OLD JOHN TREVOR.
John Trevor had been a school-master for the greater part of his life.
How he acquired so well sounding a name nobody knew. He had no
relations, he always said, in the male line, and his friends on his
mother’s side were people of undistinguished surnames. And for the first
fifty years of his life he had maintained a very even tenor of
existence, always respectable, always a man who kept his engagements,
paid his way, gave his entire attention, as his circulars said, to the
pupils confided to his care; but even in his schoolmastership there was
nothing of a remarkable character. After passing many obscure years as
an usher, he attained to an academy of his own, in which a sound
religious and commercial education was insured, as the same circular
informed the parents and guardians of Farafield, by the employment of
most competent masters for all the branches included in the course, and
by his own unremitting care. But often the masters at Mr. Trevor’s
academy were represented solely by himself, and the number of his pupils
never embarrassed or overweighted him. The good man, however, worked his
way all the same; he kept afloat, which so many find it impossible to
do. If the number of scholars diminished he lived harder, when it
increased he laid by a little. He was never extravagant, never forgot
that his occupation was a precarious one, and thus--turning out a few
creditable arithmeticians to fill up the places in the little “offices”
of Farafield, the solicitor’s, the auctioneer’s, the big builder’s, and
even in the better shops, where they were the best of cashiers, never
wrong in a total--he lived on from year to year. His house was but a
dingy one, with a large room for his pupils, and two upstairs, shabby
enough, in which he lived; but, by dint of sheer continuance and
respectability, John Trevor, by the time he was fifty, was as much
respected in Farafield as a man leading such a virtuous, colorless,
joyless, unblamable existence has a right to be.
But at fifty a curious circumstance happened. John Trevor married. To
say that he fell in love would perhaps scarcely represent the case. He
had a friend who had been in India and all over the world, and who came
home to Farafield with a liver-complaint, and a great deal of money,
some people said. Trevor at first did not believe very much in the
money. “I have enough to live upon,” his friend said; and what more was
necessary? No one knew very well how the money had been made--though
that it was honestly acquired there was no doubt. He had been a clerk in
an office in Farafield first, then because of his good conduct, which
everybody had full faith in, and his business qualities (at which
everybody laughed), he was sent to London by his employer, and received
into an office there, from which he was sent to India, coming home with
this fortune, but with worn-out health, to his native place. “Fortune?
you can call it a fortune if you like. It is enough to live on,” John
Trevor repeated, “that is all I know about it. To be sure that _is_ a
fortune: for to have enough for your old days, and not to be compelled
to work, what could a man desire more? But poor Rainy will not enjoy it
long,” his old school-fellow added regretfully. Rainy was older by five
or six years than John Trevor; but fifty-six does not seem old when one
is drawing near that age, though it is a respectable antiquity to youth.
Rainy’s sister had been a hard-working woman too; she had been a
governess, and then had kept a school; then looked after the children of
a widowed brother; and during her whole life had discharged the duties
of the supernumerary woman in a large family, taking care of everybody
who wanted taking care of. When her brother returned to Farafield she
had come to him to be his companion and nurse. He gave her a very nice
home, everybody said, with much admiration of the brother’s kindness and
the sister’s good-luck. They lived in Swallow Street, in one of the old
houses, which were warmer and better built than the new ones, and kept
two maids, and had everything comfortable, if not handsome, about,
them. When poor Rainy died, Miss Rainy had a great deal of business to
do which she did not at all understand. She had to refer to John Trevor
perpetually in the first week or two, and she was not young any longer,
nor ambitious, the good soul, and nobody had been so kind to her brother
as John, and they had known each other all their lives. It came about
thus quite naturally that they married. To be sure there were a great
many people who said that Trevor married Miss Rainy for her money, as if
poor old John at fifty had been able to have his choice of all the
lovely young maidens of the district. But this was not the case; neither
was it for love they married. They married for mutual support and
company, not a bad motive after all. If there had been no money in the
case, they would have contented themselves in their loneliness; but as
she had a house and an independence, and he an occupation, they “felt
justified,” he said to all inquirers, in taking a step which otherwise
they might not have contemplated. The consequences, however, were not at
all such as they contemplated. Mrs. Trevor began, too late, with the
energy of a workman who has no time to lose, the hard trade of a mother.
She had one baby after another at headlong speed, losing them almost as
soon as they were born, and losing her own health and tranquillity in
the process. For some half dozen years the poor soul was either ill or
in mourning. And at the end of that period she died. Poor Trevor saved
his little Lucy out of the wreck, that was all; there were five or six
little mounds in the church-yard besides Mrs. Trevor’s longer one, and
so her kind old maidenly existence was over; for before she married she
had been universally acknowledged, even by her closest friends, to be an
old maid.
It was not till Mrs. Trevor was dead that it became fully known in
Farafield that it was no humble competency that had been left to her by
her brother, but “an immense fortune.” Neither she nor her husband had
known it till long after their marriage. Rainy had been a very clever
business man, though his townsfolk all laughed at the idea, and some of
his speculations, which had been all but forgotten, turned out at last
to be real mines of gold. When it was known what a large, what a
fabulous fortune it was, all Rainy’s kindred and connections were roused
as one man. They crowded round Trevor, most of them demanding their
share, almost all of them fully believing that he had known from the
beginning how matters stood, and had married (being so much in request,
poor old John!) solely on this inducement; but some of them, on the
other hand, showed their admiration by leaving their own little bits of
fortune to Lucy, already so liberally endowed. Both of these effects
were natural enough. Trevor held his own bravely against them all. Rainy
had left his money to his sister; he knew best who deserved it, and it
was not for him (Trevor) to annul or allow to be annulled his
brother-in-law’s wishes, especially now that Lucilla Rainy (poor thing)
had a child to inherit all that belonged to her. He was not illiberal,
however, though he was unyielding on the point of law and his child’s
rights, and between him and the town-clerk, who was a person of great
influence and much trusted in by the surrounding population, the crowd
of discontented relations were silenced. As for the others, those who
insisted upon leaving their money to Lucy on the old and always popular
principle, that to those that have shall be given, Trevor allowed them
to do what seemed to them good, and by this treatment it came to pass
that the fortune of Lucy acquired several additions. “Money draws
money,” the proverb says. Thus this man of fifty-six, with all the
restrained and economical habits of a life-time passed in laborious
endeavors to make the two ends meet, found himself at the latter end of
his life with a great fortune and a motherless baby on his hands. The
position in both ways was very strange to him. He gave up the school,
generously bestowing the good-will, the furniture, and the remaining
pupils on young Philip Rainy, the son of a cousin of his wife. He would
not give away his child’s money; but he hoped, he said, that he would
always be ready to serve an old friend with that which was his own. And
then he gave himself up to the charge of Lucy’s fortune. One thing that
was to the credit of John Trevor, all Farafield said, was that he never
gave himself any airs or committed any extravagances. He lived on the
same income with which his wife and he had begun life, before the great
windfalls came which made their little daughter one of the richest
heiresses in England. He might have bought himself a great house, set up
a carriage, tried to make his way into society. But he did none of these
things. He lived on in the old way, without fuss or show, nursed Lucy’s
fortune and rolled it into ever-increasing bulk like a snow-ball, and
had Lucy nursed as best he might with no woman to help him. How it was
that in this respectable and right-minded career there should have
occurred the interval of folly in which little Jock came into the world,
who can tell? The second Mrs. Trevor was a good woman enough, and had
acted for some years as his housekeeper and the superintendent of Lucy’s
health and comfort--a comely person, too, which perhaps had something
to do with it. But nobody ever dwelt upon this moment of aberration in
old Trevor’s life, for his second wife died as his first wife had done,
and there would have been an end of the incident but for little Jock.
And nobody made much account of him.
When the second Mrs. Trevor died, he gave up housekeeping. Perhaps he
was afraid of other risks that might attend him in the same way. When a
man is a widower for the second time it is impossible to say what
Bluebeard career he may not rush into. In this, as in so many other
things, _il n’y a que le premier pas qui coûte_. After that there is no
telling to what lengths you may go. So Trevor wisely withdrew from all
hazards. He looked about him carefully, and fixed upon Mrs. Ford, who
was a cousin of his first wife. Ford was just then beginning to sigh and
make comparisons between his own lot and that of his employer, who was
his contemporary, and had just retired with, if not a fortune, at least
a competency. “Whereas I shall have to slave on to the end,” Ford said.
One evening, however, his wife came out to meet him in high excitement
to tell him what had happened.
“He will buy the lease for us,” she said, “and set us up, and then he
will take our lodgings. I never should have thought old Trevor would be
so liberal; but I suppose it is for poor Lucilla’s sake.”
And next day they went and inspected No. 6 in the Terrace. Mr. and Mrs.
Ford felt that it was a solemn moment in their career; they had no
children, and they liked to be comfortable, but such a piece of grandeur
as a house in the Terrace had never come within the range of their
hopes; and Mrs. Ford liked the idea of the cook, and the housemaid, and
the parlor-maid. Thus the bargain was made; and though the Fords had not
found it quite so delightful as it appeared at first, yet the experiment
was, on the whole, a successful one. The household got on as well as it
was possible for such a composite household to do. Sometimes a maid
would be saucy, and give Mrs. Ford to understand as she knew very well
who was the real master; and sometimes Mr. Trevor would make himself
disagreeable and find fault with the eggs, or complain of the tea. But
barring these rufflings of the rose leaves, all went very well with the
house. When she was not thinking of her housekeeping, Mrs. Ford kept a
convenient little fund of misery on hand, which she could draw upon at
the shortest notice, as to the position in which she and her husband
would be left when Mr. Trevor died. Mr. Trevor was now seventy, so that
the fear was not unnatural, and she was a woman full of anxieties who
liked to have one within reach. Ford was above all this; he knew that
they were not to be left with the lease of the house in the Terrace, and
nothing more to trust to. For he had become Mr. Trevor’s confidant. It
is not so touching a relationship as that which exists at the theater
between the first and second ladies, the heroine in white satin and the
confidante in muslin; but it is doubtful whether Tilburina ever made
revelations more exciting than those over which these two old men wagged
their beards--or rather their smooth old chins, well shaven every
morning; for at their age and in their condition of life beards were
still unknown.
Mr. Trevor was sixty-five when the idea of making his will occurred to
him first. Not that he had left Lucy’s fortune in any doubt up to that
moment. A brief and concise little document existed in his lawyer’s
hands, putting her rights entirely beyond question; but it was years
after the making of this first will that the idea occurred to him of
shaping out Lucy’s life for her, and settling the course of years after
he should have himself passed from the conduct of affairs. He was a man
who had lived a very matter-of-fact life; but John Trevor was not a man
without imagination. Even in the days when he had least time for such
vanities, there had been gleams of fancy about him, and he had always
been fond of entering into the circumstances of his pupils, and giving
them his advice. They all knew that to have his advice asked was a thing
that pleased him. And the management of a great fortune excites the mind
and draws forth the imagination. He had to throw himself into all the
combinations of speculative money-making, the romance of shares and
coupons; and had acquired a sort of divination, a spirit of prophecy, a
power of seeing what was about to pay or not to pay. Some men have this
power by nature, but few acquire it; and no doubt it had lain dormant in
John Trevor all the years during which, having no money to invest, he
had not cared to exercise his faculties as to the best investment. When,
however, he had made many very successful _coups_, and eluded many
stumbles, and steered triumphantly through some dangers, a sense of his
own cleverness and power stole into his heart. He felt that he was a man
with great powers of administration, and instincts which it was a
thousand pities not to make use of; and it suddenly came into his mind
one evening, when he had just added several thousand pounds to Lucy’s
fortune by a very successful and clever operation, that he might
exercise these powers in a still more effectual way. Ah! if Lucy’s
fortune had been a poor little trumpery bit of a fortune, not enough
for the girl to live on, it would not have increased like this, it would
never have doubled itself, as old Trevor’s money did! Even Providence
seemed in the compact, and gave the advantage to the heiress, just as
the richer people of the Rainy kindred did, who gave her their money
because she had so much already. But this is a digression. As Mr. Trevor
thought over the whole question--and naturally Lucy’s fortune, which was
his chief occupation, was also the thing that took up most of his
thoughts--he could not but feel a vivid regret that it would be
impossible to outlive his own ending, and see how the money throve in
Lucy’s hands. This seems a whimsical regret, but it is not an unnatural
one. Could we only keep a share of what is going on, could we but be
sure of seeing our ideas carried out, and assisting at our own dying and
burying, and all that would follow after, death would be a much less
dismal matter. To be sure, in most cases the penalty of this post-mortem
spectatorship would be that we should not see our ideas carried out at
all. But this was not what Mr. Trevor looked forward to. He would have
been quite content to give up his share in the world, if he could only
have kept an eye on the course of events afterward, and retained some
power of suggesting, at least, what ought to be done. But even under the
most favorable view, the hereafter for which we hope was not likely, Mr.
Trevor felt, to permit any active intervention of the disembodied spirit
in the matter of stocks or shares. And it was a painful check to him to
feel that, in a few years at the most, Lucy’s property and herself would
be deprived of the invaluable guidance which his own experience and
intelligence would give. It was while this regret was heavy upon him
that the idea of making a will suddenly occurred to him--not the
ordinary sort of will, a thing which, as already indicated, was made
long ago, but a potential and living instrument, by which out of his
grave he would still be able to look after the affairs which had cost
him so much trouble, and which had so prospered in his hands. The idea
stirred him with the liveliest thrill of pleasure. He began the document
the very next day, after laying in a stock of paper, large blue folio,
lined and crackling, that the very outward form might be absolutely
correct. And it was a very remarkable document; it was the romance, the
poem of John Trevor’s life. Sitting by himself among his coupons and
account books, he had evolved out of his own consciousness, bit by bit,
the ideal of a millionaire--nay, of a female millionaire--of an heiress,
not in her usual aspect as the prey of fortune-hunters, pursued for
love, not of herself, but of her money. The sentimental side of the
question did not touch old Trevor at all. He thought of his daughter
from a very different point of view. If he ever reflected upon a
possible husband for her, it was with great impatience and distaste of
the idea. He would rather, if he could, have settled for her that she
should never marry. He wanted her to be herself, and not anybody’s wife.
All his calculations were for her as she was, Lucy Trevor, not for Mrs.
So-and-so. It seemed to him that the woman who would take up his sketch
of existence and carry it out, would be something much more worth
thinking of than a married lady of the ordinary level. She would be a
very important person indeed, in her father’s sketch of her, making what
he intended to be a very fine use of her money, and living for that end
like a princess. He did not cut off any portion of her duties, because
she was a woman; indeed he thought no more of that fact than in so far
as it was this which gave him his chief certainty of being able to mold
her, and make her life what he wished. He would not, probably, have
thought it worth his while to take so much trouble had she been a boy;
he would not have had the same faith in her, not the same feeling about
her position. It would have been more a matter of course, not so
interesting to the fancy. Perhaps a girl, in all cases, answers the
purpose of an ideal better than a boy does. Old Trevor did not think
much about the question of sex, but instinctively felt that the girl was
what he wanted, and it would be impossible to conceive an exercise of
the imagination more exciting, more interesting. It was as near like
creating a human being as anything could be. Of the character of
Lucy--in the flesh, a slim and quiet girl of sixteen--her father knew
not very much; but the Lucy who, day by day, developed more and more in
the will, became a personage very distinct to him. The manner in which
she was to conduct herself in all the difficulties she might meet, was
the subject of his continual thoughts; until at last it seemed to the
old man that he saw her as in a mirror moving along through the
difficulties and perplexities of her life in which his own position
would enable him to accompany her and help her with his advice--rather
than that he was actually inventing the entire course of her experience
for her.
This was the subject upon which Ford was Mr. Trevor’s confidant. He
could not have lived all alone in this imaginary world; he had to
consult some one, to tell some one of all the developments of his
imagination as he traced his heiress through her life. And Ford, you may
be sure, liked to know every particular, and was pleased to have a hand
in the guidance of so rich a person, and to help to decide how so much
money was to be spent. It made him feel as if he were rich himself. He
made a very judicious confidant. He agreed in all Mr. Trevor’s ideas in
the greater matters, and differed in trifles just enough to show the
independence of his judgment; and, as it happened, there was something
particularly interesting to Ford in the chapter of Lucy’s future life at
which they had now arrived.