THE HEADS OF THE HOUSE LOOK GRAVE.
"It is a thousand pities," said Dr. Millar, holding a consultation with
his wife, while he sipped his glass of sherry and ate his biscuit,
before retiring for the night, after his last round among the patients
in greatest need of his visits.
In spite of his daughter Dora's preference for tall men, the Doctor was
short and rather stout. He ought to have looked comfortable, he had the
physique and air of a comfortable man, but a certain harassed, careworn
expression was beginning to settle down on the spectacled face which had
once been round, rosy, and very comely. He was at least twenty years
older than his wife. The old-fashioned practice had prevailed in the
old-fashioned town, of elderly men, whether bachelors or widowers,
ending by marrying for the first or the second time women a score or
more years their juniors. Indeed, Dr. Millar was hard upon seventy,
though he had till recent bad times carried his years so well that he
had looked ten years younger than his actual age.
Mrs. Millar also began to look worried as a rule, though she had more of
the woman's faculty of putting the best face on things, both in public
and in private. She was a tall woman, who had enjoyed the advantages of
what was called "an elegant figure" in her youth. Now she was large and
heavy, with a mixture of unconscious stateliness and wistful
motherliness in her gait and gestures. Like Dr. Millar, she ought to
have seemed at least easy-minded, but circumstances were becoming more
and more against the happy condition, of which a pervading atmosphere of
content and cheerfulness should have been the outward expression.
The man and woman were not cut out, so to speak, for adversity. They had
not been seasoned to it in their younger days. On the contrary, they had
been cradled for many years in the lap--if not of luxury, of fair
middle-class prosperity. It was a few tolerably rough jolts which had
shaken them from their cradle. Still the trouble was more in
apprehension than in reality. As yet it had not caused the sufferers to
change any one of the domestic habits which had grown second nature to
them. It had not induced them to darken the sunny sky over their young
daughters' heads with a shadow of the clouds which were already looming
black on the parents' horizon. It may be said at once, that Dr. and Mrs.
Millar, though they were reckoned clever, sensible people enough by
their contemporaries, had softer hearts than they had hard heads. They
had not been used to painful self-denial and stern discipline, either
where they themselves or their children were concerned.
The couple were sitting now together in the dining-room with its solidly
handsome furniture, Russian leather and walnut wood, bits of family
plate on the sideboard, bronze chimney-piece ornaments, and good
engravings on the walls. Husband and wife had spent the last part of the
evening there, for four-and-twenty years, every night they were in
Redcross, when the Doctor was not kept out late, or when the couple were
not abroad in company, or seeing company at home. Dr. Millar, in his
slightly old-fashioned professional black coat and white tie, was
leaning back in his easy-chair sipping his sherry, and occasionally
drumming lightly on the table near him with these fine long sensitive
fingers which were a born doctor's fingers.
Mrs. Millar wore a demi-toilet in the shape of an expensive cashmere and
silk gown--not an evening dress, but an approach to it, as became the
wife of one of the leading professional men in Redcross, connected with
the county to boot. Her lace cap was a costly trifle of its kind, but
it had an awkward habit--the odder in a woman who was neat to formality
in the other details of her dress--of slipping to one side, or tilting
forwards or backwards on the brown hair, still abundant and just
streaked with gray; so that one or other of her daughters was constantly
calling Mrs. Millar's cap to order and setting it right. She was sitting
in an arm-chair, opposite her husband. Mechanically she put one daintily
slippered, very neat foot, considering the weight it helped to carry,
beyond her skirts, and stretched it towards the fire. There was still a
good fire blazing in the steel grate, though the spring was well
advanced, the weather was not more than chilly, and the hour was late.
It was as if coals were not a marketable commodity and a serious item in
the expenses of an embarrassed household. She held up a Japanese fan
between her face and the fire, from mere custom, for she had ceased to
pay much heed to the exigencies of a florid complexion.
"It's a thousand pities," repeated the little Doctor, looking quite
portentously regretful and oppressed. "It is not only that Tom Robinson
is an excellent fellow and would have made Dora the best of
husbands--given her a safe and happy home, and all that sort of thing;
but in case of anything happening, I am convinced he would have been as
good as a brother to the other girls, and a son to you. A man like him
is a stay and support to a household of helpless women."
"But nothing is going to happen, Jonathan," said Mrs. Millar, with an
involuntary nervous quiver which sent her cap hovering over one eyebrow.
"At least nothing worse than we know. Your practice is not so lucrative
as it used to be; how can it, in these bad times, with so many poor
young fellows of doctors settling here and there and everywhere in
Redcross and the villages around, starving themselves out, while they
impoverish their seniors? Nothing more than that, except the little
trouble at Carey's Bank."
"Quite enough too, Maria, quite enough," commented the Doctor deep down
in his throat, prolonging the words a little as if he were chanting the
refrain of a dismal song; "and when a man is my age and has plenty of
the young rivals you refer to, it is high time he should be looking out
for something happening. A family of girls, too. God help me! If they
had been four boys, who might have made their own way in the world, and
provided for you among them, I could have faced it better." He struck
the table again, with spasmodic force this time.
"Now, Jonathan, you will wake up the house. This is not like you,"
remonstrated his wife--all the more energetically that her heart sank
while she spoke. "I should not have expected you to give way in this
manner." She gave a quick push back to her unruly cap. "I am sure there
is no occasion for it. We are in no worse position than we were last
year, even the year before that."
"Save that I am growing older every year," he said grimly, "and the
affairs of the bank are not mending, as I hoped they might."
"Can't you sell out?" she suggested breathlessly, as she clasped her
hands on her knees.
"I have put it off too long, supposing I had the conscience to transfer
my liabilities to some simpleton who might not draw half a dozen of the
dividends of which I have drawn scores. Besides, the thing is
impossible, as I am telling you. Between you and me, the shares are far
below par."
"What is par, Jonathan?" interrupted Mrs. Millar in a praiseworthy
attempt to understand her husband.
"Oh, bother," he cried, running his hand in mild exasperation through
his white hair; "the standard value, or the original value, whichever
you like best. I should not dare to propose to sell out at such a loss;
it would not only be to impoverish myself at once in order to avoid the
risk of greater ruin, it would draw attention. It would have a most
suspicious look, and might bring the rotten affair down about our ears
instantly, while I should get the blame of the downfall."
"But some of the large foreign investments might be realized any
day--you told me the last time you spoke of business--with the first
good turn of trade," she reminded him anxiously.
"I trust so still, and I believe old Carey is an honest man and a
perfect gentleman--that is one comfort; but I cannot help thinking he
has got into bad hands. I tell you, Maria, I don't like that
brother-in-law of his who comes down from London to attend the Redcross
meetings, and tries to blarney us all round. And I cannot approve of the
bolstering up of Carey's cousins, the Carters, in their chemical works
at Stokeleigh, which it strikes me will never do much good. It--the
bolstering up--has been going on for a long time now, to what extent I
am not prepared to show. Unfortunately I have a bad head for figures,"
he shrugged his shoulders as if anticipating a reproach, "the less
reason why I should have laid out my savings on bank shares, you will
say? No doubt, no doubt, but there had been fewer troubles with banks in
my day. When I made the first investment everything appeared right, and
the dividends announced were tempting."
"I am not finding fault with what you did, Jonathan; I never thought of
such a thing," the perturbed woman found voice to reassure her husband.
"I know you did it for the best; and for that matter, I am convinced it
will all come right in the end," she ended with a little sigh.
"It is very good and pretty of you to say so, Maria," he said with a
certain old-fashioned, stiff gallantry which, while it complimented her,
treated her as a much younger and more irresponsible being than he was.
As he spoke he took up the hand which lay in her lap and held it for a
moment clasped in his. "And I can say you have been all that I could
have wished as a wife and mother, you have never once failed me during
the whole of our married life."
"Oh! thank you, thank you, Jonathan." She acknowledged his praise with a
momentary choke in her voice, and a bend of her head which was not
without a docile dignity.
"We are all in the same boat," resumed the Doctor in the deep tones
which somehow sounded like bass recitative; "the Rector, Colonel
Russell, and I--not to say Carey himself. We all wished to increase our
incomes with as little trouble and risk as possible--so it seemed then,
but if the bank comes to smash, all the old Redcross gentle-folks, as we
were pleased to call ourselves, will go with it."
"Don't mention such a thing, don't think of it," cried Mrs. Millar in
her dismay.
He went on without noticing her. "The Bishop won't let the Rector come
down, and Russell is twenty years younger than I. He is no older than
you are, though a foreign climate has told a good deal on him; still, he
is patched up, and with care ought to have lasted as long as the rest of
us. He may exert his interest, and get a post in India again, though I
should be afraid it would finish him in six months."
The poor middle-aged lady who sat listening with dry lips apart, and
pleasant hazel eyes distended with fright and distress, though she was
no older than the unfortunate colonel, had not been exposed to a foreign
climate, and had hardly suffered from a serious illness in her life, did
not look much like such an arduous undertaking as going out to India to
redeem a wrecked fortune. She pulled herself together, however, and set
herself to the good woman's business of comforting and encouraging her
husband. "I am certain it is right to go on hoping. You often say that
in your profession you have no such helpful allies as hope and courage;
you must practice what you've preached, Doctor," and the faithful soul
actually contrived to impart a playful ring to her unsteady voice. "The
Rector has not preached the duty more strenuously than you have; and
you are not going to be the first to break down, especially when there
is no real occasion. Depend upon it, Carey's Bank will pull through like
some of your most doubtful patients, with time and care."
"With all my heart," he said, absently taking off his spectacles,
polishing, and replacing them. Then he resumed his former line of
thought. "Tom Robinson is out of the mess. He, and his father before
him, found other ways of disposing of their capital where it was more
under their own inspection and control. If that foolish girl of ours,
Maria, could only have brought herself to listen to Robinson," he worked
himself up into a fresh access of vexation, "the liking would have come
in good time. I did not expect her to have a fancy for him on the spot,
for quiet, steady young fellows like him are not apt to take girls'
fancies--the worse for the girls."
"But, father"--remonstrated Mrs. Millar, involuntarily bestowing on her
husband the title the girls gave him--she drew herself up as she spoke,
and again destroyed the equilibrium of her cap--"you cannot surely think
that Tom Robinson would have been a fit match for Dora, or any of her
sisters. He is well enough in himself, I say nothing against him, but he
has not gone into a profession, instead he has identified himself with
'Robinson's'--that shop;" a shade of ineffable disgust stole into her
ordinarily good-humoured voice.
"Showed his good sense and manliness," said the Doctor gruffly. "I wish
every one else had been as wise. I wish all of us had big paying shops
at our backs instead of Carey's shaky bank. I for one would swallow the
indignity cheerfully. Why, my father kept on his dispensary in the days
when the practice was at its best. The greater fool I to give it up. I
tell you England will never be what it was till it gets rid of this
rubbish of despising trades and shops. Don't you help to put it into
these silly girls' heads. It makes me sick to think how they may live to
wish they were connected with an honest, solvent shop."
"My dear, I think you are going a little too far." Mrs. Millar fired up
in defence of her young like a ruffled mother-pigeon. "I should be very
sorry to teach the girls to look down on anybody; but that there are
different sorts and conditions of men, they may learn from their very
Bibles and prayer-books. There are such things as education and
culture--not to speak of good birth. You yourself, Dr. Millar, are
fairly well born and well connected for a professional man." She
instanced this with an imperceptible bridle and toss of her matronly
head, which hinted broadly, "If it had not been so, Jonathan, I should
never have been Mrs. Millar." The movement threatened to deposit her cap
on the carpet behind her, but she recovered it in time, and took up the
thread of her discourse by quoting the much-prized family
distinction--"There was your Aunt Penny, who married into the county."
"Oh! are you at that humbug?" he cried, with a man's disrespectful
impatience. "I thought it had seen its day, and was long over and done
with. I could not have conceived that you--" ("were such a fool," he was
going to say, when he caught himself up.) He was quick-tempered and
impulsive, but he was also suave by nature, and his long habit of
courteous indulgence to his wife caused him to alter the phrase. "I did
not know that you had so lively an imagination as to persist in
believing that old myth, Maria."
"But your Aunt Penny did marry one of the Beauchamps of Waylands,"
insisted Mrs. Millar.
"Certainly; and she made the poorest marriage of anybody that I have
ever had to do with, though I have always understood that he was not a
bad sort, beyond being as thick-headed as his brother the squire or an
officer of dragoons. He get on at the bar! I dare say not. And he was no
quicker-witted or longer-sighted in Australia. You must have heard me
say how grieved I was once when I came across a fellow from Sydney who
had been up the country, and remembered something of the Beauchamps and
their straits. They were regularly hard up, and went through no end of
trouble. Poor Aunt Penny seldom had a woman-servant--women-servants were
more difficult to get out there in those days. She had to wash, cook,
and scour for the men at the station."
"Why didn't they come home?" inquired Mrs. Millar rather weakly.
"Come home! They had nothing to come home with, or to. You don't suppose
his brother, the squire, with a wife and family of his own, would have
kept them, though the Beauchamps had received her civilly enough at the
time of the marriage! She had to milk the cows when the cow-man was
otherwise wanted. I do not say that many a better born woman than she
was has not done as much and thought little of it, only it was not in
Aunt Penny's line. I can just remember her when I was a small boy, a
pretty creature who read Italian, sang to her guitar, and made bread
seals for her amusement. She had such a mortal terror where cows were
concerned that she would run like a lapwing when she heard one come
lowing up the lane behind the house. Paton, the man from Sydney who
remembered them, thought they did a little better towards the end, when
they got a store, and Mrs. Beauchamp kept it. Do you hear that, Maria?"
cried the Doctor, with a half-humorous, half-indignant emphasis.
"Yes, I hear," replied Mrs. Millar, with an obstinate inflection of her
voice which said, "I am of my own opinion still." She illustrated this
by adding, in an undertone, "They were in Australia."
"A store," continued the Doctor, "is the rudest, most uncouth kind of
shop; and Beauchamp was not fit to keep it, he had to turn it over to
his wife, who was thankful to serve shepherds and bush-rangers for aught
I know. She lost one child in the bush, God help her! The little thing
wandered away and was never heard of again; and her other child, a boy,
who grew up, did not turn out well. I tell you, I never like to think or
speak of the mother."
"Poor Aunt Penny!" said Mrs. Millar hastily. "But there is one
thing"--with a sudden accent of triumph in the perception that she had
the advantage of her husband at last--"your Aunt Penny married the man
she cared for; she got her choice, and in that light she had no reason
to complain, though she had to abide by it."
The Doctor was a little taken aback. "I do not know that she
complained--at least her people at home heard nothing of it. And you
must do me the justice of owning that I have done nothing to force
Dora's inclinations. Indeed, I am not clear that I have done my duty. I
ought to have reasoned with the girl. Robinson is not only a good man,
he is also a gentleman, every inch of him, so was his father before
him."
"In the choice of Jenny Coppock, of Coppock's Farm, for a wife!"
exclaimed Mrs. Millar, still rebellious, even satirical and disdainful.
"He was entitled to choose whom he would, I suppose, so long as she was
an honest woman, and Jenny Coppock was that quite as much as her husband
was a gentleman. She made him happy, I believe, strange as it may sound
to some people, as ladies do not always make their husbands happy--you
know I mean nothing personal, Maria. Whether she was quite happy herself
is a different question, of which I have had no means of judging. But I
have heard you yourself say that she never presumed on her rise in rank,
or sought to thrust her comely, kindly face where it was not wanted. Her
son has a look of her, without her good looks. Poor Mrs. Robinson! I was
with her in her first and last illness, as you are aware, and a more
courageous, self-forgetful soul I had never the privilege to attend."
Mrs. Millar turned back in the conversation, and took to dogmatizing.
"People who are well-informed and well-bred will never descend to a
lower level without great discomfort and serious loss. I for one, though
I have not profited by the advantages the girls have commanded, and I
daresay have not their brains"--she made the frank admission with
womanly, motherly humility--"though I could not to save my life make one
of Rose's beautiful water-colour sketches, or read Greek and Latin like
'little May,' or even talk to the point on every subject under the sun
like Annie, still I should not be happy if I had to keep company with
Wilkins the butcher's or Ord the baker's wife, and they would not be
happy either. It would not matter, in one sense, though I knew they were
respectable, worthy women, and were ever so much better off as to money
than I. That would not keep me from feeling thoroughly out of place and
having hardly an idea in common with my neighbours in their
plush-trimmed gowns and fur-lined mantles. I could not stand such
degradation for my girls," she protested, with rising agitation. "I had
far rather that they and I should be the poorest ladies in the land,
should have to pinch and deny ourselves all round."
"It is little you know of it," muttered Dr. Millar, shaking his white
head, and pensively contemplating his finger-nails.
"While we still retained the position to which we were born, and the
associations among which we were reared," ended Mrs. Millar, with a
gasp.
"Bless the woman, what does she mean?" cried Dr. Millar after his lively
fashion, with an air of injured innocence. "Does she pretend that Tom
Robinson has not been educated--stamped, for that matter, with the last
university brand, to which he does credit, I must say? Stay, there goes
the night-bell. I am wanted for somebody."
"You'll never go out again to-night, Jonathan," pleaded Mrs. Millar,
"after all your worry, when you have not had more than a couple of
hours' rest." She was already reproaching herself keenly for having
contradicted and argued with him. She had never been able to comprehend,
for her comfort, that to a man like him an argument is both rousing and
refreshing. In the middle of her remorse she instinctively held up her
head, and balanced her cap as a Dutchwoman of the last century balanced
her milk-pail, or a girl of the Roman Campagna her sheaf of grass and
wild flowers. "It is a shame," she reflected indignantly; "it is very
likely nothing of any consequence, just one of those inconsiderate
people who think that a professional man ought to be always at their
beck and call."
"There, Maria, you're scoring another point for trade," said the little
doctor, getting on his feet, and buttoning up his coat as a preliminary
to obeying the call. "I'll warrant Wilkins and Ord will be toasting
their toes, and retiring to bed with the comfortable conviction that
their night's rest will not be disturbed; since Wilkins's head-man
attends to the slaughter-house, and the eldest journeyman baker sees to
the setting of the sponge. Why don't you say, _noblesse oblige_, Maria?
But I think I know the name of the inconsiderate individual who has
interrupted our conversation, and I assure you he would not if he could.
It is little Johnny Fleming--Fleming the grocer's son--whose case is
critical, I fear. I told his mother if he got worse to send for me at
once. When I am out, at any rate, I'll just look in on old Todd, in
Skinners' Buildings. He appeared in a dying state this morning; but as
the family have not sent to let me know of the death, if he has hung on
so long, the chance is he will rally and come round this bout. I'll be
some time; don't sit up for me, my dear."
"It is too bad," Mrs. Millar fretted. "They ought to send at night for
Newton or Capes from Woodleigh--it is only a step for any of the young
doctors, instead of disturbing a man of your age."
"Good heavens! don't breathe such a thing. I could not afford it. I
thought of taking a young partner twenty years ago, but I put it off
till it was too late. Perhaps it was a mistake; we all make mistakes,"
he sighed. "An active young practitioner, well up to date, might have
kept the business better together."
"Nonsense!" cried his wife energetically. "Nobody would have looked at
him when they could have had your skill and experience."
"Then be thankful I'm still fit for work--one must take the bad with the
good. It is the fortune of war, Maria," said the gallant old doctor as
he departed.