"Perhaps it is Miss Maceveril? Well, the Maceverils are exclusive
people. But faint heart, you know, never won fair lady."
Tom shook his head. "I should not be afraid of winning _her_." But it
was not Miss Maceveril he was thinking of.
"What should you be afraid of?"
"Her friends. They would not listen to me."
"Thinking you are not rich, I suppose?"
"Knowing I am not, sir."
"The young lady may have money."
"There's the evil of it," said Tom, impulsively. "If she had none, it
would be all straight and smooth for us. I would very soon make a little
home for her in London."
"It is the first time I ever heard of money being an impediment to
matrimony," observed old Paul, taking the first sip at his wine.
"Not when the money is on the wrong side, sir."
"Has she much?"
"I don't know in the least. She will be sure to have some: she is an
only child."
"Then it _is_ Mary Maceveril!" nodded the old man. "You look after her,
Tom, my boy. She will have ten thousand pounds."
"Miss Maceveril would not look at me, if I wanted her ever so. She is as
proud as a peacock."
"Tut, tut! Try. Try, boy. Why, what could she want? As my partner, you
might be a match for even Miss Maceveril."
"Your what, sir?" cried Tom, in surprise, lifting his eyes from the
blue-and-red checked table-cover.
"I said my partner, Tom. Yes, that is what I intend to make you: have
intended it for some time. We will have no fly-away London jaunts and
junkets. Once my partner, of course the world will understand that you
will be also my successor: and I think I shall soon retire."
Tom had risen from his seat: for once in his life he was agitated. Mr.
Paul rose and put his hand on Tom's shoulder.
"With this position, and a suitable income to back it, Tom, you are a
match for Mary Maceveril, or for any other good girl. Go and try her,
boy; try your luck."
"But--it is of no use," spoke Tom. "You don't understand, sir."
"No use! Go and try,"--pushing him towards the door. "My wife was one
of the proud Wintertons, you know: how should I have gained her but for
trying? _I_ did not depreciate myself, and say I'm not good enough for
her: I went and asked her to have me."
"But suppose it is not Mary Maceveril, sir?--as indeed it is not.
Suppose it is somebody nearer--nearer home?"
"No matter. Go and try, I say."
"I--do--think--you--understand--me, sir," cried Tom, slowly and
dubiously. "I--hope there is no mistake!"
"Rubbish about mistake!" cried old Paul, pushing him towards the door.
"Go and do as I bid you. Try."
He went to look for Emma, and saw her sitting under the acacia tree on
the bench, which faced the other way. Stepping noiselessly over the
grass, he put his arms on her shoulders, and she turned round with a
cry. But Tom would not let her go.
"I am told to come out and _try_, Emma. I want a wife, and your father
thinks I may gain one. He is going to make me his partner; and he says
he thinks I am a match for any good girl. And I am not going to London."
She turned pale and red, red and pale, and then burst into a fit of
tears and trembling.
"Oh, Tom, can it be true! Oh, Tom, Tom!"
And Tom kissed her for the first time in his life. But not for the last.
The news came out to us in a lump. Tom Chandler was taken into
partnership and was to marry Emma. We wished them good luck. She was not
to leave her home, for her father would not spare her: she and Tom were
to live with him.
"I had to do it, you know, Squire," said old Paul, meeting the Squire
one day. "Only children are apt to be wilful. Not that I ever found
Emma so. Had I not allowed it, I expect she'd have dutifully saddled
herself, an old maid, upon me for life."
"She could not have chosen better," cried the Squire, warmly. "If
there's one young fellow I respect above another, it's Tom Chandler.
He is good to the back-bone."
"He wouldn't have got her if he were not; you may rely upon that,"
concluded old Paul, emphatically.
So the wedding took place at Islip in the autumn, and old Paul gave Tom
a month's holiday, and told him he had better take Emma to Paris; as
they both seemed, by what he could gather, red-hot to see it.
* * * * *
Drizzle, drizzle, drizzle, came down the rain, dropping with monotonous
patter on the decaying leaves that strewed the garden. Not the trim
well-kept garden it used to be, but showing signs of neglect. What with
the long grass, and the leaves, and the sloppy roads, and the November
skies, nothing could well look more dreary than the world looked to-day,
as seen from the windows of North Villa.
Time had gone on, another year, bringing its events and its changes; as
time always does bring. The chief change, as connected with this little
record, lay in Valentine Chandler. He had gone to the dogs. That was
Islip's expression for it, not mine. A baby had come to Tom and Emma.
Little by little, step by step, Valentine had gone down lower and lower.
Some people, who are given to bad habits, make spasmodic efforts to
reform; but, so far as Islip could see, Valentine never made any. He
passed more time at the Bell, or at less respectable public-houses,
and drank deeper: and at last neglected his business almost entirely.
Enervated and good for nothing, he would lie in bed till twelve o'clock
in the day. To keep on the office seemed only a farce. Its profits were
not enough to pay for its one solitary clerk. Valentine was then pulled
up by an illness, which confined him to his bed, and left him in a shaky
state. The practice had quite gone then, and the clerk had gone; and
Valentine knew that, even though he had had sufficient energy left to
try to bring them back, no clients would have returned to him.
He was going to emigrate to Canada. His friends hoped he would be
steady there, and redeem the past: he gave fair promises of it. George
Chandler (Tom's brother, who was doing very well there now, with a large
farm about him, and a wife and children) had undertaken to receive
Valentine and help him to employment. So he would have to begin life
over again.
It was all so much gall and bitterness to his mother and sisters, and
had been for a long while. The tears were dropping through the fingers
of Mrs. Chandler now, as she leaned on her hand and watched the dreary
rain on the window-panes. With all his faults, she had so loved
Valentine. She loved him still, above all the trouble he had brought;
and it seemed, this afternoon, just as though her heart would break.
When the business fell off, of course her income fell off also.
Valentine was to have paid her a third of the profits, but if he did not
make any profits, he could not pay her any. She had the private income,
two hundred a-year, which Jacob had secured to her: but what was that
for a family accustomed to live in the fashion? There is an old saying
that necessity has no law: and Mrs. Jacob Chandler and her daughters had
proved its truth. One of the girls had gone out as a governess; one was
on a prolonged visit to her aunt Cramp; and Julietta and her mother were
to move into a smaller house at Christmas. The practice and the other
business, once Valentine's, and his father's before him, had all gone
over to the other firm, Paul and Chandler.
"I'm sure I don't know what Georgiana means by writing home for money
amidst all our troubles!" cried Mrs. Chandler, fretfully. "She has
fifteen pounds a-year salary, and she must make that do."
"She says her last quarter's money is all spent, and she can't possibly
manage without a new mantle for Sunday," returned Julietta.
"_I_ can't supply it; you know I can't. I am not able to pay my own way
now. Let her write to Mrs. Cramp."
"It would be of no use, mamma. Aunt Mary Ann will never help us to
clothes. She says we have had too many of them."
"Well, I don't want to be worried with these matters: it's enough for me
to think of poor Valentine's things. Only two days now before he starts.
And what wretched weather it is!"
"Valentine says he shall not take much luggage with him. He saw me
counting his shirts, and he said they were too many by half."
"And who will supply him with shirts out there, do you suppose?"
demanded Mrs. Chandler. "You talk nothing but nonsense, Julietta. Where
_is_ Valentine? He ought to be here, with all this packing to do. He
must have been gone out these two hours."
"He said he had business at Islip."
Mrs. Chandler looked gloomy at the answer. She hated the very name of
Islip: partly because they held no longer any part in the place, partly
because the Bell was in it.
But Valentine had not gone to the Bell this time. His visit was to his
cousin Tom; and his errand was to beg of Tom to give or lend him a
fifty-pound note before sailing.
"I shall have next to nothing in my pocket, Tom, when I land," he urged,
as the two sat together in Tom's private room. "If I get on over there,
I will pay you back. If I don't--well, perhaps you won't grudge having
helped me for the last time."
For a moment Tom did not answer. He sat before his desk-table, Valentine
near him: just as Valentine had one day sat at his desk in his private
room, and Tom had been the petitioner, not so many years gone by.
Valentine looked upon the silence as an ill-omen.
"You have all the business that once was mine in your fingers now, Tom.
It has left me for you."
"But not by any wish or seeking of mine, Valentine; you know that,"
spoke Tom readily, turning his honest eyes and kindly face on the fallen
man. "I wish you were in your office still. There's plenty of work for
both of us."
"Well, I am not in it; and you have got it all. You might lend me such
a poor little sum as fifty pounds."
"Of course I mean to lend it: but I was thinking. Look here, Valentine.
I will not give it you now; you cannot want it before sailing: and you
might lose it on board," he added laughing. "You shall carry with you an
order upon my brother George for one hundred pounds."
"Will George pay it?"
"I will take care of that. He shall receive a letter from me by the same
mail that takes you out. Stay, Valentine. I will give you the order
now."
He wrote what was necessary, sealed it up, and handed it over. Valentine
thanked him.
"How is Emma?" he asked as he rose. "And the boy?"
"Quite well, thank you: both. Will you not go in and see them?"
"I think not. You can say good-bye for me. I don't much care to trouble
people."
"God bless you, Valentine," said Tom, clasping his hand. "You will begin
life anew over there, and may have a happy one yet. One of these days
you will be coming back to us, a prosperous man."
Valentine went trudging home through the rain, miserable and dispirited,
and found a visitor had arrived--Mrs. Cramp. His mother and sister
were upstairs then, busy over his trunks; so Mrs. Cramp had him all to
herself. She had liked Valentine very much. When he went wrong, it put
her out frightfully, and since then she had not spared him: which of
course put out Valentine.
"Yes, it will be a change," he acknowledged, in reply to a remark of
hers. "A flourishing solicitor here, and a servant there. For that's
what I shall be over yonder, I conclude; I can't expect to be my own
master. You don't know how good the business was, Aunt Mary Ann, at the
time my father died. If I could only have kept it!"
"You could not expect to keep it," said Mrs. Cramp, who sat facing him,
her bonnet tilted back from her red and comely face, her purple stuff
gown pulled up above her boots.
"I should have kept it, but for now and then taking a little drop too
much," confessed poor Valentine: who was deeper in the dumps that day
than he had ever been before.
"I don't know that," said Mrs. Cramp. "The business was a usurped one."
"A what?" said Valentine.
"There is an overruling Power above us, you know," she went on. "I am
quite sure, Valentine--I have learnt it by experience--that injustice
never answers in the long run. It may seem to succeed for a time; but
it does not last: it cannot and it does not. If a man rears himself on
another's downfall, causing himself that downfall that he may rise, his
prosperity rests on no sure foundation. In some way or other the past
comes home to him; and he suffers for it, if not in his own person,
in that of his children. Ill-gotten riches bring a curse, never a
blessing."
"What a growler you are, Aunt Mary Ann!"
"I don't mean it for growling, Valentine. It is true."
"It's not true."
"Not true! The longer I live the more examples I see of it. A man treads
another down that he may rise himself: and there he stands high and
flourishing. But wait a few years, and look then. He is gone. Gone, and
no trace of his prosperity left. And when I mark that, I recall that
verse in the Psalms of David: 'I went by, and lo, he was gone: I sought
him, but his place was nowhere to be found.' That verse is a true type
of real life, Valentine."
"I don't believe it," cried Valentine. "And where's the good of having
the Psalms at your finger-ends?"
"You do believe it. Why, Valentine, take your own case. Was there ever
a closer exemplification? Tom was injured; put down; I may say, crushed
by you and your father. Yes, crushed: crushed out of his rights. _His_
father made the business; and the half of it, at any rate, ought to have
been Tom's. Instead of that, your father deposed him and usurped it. He
repented when he was dying, and charged you to remedy the wrong. But you
did not; _you_ usurped it. And what has it ended in?"
"Ended in?" cried Valentine vacantly.
"You are--as you are; ruined in character, in purse, in reputation; and
Tom is respected and flourishing. The business has left you and gone
to him; not through any seeking of his, but through your own doings
entirely; the very self-same business that his father made has in the
natural course of time and events gone back to him--and he is not thirty
yet. It is retribution, nephew. Justice has been righting herself; and
man could neither stay nor hinder it."
"What nonsense!" debated Valentine testily. "Suppose I had been steady:
would the business have left me for Tom then?"
"Yes. In some inscrutable way, that we see not, it would. I am sure of
it. You would no more have been allowed to triumph to the end on your
ill-gotten gains, than I could stand if I went out and perched myself on
yonder weathercock," affirmed Mrs. Cramp, growing warm. "Your father
kept his place, it is true; but what a miserable man he always was, and
without any ostensible cause."
"I wonder you don't set up for a parson, Aunt Mary Ann! This is as good
as a sermon."
"Then carry the sermon in your memory through life, Valentine. Our
doings, whether they be good or ill, bring back their fruits. In some
wonderful manner that we cannot understand, events are always shaping
onwards their own true ends, their appointed destiny, and working out
the will of Heaven."
* * * * *
That's all. And the Squire seemed to take a leaf out of Mrs. Cramp's
book. For ever so long afterwards, he would tell us to read a lesson
from the history of the Chandlers, and to remember that none can deal
unjustly in the sight of God without having to account for it sooner or
later.