CHAPTER XLV.
NO LONGER COCK-SURE.
ROCHFORD came back in a sadly humbled condition of mind. He was indeed summoned back by a telegram which told him that all was well and his services unnecessary, and returned trailing his arms, so to speak, very much cast down, beginning to say to himself that the Reading solicitor was not at all likely to be considered a fit match for Sir Edward Penton’s daughter now that all chance of special service to the family was over. Young idiot! why, after staying away so long, couldn’t he have stayed a little longer? Why not have helped somebody by his folly instead of simply dropping from the skies when it suited him in his egotism and selfishness? Rochford came back deeply humiliated, deeply despondent. He too had tramped about London one weary and dismal day, and with disgust had recognized that his mission was not so easy as he had supposed. He had gone to the post-office which Walter had given as his address, and had made what inquiries were possible, and then had hung about hoping that Walter would come to fetch his letter, like those sportsmen who hang about the pools where their big game go to drink. But no one came; and in the morning had arrived that telegram—“All well: further search unnecessary. Has returned home.” Confound him! Why, after making everybody miserable, could he not have stayed another day? Rochford came home very despondent, taking the blackest view of affairs. If he had but acted with more prudence in the end of the year—if he had but pushed on matters and got that bargain accomplished before Sir Walter had been stricken with his last illness!—then the Pentons, though they would still have had the baronetcy, would not have been a great county family, and Ally, without fortune to speak of, would have made no mésalliance in marrying a man who could keep her in luxury though he was but the family man of business. But now, though the fortune was scarcely greater, the position was very different. The mother was very artless, but still she knew enough to know that girls so attractive, with the background of Penton behind them, even if they had not a penny, were not to be thrown away on men like himself. Such was the tenor of his thoughts as he came back. He had expected to return with trumpets sounding and colors flying, bringing back in triumph the wanderer, and having a certain right to his recompense. He came now silent and shamed, an officious person who had offered more than he could perform, who had thrust his services upon those who did not require them. He had not even the courage to see Ally before he went in humbled to her father. It was his duty to tell Sir Edward all that had happened, but he had scarcely a doubt as to what must follow. He would be sent away, he felt sure; probably he would not be allowed to speak to her at all—he the man of business, and she the princess royal, the eldest daughter of the house.
But, to his relief as well as surprise, Sir Edward met him with an unclouded countenance. He gave him a warm grasp of the hand. He said, “Well, Rochford, all’s well that ends well. You see it was all settled more easily than you supposed.”
“You can’t doubt, Sir Edward, that I am most glad it should be so.”
“Oh, yes, I’m sure you are; glad—but a little disappointed, eh?—it’s quite natural: you were so cock-sure. That is the worst of you young men. You think we elder ones are all ninnies; you think we don’t know what we are about. And you are so certain that you sometimes take us in, and we think so too. But you see you are wrong now and then,” said Sir Edward, with high satisfaction, “and it turns out that it is we who are in the right.”
Rochford did not fail to remark to himself in passing, that though he might be wrong he saw very little reason for the assertion that Sir Edward was right. But he was too much cast down for argument. He said, “The chief thing is that your anxiety is relieved. I am very glad of that—though I should have liked better to have had a hand in doing it.” And then he drew himself together as best he could. “There is another subject, Sir Edward, that I wished to speak to you about.”
“Yes, very likely; but you must hear first about Walter. So far as I can make out it has been a mere escapade, and he has been mercifully saved from committing himself, from—compromising his future. We can’t be thankful enough for that. He comes back free as he went away, and having learned a lesson, I hope, an important lesson. We mean to say nothing about it, Rochford. You’ll not take any notice: I’m sure we can trust in you.”
“I hope so,” said the young man; and then he repeated, “Sir Edward, there is another subject—”
“You don’t look,” said Sir Edward, rubbing his hands with internal satisfaction, “so cock-sure about that.”
This was not very discouraging if he had retained sufficient presence of mind to see it. But he was out of heart as well as out of confidence, and everything seemed to him to be of evil augury. “No, indeed,” he said, “I am far from being sure. I feel that what I am going to ask will seem to you very presumptuous: and if it were not that my whole heart is in it and all my hopes—”
“Ah, you use such words lightly, you young men—”
“I don’t use them lightly. If I could help it I would put off speaking to you. I would try whether it were not possible to find some way of recommending myself—of making you think a little better of me.”
“If you suppose,” cried Sir Edward, benignly, “that I think less of you because you were not successful about Walter you are quite mistaken, Rochford. You had not time to do anything. He left town almost as soon as you arrived in it. I never expect impossibilities, even when they are promised,” he added, with a nod of his head.
“It is I that am looking for impossibilities, Sir Edward. I can’t think how I could have been so bold. I have been letting myself think that perhaps—that if you could be got to take it into consideration—that, that in short—”
And Mr. Rochford, crimsoning, growing pale, changing from one foot to another, looking all embarrassment and awkwardness, came to a dead stop and could find nothing more to say.
“What is it? You seem to have great difficulty in getting it out. What have I in my power that is so important, and that you are so shy about?”
“I am shy, that is just the word. You will think me—I don’t know what you will think me—”
“Get it out, man. I can’t tell till I know.”
“Sir Edward,” said Rochford, more and more embarrassed, “your daughter—”
“Oh, my daughter! Is that how it is?” It is not to be supposed that a day had elapsed after Walter’s return and the relief of mind that followed it without some communication passing between Lady Penton and her husband on the second of the subjects that had excited her so deeply.
“Sir Edward,” said the young man, “Miss Penton’s family and position are of course superior to mine. It all depends on the way these matters are looked upon. Some people would consider this an insuperable obstacle. Some do not attach much importance to it. Ideas have changed so much on this subject. My grandfather, as perhaps you are aware, married a Miss Davenport of Doncaster. But I don’t know how you may look on that sort of thing.”
“I don’t exactly see the connection,” said Sir Edward; “your grandfather’s marriage was a good while ago.”
“Yes, when prejudices were a great deal stronger than now. Though they exist in some places, I have the strongest reason to believe that among the best people they are no longer held as they used to be. Eva Milton married a Manchester man that had no education to speak of at all.”
“Are you arguing the question on abstract principles?” said Sir Edward, who was nursing his foot, and looking half-amused, half-bored. His companion was too anxious to be able to judge what this look meant, and he was sadly afraid of irritating the authority in whose hands his happiness lay.
“Oh, no, not at all,” he cried, anxiously: “I wanted to remind you, sir, that it was not the first time that such things had been done. It’s no abstract question: all that I look forward to in life depends on it. I am not badly off, as I can prove to you if you will let me. I could keep my wife, if I had the good fortune to—to—make sure of that—surrounded by everything that belongs to her sphere. There should be nothing wanting in that way. I could make settlements that would be, I think, satisfactory.”
“Is that how you talked to Ally?” said Sir Edward, a perception of the humor of the situation breaking in. “How astonished she must have been!” His mind was so unusually at ease that he was ready to smile even in the midst of an important arrangement like this.
“To Ally!” cried Rochford, startled by the reference, and in his confusion unable to see how much it was in his favor. “No, sir,” he said, eagerly, “not a word! Do you think I would fret her delicate mind with any such suggestions? No. She is far above all that. She knows nothing about it. I may not be worthy of her, but at least I know how to appreciate her. She has heard nothing like this from me.”
“But I suppose you must think that what you did say was not without effect, and that the appreciation is not all on your side? You don’t mind fretting my delicate mind, it appears,” said Sir Edward; and then, in a sharper tone, “How far has this matter gone?”
“Sir Edward,” stammered the young man: his anxiety stupefied instead of quickening his senses; he seemed able to perceive nothing that was not against him, “I—I—”
“You don’t give me very much information,” repeated the father. “Can’t you tell me how far this matter has gone?”
Rochford was a keen man of business. He was not to be overpowered by the most powerful judge or the most aggravating jury. He was in the habit of stating very clearly what he wanted to say. But now he stood before this tribunal stammering, without a word to say for himself. “Sir Edward,” he repeated, “if I had taken time to think I should have felt that you ought to have been consulted first. But in an unguarded moment—my—my feelings got the better of me. I saw her unexpectedly alone. And then,” he added with melancholy energy, “I thought, I confess, that if I could be of use, if I could find and bring back—”
“I see,” said Sir Edward, “that was why you undertook so much. It was scarcely very straightforward, was it, to profess all that interest in the brother when it was the sister you were thinking of all the time?”
“Perhaps it might not be straightforward,” owned the unsuccessful one; “and yet,” after a pause, “it was no pretense. I was interested, if you will let me say so, in—all the family, Sir Edward. I should have been too glad—to be of any use: even if there had been no—even if there had not existed—even if—”
“I see,” said the stern judge again: and then there was a dreadful pause. Circumstances alter much, but not even the advanced views of the nineteenth century can alter the position in which a young lover stands before the father of the girl he loves—a functionary perhaps a little discredited by the march of modern ideas, but who nevertheless has still an enormous power in his hands, a power which the feminine heart continues to believe in, which is certainly able to cause a great deal of discomfort and inconvenience, if nothing else. Rochford stood thoroughly cowed, with his eyes cast down, before this great arbiter of fate, although after a while, as the silence continued, there began to crop up in his mind suggestions, resolutions: how nothing should make him resign his hopes; how only Ally herself could loose the bond between them, how he would take courage to say to the father that however much they respected him his decision would not be absolute, that on the contrary it could be resisted, that the two whose happiness was involved—that the two—the two—words which made his heart jump with a sudden throb in the midst of this horrible uncertainty—would stand against the world together not to be sundered. All these heroic thoughts gathered in his mind as he stood awaiting the tremendous parental decision, which came in a form so utterly unexpected, so bewildering, that he could only gasp, and for a moment could not reply. This was what Sir Edward said:
“You know, I suppose, that my girls will have no money, Rochford?”
“Sir!” cried the lover, with a burst of pent-up breath which seemed to carry away with it the burden of a whole lifetime of care from his soul.
“They will have no money. I am a poor man, and have always been so all my life. If you have not known that before you will have to know it now in your capacity (as you say) of the Penton man of business. To keep up Penton will tax every resource. We shall be rather poorer, my wife thinks, than we have been at the Hook; and as for the girls—”
“Do you mean that that’s all?” cried the young man. “You don’t make any—other objection? What do you think I’m made of? I don’t want any money, Sir Edward. Money! when there is Miss Penton—Ally, if I may call her so. How shall I ever thank you enough? I have plenty of money; it’s not money I want, it’s—it’s—”
Words failed him: he stood and swung Sir Edward’s hand, who looked not without a glow of pleasurable feeling at this young fellow who beamed with gratitude and delight. It is never unpleasant to confer so great a favor. This had not been generally the position in which fate had placed Edward Penton. It had been usually the other way. He had received few blessings, even from the beggars, having so little to give; but an emperor could not have conferred a greater gift than his daughter, a spotless little princess of romance, a creature altogether good and fair and sweet. He felt the water come into his eyes out of that simple sense of munificence and liberal generosity. “I think,” he said, “you’re a good fellow, Rochford, and that you’ll be good to little Ally. She’s too young for anything of the kind, but her mother sees no objection. And she ought to know best.”