaking, my
affair. I am grown rusty and precise, it may be, from living so
monotonous a life in the bush, so far removed from the higher
fashionable existence. Doubtless these things, which appear to me so
dangerous and alarming, are only the everyday phenomena of a more
artificial society. Let us hope for the best—that Carlo Grandison may
tone down after a few years, and that Miss Josie’s frivolity may subside
into mere fashionable matronhood.”
Mr. Stamford finished his breakfast with an appetite which proved either
his moderation in the use of the good familiar creature over-night, or a
singularly happy state of the biliary secretions. He then proceeded in a
leisurely way to open his letters. Glancing at the postmark “Mooramah,”
the little country town near home, and recognising Hubert’s bold, firm
handwriting, he opened it, and read as follows:—
“MY DEAR OLD DAD,—I have no doubt you are enjoying yourself quietly, but
thoroughly, now that you have cleared off the Bank of New Guinea and got
in with the Austral Agency Company. Mother says you are to give yourself
all reasonable treats, and renew your youth if possible, but not to
think you have the Bank of England to draw upon just yet.
“I told her you were to be trusted, and I have a piece of good news for
you, which will bear a little extravagance on its back. I am very glad
we were able to pay off that bank.
“They had no right to push you as they did. However, I suppose they
can’t always help it. Now for the news, if some beastly telegram has not
anticipated it. We have had RAIN!
“Yes, rain in large letters! What do you think of that? Forty-eight
hours of steady rain! Five inches sixty points! Didn’t it come
down!—cats and dogs, floods and waterspouts!
“The drought has broken up. The river is tearing down a banker. You can
see the grass grow already. All bother about feed and water put safely
away for a year at least. Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!
“I have sent most of the sheep out back. Dams all full, but none carried
away, thank goodness!
“I got the hill paddock fence finished and the weaners all into it
yesterday. Didn’t get home till midnight.
“The run like a batter pudding, soaked right down to the bed rock. We
shall have more grass than we can use. Old Saville (Save-all, I call
him!) would sell five thousand young sheep, mixed sexes. He wants to
realise. If Mr. Barrington Hope, or whatever his name is, will stand it,
they would pay to buy. Wire me if I can close, but of course I don’t
expect it.
“I think I may safely treat myself to John Richard Green’s _Making of
England_ and Motley’s _Rise of the Dutch Republic_, so please post them.
Everything looking first-rate. Laura is writing too.
“Your loving son,
HUBERT STAMFORD.”
Next came a letter in a neat, characteristic, legible hand, not
angular-feminine, which he well knew:—
“OH! DARLING DAD,—We are all gone straight out of our senses with
joy. We have had such blessed and beauteous rain. The windows of
Heaven have indeed been opened—where else could such a lovely
downpour come from?
“All our doubts and fears are cleared away. Hubert has been working
himself to death, poor boy; off before daylight and never home till
twelve or one in the morning. He says that we shall have the best
season known for years, and that nothing can possibly hurt the grass
for a whole twelvemonth. Besides, more rain is sure to come. They
always say that though. Some water came through here and there, but
it was a blessing that Hubert and the old splitter put the new roof
over the kitchen before the drought broke up. The dear garden looks
lovely, I have been sowing a few flower seeds—so fresh and beautiful
it is already.
“I rode to one of the out-stations with Hubert yesterday, and we got
such glorious ferns coming back. I am sorry to say dear mother is
not over strong. The hot weather, and the old trouble, ‘no
servants,’ have been too much for her. Do you think you could bring
back a good, willing girl as cook and laundress—that would shift the
hardest part of the work off our shoulders—and I think Linda and I
could manage the house-work, and be thankful too? Try your best,
that’s a good old dad!
“I have been reading _Middlemarch_ strictly in spare time, and am
getting on pretty well with my German and Italian. If you could
bring up two or three books, and by all means a pretty song or two,
we should have nothing left to wish for. Now that the rain has come,
it seems like a new world. I intend to do great things in languages
next year. How about Mrs. Carlyle’s letters? From the review we saw
in _The Australasian_, they must be deeply interesting. We expect
you to return quite restored to your old self. Write longer letters,
and I am always,
“Your loving daughter,
“LAURA STAMFORD.”
“So far, so good, indeed,” quoth Mr. Stamford to himself. “The year
has turned with a vengeance. Let me see what the _Herald’s_
telegrams say. Lucky I did not look at the paper. So Hubert’s letter
gives me first news. Ah! another letter. Handwriting unknown,
formal, with the English postmark, too. No bad news, I hope. Though
I can hardly imagine any news of importance from the old country,
good or bad, now. Luckily, I am outside the pale of bad news for a
while, thanks to Barrington Hope and this breaking up of the
drought. What says the _Herald_?
”MOORAMAH.
“(From our Own Correspondent.)
“Drought broken up. Heavy, continuous rain. Six inches in
forty-eight hours. Country under water. Dams full. A grand season
anticipated.
“Quite right for once, ‘Our Own Correspondent,’ albeit too prone to
pronounce the ‘drought broken up’ on insufficient data. But now
accurately and carefully observant. I drink to him in a fresh cup of
tea.
“And now for the unknown correspondent. Here we have him.”
Mr. Stamford carefully and slowly opened his letter, after examining
all outward superscription and signs. Thus went the unaccustomed
missive:—
”HAROLD STAMFORD, ESQ.,
“Windāhgil Station, Mooramah,
“New South Wales, Australia.
”LONDON, 23 Capel Court,
“_April 14, 1883_.
“SIR,—It has become our duty to announce the fact that, consequent
upon the death of your cousin, Godwin Stamford, Esq., late of
Stamford Park, Berkshire, you are entitled to the sum of one hundred
and seventy-three thousand four hundred and sixty-nine pounds
fourteen shillings and ninepence (£173,469 14_s._ 9_d._), with
interest from date, which sum now stands to your credit in the
Funds.
“You are possibly aware that your cousin’s only son, Mark Atheling
Stamford, would have inherited the said sum, and other moneys and
property, at the death of his father, had he not been unfortunately
lost in his yacht, the _Walrus_, in a white squall in the
Mediterranean, a few days before the date of this letter.
“In his will, the late Mr. Godwin Stamford named you, as next of
kin, to be the legatee of this amount, in the case of the deceased
Mark Atheling Stamford dying without issue. We have communicated
with our agent, Mr. Worthington, of Phillip Street, Sydney, from
whom you will be enabled to learn all necessary particulars. We
shall feel honoured by your commands as to the disposal or
investment of this said sum, or any part of it. All business with
which you may think fit to entrust our firm shall have prompt
attention.—We have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servants,
“WALLINGFORD, RICHARDS & STOWE.”
Mr. Stamford read the letter carefully from end to end, twice,
indeed, with an unmoved countenance. He pushed it away; he walked up
and down the room. Then he went into the balcony of the hotel and
gazed at the people in the street. He retired to his bed-room after
this, whence he did not emerge for a short space.
Returning to the table he sat calmly down, gazing at his letter, and
again examining the signature, the important figures, which also had
the value set forth formally in writing. Yes, there was no mistake.
It was not seven thousand four hundred and sixty-nine pounds.
Nothing of the kind. One hundred and seventy thousand pounds and the
rest. “One hundred and seventy thousand!” He repeated the words over
and over again in a calm and collected voice. Then the tears rushed
to his eyes, and he laid his head on his hands and sobbed like a
child.
“For what did it all mean? Nothing less than this. That he was a
rich man for life. That his wife, best-beloved, tender, patient,
self-sacrificing as she had always been since he took her, a
fresh-hearted, beautiful girl, from her father’s house, where she
had never known aught but the most loving care, the most elaborate
comfort, would henceforth be enabled to enjoy all the old pleasures,
even the luxuries of life, from which they had all been so long
debarred. They could live in Sydney or Melbourne, as it pleased them
best. They could even sojourn in London or Paris, and travel on the
continent of Europe.
“The girls could have all the ‘advantages,’ as they are called, of
the best teaching, the best society, change of scene, travel.
“Great Heaven! what a vista of endless bliss seemed opening before
him!”
But then, as he sat and thought, another aspect of the case, dimly,
shadowy, of darker colours and stranger light, seemed to pass before
him.
“Would the effect of the sudden withdrawal of all necessity for
effort, all reason for self-denial, be favourable to the development
of these tenderly-cultured, generous but still youthful natures?
“When the cares of this world—which up to this point had served but
to elevate and ennoble—were dismissed, would ‘the deceitfulness of
riches’ have power to choke the good seed?
“Would the tares multiply and flourish, overrunning the corn, and
would the uprooting of them import another trouble—a difficulty
which might be enlarged into a sorrow?
“Would indolence and reckless enjoyment succeed to the resolute
march along the pathway of duty, to the prayerful trust in that
Almighty Father who granted strength from day to day? Would the
taste for simple pleasures, which now proved so satisfying, be lost
irrevocably, to be succeeded, perhaps, by a dangerous craving for
excitement, by satiety or indifferentism?
“What guarantee was there for this conservation of the healthful
tone of body and mind when the mainsprings of all action, restraint,
and self-discipline were in one hour relaxed or broken?
“Could he bear to behold the gradual degeneration which might take
place, which had so manifested itself, as he had witnessed, in
natures perhaps not originally inferior to their own?”
Long and anxiously did Harold Stamford ponder over these thoughts,
with nearly as grave a face, as anxious a brow, as he had worn in
his deepest troubles.
At length he arose with a resolved air. He left the hotel, and took
his way to the office of Mr. Worthington, whom he knew well, who had
been his legal adviser and the depository of all official
confidences for many years past.
It was he who had drawn the deed by which the slender dowry of his
wife, with some moderate addition of his own, had been settled upon
her. He knew that he could be trusted implicitly with his present
intentions; that the secret he intended to confide in him this day
would be inviolably preserved.
This, then, was the resolution at which Harold Stamford had arrived.
He would _not_ abruptly alter the conditions of his family life; he
would gradually and unostentatiously ameliorate the circumstances of
the household. But he would defer to a future period the information
that riches had succeeded to this dreaded and probable poverty. He
would endeavour to maintain the standard of “plain living and high
thinking,” in which his family had been reared; he would preserve it
in its integrity, as far as lay in his power until, with characters
fully formed, tried, and matured, his children would in all
probability be enabled to withstand the allurements of luxury, the
flatteries of a facile society, the insidious temptations of the
world, the flesh, and the devil.
Intent upon removing such dangers from their path in life, he felt
himself warranted in using the _suppressio veri_ which he meditated.
And he implored the blessing of God upon his endeavours to that end.
Then, again, the station? It must stand apparently upon its own
foundation. What pride and joy to Hubert’s ardent nature for the
next few years would it be to plot and plan, to labour and to
endure, in order to compass the freedom of the beloved home from
debt! Now that the rain _had_ come, that the account was in good
standing, he had felt so sanguine of success that it would be cruel
to deprive him of the gratification he looked forward to—the
privilege he so prized.
And what task would employ every faculty of mind and body more
worthily, more nobly, than this one to which he had addressed
himself! Hubert’s favourite quotation occurred to him—
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?
This he was wont to declaim when his mother, meeting him as he
returned from weary rides, chilled by winter frosts, burnt black
well-nigh by summer suns, had many a time and oft expostulated,
telling him that he would kill himself.
The tears came into the father’s eyes as he thought of these things.
“Poor Hubert! poor boy! How he has worked; how he means to work in
the future! We must manage not to let him overdo things now. I
daresay I shall be able to slacken the pace a little for him without
his suspecting the real cause.”
As he thought of his son, sitting Centaur-like on his favourite
horse, with his head up, his throat bare, courage in his eye and
manly resolution in his whole bearing—wild to do anything that was
self-sacrificing, dangerous, laborious, fully repaid by a smile from
his mother, a kiss from Laura, a nod of approval from himself—he
could not help contrasting him with Carlo Grandison, the product, as
he surmised, of a life of ease—of a system where self-restraint had
been rendered obsolete.
He thought of Laura’s patient labours, of her constancy to
uncongenial tasks, of her fresh, unsullied bloom, and sweet,
childlike nature.
“God forbid!” he said, “that they should ever know wealth if such a
transformation is likely to take place in their character. I know
what they are now. It shall be my aim to preserve them in their
present innocence. Let them remain unspotted from the world. I must
invent a way by which fair development and mental culture may be
furnished. But as to taking them away from this humble retreat where
all their natural good qualities have so grown and flourished in the
healthful atmosphere of home life, it were a sin to do it. I have
made up my mind.” And here Mr. Stamford almost frowned as he walked
along and looked as stern as it was in his nature to do.
On arriving at Mr. Worthington’s chambers, with the precious
document carefully secured within his pocket book, he found that
gentleman engaged. He, however, sent in his card with a request to
be admitted at his leisure upon business of importance, and received
a reply to the effect that if he could remain for a quarter of an
hour, the principal would be at liberty.
The time seemed not so long with a tranquil mind. The days of the
torture-chamber were over.
He employed it in re-considering the points of his argument, and
when the door of Mr. Worthington’s private room opened, he felt his
position strengthened.
“Sorry to detain you,” said the lawyer, “but it is a rule of mine to
take clients as they come, great and small. Haven’t seen you for
some time, Mr. Stamford. Had rain, I hear, in your country; that
means everything—everything good. What can I do for you?”