SQUIRE HERITAGE MAKES A WILL.
Old Squire Heritage had aged very rapidly after the abrupt departure of
his son from the hall.
Of a naturally gloomy and austere disposition, and strongly biased
towards the cold and uncompromising religious views which a large
section of the English people have had transmitted to them through many
generations from the old Puritans, the squire believed the blow which
had fallen upon him was dealt by a Divine hand.
He had, in his unsympathetic way, been very proud of his son George.
The harshness that the young man so bitterly resented was only the
result of a mistaken idea of parental duty.
When his son showed a taste not only for the frivolities but also for
what the squire considered the vices of the age, he felt that stern
repression was necessary. In the old days of parental despotism he
would have flung his son into prison; in the enlightened times which
forbade the head of a family to declare his domestic circle in a state
of siege and proclaim military law, he contented himself by
reprimanding the prodigal, treating him with icy displeasure, and
eventually renouncing all ties of kinship with him.
By an ordinarily constituted father George’s misdeeds would have been
treated as youthful follies, and though the parental anger might have
been fierce when the parental pocket was touched, it is probable far
less drastic remedies would have been considered necessary.
When George, trembling with passion, left his father’s presence vowing
to see his face no more, Squire Heritage did not reproach himself for
having goaded the young man to such a frame of mind.
When that night the old lodge-keeper came to him and told him that the
young squire had ordered his things to be sent after him to London, his
master simply said, ‘Send them,’ in a tone which prohibited any further
discussion.
But when, a fortnight later, Bess Marks disappeared, leaving a note for
her father which pointed to only one conclusion, and the squire heard
of it, he went to the grief-stricken man and took him kindly by the
hand and comforted him.
Never was there a greater contrast than between the two fathers—the
plebeian and the patrician.
The lodge-keeper, a prey to violent grief and heartbroken at his
child’s conduct, never breathed a word of reproach against her. He only
prayed that, however guilty she might be, no suffering might come near
her, but that God would give her back again to his loving and
protecting arms.
Squire Heritage spoke of his absent son coldly, almost cruelly. It was
no secret among the people on the estate that Bess Marks had ‘run away’
with the young squire, and this added to the intensity of his father’s
indignation and shame.
He felt humiliated, as he stood in the presence of his faithful old
retainer, to think that this foul wrong should have been done him by
one who bore his name, and his anger against the absent scapegrace was
fed by the discovery, as flame is fed with oil.
For the mental torture which he endured he sought refuge in the
consolations of religion—of a religion which was founded on the fierce
moral code of the Old Testament, and ignored the gentler teaching of
the New.
He became almost a recluse, and passed his days in the old library,
building up around the natural instincts of his heart a wall of
bigotry, against which the erring son might throw himself in vain.
With nothing else to occupy his mind or divert his attention, with no
society now but that of the fierce old theologians, his favourite
authors, he became a prey to religious monomania, and an intellect long
threatened was submerged by a flood of fanaticism.
He believed that God called upon him to show his faith as Abraham
showed his. His conscience told him that he must cast the erring son
off for ever, and that if he shrank from the utmost extremity of
punishment he was a weak vessel, who preferred his human affection to
his duty to God and man.
When once a lonely, narrow-minded man yields to this morbid view, there
is no limit to the sway it has over him. Every natural instinct, every
human feeling, becomes subservient to it, and the cruellest and most
heartless deeds, surrounded by a false religious glamour, seem to him
but so many noble actions performed in the service of the Master.
It was not enough for Squire Heritage that he and his son had parted,
and that he was in utter ignorance of the young man’s whereabouts. Such
conduct called for the severest punishment it was in his power to
inflict. In the first days of their separation, though he had renounced
him, he had hesitated at disinheriting him.
That was a vengeance that would survive when the grave had closed over
him. While he lived he would never call him son again, but when he was
dead—no, he would not make up his mind to carry his just indignation to
such a point as that.
But when Bess Marks disappeared, and it was known that George had been
seen frequently with her ‘sweethearting,’ as the gossips called it, and
when inquiry left no doubt that the girl had gone, and at her young
master’s instigation, the old squire shattered his last scruple at a
blow.
On the very day that he felt certain the old lodge-keeper’s daughter
had been lured from home by his son, he sent to his solicitor in hot
haste, and prepared and executed a new will.
His first impulse had been to leave the whole of his estate to charity,
but the pride of race was strong upon him.
Since the days when Cromwell rewarded his bravest followers with the
lands of the Royalists, the Heritages had been lords of the old hall
and the land about it. If he left all to charity the estates would have
to be sold. After a long and anxious consideration the squire
determined on leaving his property to preserve the name, and yet to
leave his fortune where it would be well used.
He had never renewed his old friendship with John Adrian, which had
been interrupted when they both fell in love with the gentle lady
Heritage afterwards married.
John had not broken his heart when pretty Ruth Patmore gave the
preference to the wealthy young country squire. He had taken the defeat
like a sensible fellow, and later on had himself married and been
comparatively happy. But that a remembrance of the old romance survived
was evident when he named his little daughter Ruth.
Though the Heritages and the Adrians never met, they heard of each
other from mutual friends, and after his wife’s death the squire had
once or twice inquired especially after Ruth.
He had heard that she had met with a disappointment in love, and also
of her pure end noble life, her labours among the poor, and the extent
to which she tried to do good with the means at her command.
There was something of sentiment in it, perhaps, but he could not help
thinking how fortunate Adrian had been in his daughter and how
unfortunate he had been in his son.
Brooding over the past, and comparing it with the present, it was not
wonderful that the image of Ruth Adrian rose before him often as he
thought of his ungrateful son.
When he was brooding over the scheme of the new will which he had
determined to make, and had abandoned the idea of leaving his fortune
to charitable institutions, again his mind reverted to Ruth Adrian.
Gradually a vague idea formed itself, which by degrees assumed a
definite shape. There would be something of poetic justice in
benefiting the daughter of his old rival, the girl who bore his dead
wife’s name. Had God granted him a daughter he would have named her
Ruth too—Ruth Heritage. The name lingered in his mind, and the sweet
memories flowed ones more over the grave ox the buried years.
Ruth Heritage!
Why was this gentle girl not his daughter? How fortunate Adrian had
been. His wife lived still, and his daughter was the comfort of his
age. He, the successful rival, had no wife and no child.
Ruth Heritage!
He sat in the window-seat of the library, looking across the quiet park
to the lodge-gates, watching for his solicitor to come, and thinking
over the will he was to make.
And when, an hour later, his man of business was with him in close
conference, his scheme was complete. There was an element of romance in
it. The harshness to his own son was toned down by the halo of
tenderness which it cast over an old love-story.
The solicitor took his client’s instructions with professional lack of
emotion. Family solicitors assist in the disinheritance of sons, the
revelation of delicate domestic secrets, and carefully calculated
schemes of a revenge which is to survive after death, with no more
concern than the prompter feels as he watches the progress of a
sensation drama.
To him the scheme which may bring happiness or misery to hundreds
represents so many folios of writing at so much a folio, and so many
hours of professional work at so much an hour.
Mr. Baggs, of the firm of Baggs & Carter, expressed no surprise at the
fact that young George Heritage was to be disinherited, and did not
even venture on a suggestion. He listened to his client’s instructions,
and took them away to put them in a legal form.
When the will was ready Squire Heritage signed it, sealed it, delivered
it as his act and deed, and locked it up among his papers.
It was a very simple will. It gave and bequeathed to Ruth Adrian, the
daughter of his old rival John Adrian, the whole of his property,
subject to a few legacies to old servants. But it made this proviso:
that the said Ruth Adrian should assume the name of Heritage; and that
in the event of her being married when the will came into operation,
her husband should assume the name of Heritage. By this means the old
name would continue to be identified with the place.
Directly he had settled his worldly affairs, the squire relapsed once
more into the gloomy inactivity from which he had only been aroused by
the necessity of devising a scheme for the disposal of his property.
But in spite of himself he kept thinking of the will and then of his
absent son. He found himself picturing the days that should be after he
had passed away and had no power to revoke his decision.
When in his lonely walks round the estate he passed some wretched tramp
on his way to the workhouse, he would fancy his son, reduced to such a
position after a career of dissipation, perishing friendless and
without hope.
Then he would shudder and ask himself if he were justified in thus
ruining the worldly prospects of his only son for life, and giving his
inheritance to a stranger.
But at night, with the Bible open before him, and the passionate Hebrew
invective against the evildoer appealing to his narrowed vision, he
cast these forebodings to the wind. Such thoughts were thoughts sent by
the devil to weaken his determination. Were not all the servants of God
tempted in like manner to swerve from the path of duty, and was it not
always the natural impulses of the heart that were sought to be turned
to their undoing? So the gloomy train of thought led him away, till he
was prepared to listen to each chord of human sympathy which memory
awoke in him as one struck by the tempter’s fingers.