LITTLE Mar said nothing at any time about this shock to his being, which occurred when he was so very young that his after recollection of it was of the most imperfect kind—a confused memory of pain rather than any definite recollection of facts. But there was no doubt that it had a very serious effect upon him. Such a change, from the supremacy of an only child, monarch of all he surveyed, the idol of his father and of his aunt, to whom Mar was every thing, into a mere indefinite member of a large nursery party, nobody’s favorite, a little stranger whose tastes were not consulted, nor his fancies thought of—is more tremendous than anything that can happen to a man. How good for him, people said, instead of being petted and spoiled as an only child is so apt to be, to have the advantage of a wholesome nursery life with other children round him, and all the natural give and take of a large family. But such a revolution is a terrible experiment. I have known it drive a delicate child into a sort of temporary imbecility. This could not be said of Mar, for, amid all the criticisms to which he was subject, it was never alleged of him that he was without intelligence. But a great many other things were said which, whether they were true or not, had a great effect upon his after career.
For one thing, Mrs. John Parke intimated to all her friends with great regret that the little lord was exceedingly delicate, which was a thing not to be wondered at considering the age of his parents, the unfortunate tendency to nervous and mental disease in his mother’s family, and the extremely injudicious way in which he had been brought up until the time when he came under her care. He was so delicate that when Mar reached the age at which other boys go to school, his aunt did not feel that she could take the responsibility of permitting him to go. She said it was his uncle who was afraid to take this step, but most people knew that Mrs. John Parke had the reigning will in the house. The situation altogether was one which the outer world did not very well understand. Lady Frogmore lived at the Dower-house, which was quite on the other side of the county, and very difficult to get at from the Park, being out of the way of railways, and requiring a very long and roundabout journey by various junctions. She was well enough to see her friends, to take a little mild share in what was going on, but her son was never with her. It was vaguely rumored that she had taken an aversion to him during the time of the insanity, from which, as a matter of fact, most people were doubtful if she had ever recovered, while many continued to regard her with a little alarm, her sister-in-law being the chief of these. Mrs. John Parke never hesitated to express this feeling with lamentations over her own weakness. “Poor Mary,” she said, “is quite well now: I know she is quite well—just as clear in her head as any of us, except that unfortunate delusion about the boy. I know it is very bad of me, but one can’t help one’s nature; and I cannot get over it. She always frightens me. I keep thinking perhaps something may be said that will set her off—or something happen. I know I am very wrong, but I have such a horror of mad people. Oh yes, I know she is quite well now, but when that is in your nature how can one ever be sure?” Most people sympathized with Mrs. John, who betrayed to her intimates with bated breath the state of affairs between Mary and her child. “Greenpark was in many ways more convenient to us,” she said, “but what could we do? We could not abandon the poor child. John was his natural guardian, and of course we all felt that wholesome quiet family life, when he would simply be one of many, was the best thing for him—the only thing to neutralize all those other dreadful influences. He is always called by his Christian name, not Frogmore, as would naturally be the case for the same reason. It is so much better, with such an excitable feeble child, not to surround him with any sort of special distinction—time enough for that when he is a man.”
“If he ever lives to be a man,” Mrs. Parke’s confidants would say, shaking their heads.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake don’t say such a dreadful thing. What should I do if he did not live to be a man? I think I should kill myself! We his next heirs, and acting as father and mother to him—Oh, no, no. If I did not believe that under all his delicacy he had a tough wiry constitution, I should never have consented to take such a charge.”
But notwithstanding the tough, wiry constitution in which she believed, Mrs. Parke was too anxious about her nephew to allow him to go to school. It was too exciting for him, it was too exhausting for him. With the germs, perhaps, who could tell, of madness in him, it was altogether too dangerous. And Mar accordingly grew up at home under the charge of successive tutors who rarely managed to please Mrs. Parke, or to please themselves under her roof, for long together. Either they had theories as to what was good for their pupil which did not agree with hers, or they found the life so deadly dull which they were expected to spend with Mar in seclusion, shut out from everything that might be going on, that it soon became insufferable to them. They formed quite a procession coming and going, one following the other, and as each man had, more or less, a different system, it may be supposed that poor little Mar’s education did not advance in any remarkable way. What they all agreed in was a desire to get the boy into the open air, to give him the advantage of a country life, to make him hardy and active. But to this Mrs. Parke maintained a constant opposition. He was not strong enough, she said; his lungs were delicate; he would not bear the exposure and exercise which were good for the others. In summer she was obliged to relax her rules, but in winter she was obdurate, with the natural consequence that Mar caught cold more readily than anyone else in the house.
This was the position of affairs when Duke, John Parke’s eldest son, came of age. Duke’s majority was celebrated as if indeed it was he who was the heir. The family had by this time been so long established in the chief house of the race that they were scarcely conscious that it was not theirs by full right of possession. Letty, the eldest girl, was nineteen; she was not quite three years older than Mar, and his champion and supporter in the family. There were two boys younger than she, and a little girl who brought up the rear—all of whom were stronger, noisier, more assuredly at home, masters and mistresses of the position, than the quiet, slim, pale boy, too long, too slight, too grave for his years, who had the habit of being pushed into the background, and never asserted himself, or took any distinctive place in the family party. The younger ones, indeed, were all contemptuous of Mar. His delicacy, of which so much was made, his perpetual staying at home, his supposed incapacity for their sports, and indifference to their pleasures, had been part of their code all their life. There were so many things that Mar could not do. “Oh, he can’t come. He’ll catch cold,” Reginald, who was sixteen, said scornfully when there was any question of Mar sharing their pleasures. The members of the family who stood by Mar were the two eldest, and little Mary, the youngest girl, whom her mother called Tiny, in order not to use poor Lady Frogmore’s name, which John had insisted upon giving her—who made a slave of the quiet boy and found him very serviceable. The girls made Mar’s life a little brighter than it would otherwise have been, and Duke when he was at home, which was not very often, was always good to his old playfellow, who looked up to him as a youth of sixteen does to one of twenty-one, with admiration and devotion. And thus the time drew on to Duke’s majority. The preparations for it caused a little scandal in the neighborhood. The good people about protested to each other that it was for all the world as if John Parke’s son was the heir, but they accepted with alacrity all the same the invitations which Letitia sent forth in so liberal a way. There was to be a dinner of the farmers, who had known Master Duke all his life. There was to be a great ball to which all the county was invited, and there was a fête in the Park for the village folk and all the poor neighbors, and also for the “smart” people whose revels were of a less noisy kind. It is so much the fashion nowadays to put the poor neighbors in the foreground that this fête was Letitia’s chef d’œuvre. The programme altogether was one by which she felt she was to distinguish herself in the county, and which would mark Duke’s birthday as nothing else could do. Mrs. Parke, indeed, spoke of her son exactly as if he were the heir. She spoke of her humble guests as having seen him grow up, as taking such an interest in him. All the connections of the family were collected to celebrate this great event, and what was the most extraordinary of all, Lady Frogmore, who went out so little, and to whom this was in some sort a hostile demonstration, was one of the guests. There was nothing in the whole programme about which the county neighbors, the spectators who watched and criticized Letitia, were so much interested as the demeanor of Lady Frogmore. She had not appeared among them for years, her story was full of mystery, she was said to be indifferent to, if not possessed by an aversion for her own son, her only child, who lived neglected in his uncle’s family. All these things gave excitement to the reappearance of the poor lady, whose pleasant ways so many remembered with kindness, and whose life had been so strangely and so terribly overcast.
By this time the vicar of Grocombe and his wife were both dead. That Mary had been a dreadful disappointment to them, and that they had not at all approved of her conduct at the time of Lord Frogmore’s death, they had not hesitated to say, and Mrs. Hill has indeed been heard to declare that it gave her husband his death-blow. He had been so much disappointed in Mary! He had felt it such a dereliction of duty on her part to leave her son in the hands of the Parkes, people about whose religious principles there was no certainty, and it had helped him to his grave to think of little Mar being brought up perhaps in the most careless way, while his grandfather was a clergyman. Whether it was this mental trouble or bronchitis that removed the vicar at the ripe age of seventy-five, it is at all events certain that he did succumb, and that his wife did not long survive him. When the new vicar was appointed, Mrs. Hill came to her daughters at the Dower-house, but she never was happy there. She kept asking daily why was Mary there and not at the Park? Why had she abandoned her child?—it was nonsense to say that she had forgotten her child! Why, why had she left Mar? which indeed were very reasonable questions, but did not promote the happiness of the house. After her death the two sisters continued as before each other’s closest companions, and now with no divided duty, save that Mary was very tranquil in her secluded life, and that Agnes’ heart was racked with anxiety. She kept up a little correspondence with Mar, exchanging letters full of love and longing for his schoolboy epistles, in which there was not even the animation of a schoolboy, which poor Agnes looked for with the wildest anxiety, and cried over with the deepest disappointment when they came. How should he be able to respond—that undeveloped, heart-stunned boy—to her tenderness, the tenderness of an old mother, not even young to gain his sympathy? Agnes was the one who suffered amid all these differing interests and feelings. Now and then, at long intervals, she had a glimpse at her boy, a privilege which generally left her sadder than ever. “He looks so delicate,” she was even forced to allow to Letitia, who surprised her in tears after she had taken farewell of the boy. “Yes, he is very delicate,” said Letitia with a grave face. “I take a hundred precautions with him which I should laugh at for my own children. But if anything were to happen to Mar in my house I should die.” “Oh, God forbid that anything should happen!” cried poor Agnes. “I am sure I hope so sincerely,” cried Letitia, but still shaking her head. And the same impression was universal. The old women in the village whom Agnes went to see on her visit, old pensioners, shook their heads, too, and said, “Ma’am, you’ll never rare him.” And the tutor who was leaving seized upon the owner of the sympathetic face and discoursed to her largely of the false system on which Mar was being trained. “He’s like a flower growing in a prison—that flower, you know, that some man wrote a book about, all running to seed, and not a bit of color for want of air and sun.”
“Oh, if it was only air and sun that were wanted,” cried Agnes.
“It is, it is!” said the young man. “I hear his mother’s living; why don’t she send and take him away? To be with you now, who would pet him and study him, would make all the difference in the world.”
“Oh, don’t say so,” said Agnes with tears, “for it cannot be, I fear it cannot be.”
“Well,” said the young man, “I would not leave the boy here if I had anything to do with him: but then perhaps I’m prejudiced, for I hate—Mrs. Parke.” He was going to say “the woman here,” but paused in time.
“You must not speak so,” said Agnes.
“No, I suppose I ought to keep it to myself,” said the tutor. She said to herself afterwards that no doubt it was because he was going to leave, because he had been dismissed. People said you must never trust discharged servants. To be sure he was not a servant, he was a gentleman; but still—Agnes tried a little to comfort herself in this way; but Mrs. Parke’s pious hope that nothing might happen, and the tutor’s bold criticisms rankled in her mind. It was she that decided Lady Frogmore to accept the invitation to all the rejoicings over Duke’s majority, though it was not Agnes but Mary that was fond of Duke. “It is right that you should show yourself,” she said to her sister. Mary did not perceive what good showing herself would do, and feared the great dinner, and the return to a place which had so many sad associations (she said). But Agnes pressed so much that her sister, always gentle and so seldom asserting her own will against anyone else’s, at last consented. A visit to the Park was a great step. It was always on the cards that something might awaken smouldering recollections, or throw a new light upon that mystery of the past. At all events, it was with the stirrings of a new hope that Agnes, who managed everything, got her sister afloat on the day before Duke’s birthday, and steered her by the many junctions through half a dozen different trains across country to the Park. It was a troublesome journey, and took the greater part of the day, what with the difficulty of connecting trains, and long waiting at various stations. These delays and waitings were, however, rather good for Mary, who began to be roused out of her usual quiescence, and to ask questions about when they would arrive, and what company they would be likely to find there. “Duke was always my boy,” poor Mary said. A little cloud passed over her face as she spoke, as though a consciousness of something that had interfered between Duke and her had floated across her thoughts. Agnes did not burst out as she would have liked to do into a blast of sentiment in respect to Duke, which was perfectly uncalled for. But she looked disappointed though she did not say it.