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.