The Son of His Father: Volume 3 by Mrs. Oliphant - HTML preview

CHAPTER XVIII.
 A SUSPENDED SOLUTION.

IT seemed to matter very little to John that Mr. Cattley met him in the evening with what he thought good news. In the absence of anything better, it was good news. May had been very amiable, as was the manner of that hopeless but good-humoured and philosophical unfortunate. He declared that nothing on earth would induce him to injure his children by attaching himself to them: he had come back to John’s room only to return those papers which he had taken with the intention of disposing of them on his son’s account, meaning no harm. He had never meant any harm. He had intended, perhaps, to secure to himself a share of the profit, but never to harm the boy. ‘Though he’s sadly changed, if ever he was my little chap,’ he said.

Mr. Cattley did not tell Jack, but he confided to Susie that he had offered to take that smiling and gentle-mannered reprobate to live with ‘us’ in the new parish where nobody would have known. But May would not listen to any such proposal. He was very wise and foreseeing, and full of consideration.

‘There is no saying who might turn up,’ he said; ‘at the last, everything gets known; and perhaps a parson’s house would be too much for me,’ he had added, with a twinkle in his eyes. ‘I don’t know that I’m good enough for that. I might fall into temptation, don’t you know! And I couldn’t live with a blunderbuss always at my head, which would be the case if I were with that son of mine—if he is my son. And Susie would be worse, with her eyes. I remember her eyes long ago—they were harder to meet than all her mother’s talk. They’re all very good, Mr. Cattley. A man might be very happy among them; but not my kind. I’m not worthy of such company. No, I’ve got a plan of my own.’

This plan, when it was stated, was to the effect that May had made up his mind to emigrate. He thought he would go to the far West of America, or to California.

‘I don’t want to go to a place where there’s no fun,’ he avowed, candidly. ‘I want to see a little life. If I stay here, I’ll get into mischief.’

Mr. Cattley (against his own wishes) had done his best to persuade him to depart from this determination, but in vain; and finally he had been authorised to treat with the family for the passage-money of the two travellers, for Mr. Cattley had found the faithful Joe in attendance, and had not been able to persuade May that this was not a fit companion for him.

‘He has been all the company I’ve had. Perhaps he’s not fit for respectable society,’ said May, looking at the slouching ruffian with eyes that were almost affectionate, ‘but I’m not respectable myself, and why should I pretend to be better than he is? I’m not better, I’m worse, if the truth was known; for of course I know a great deal better, and ought to have avoided what was wrong, if anything is really wrong or right in this world. It depends so much on your point of view.’

‘But why should you not be respectable?’ the curate had said. ‘There is a home waiting for you, and better company than Joe.’

The unteachable, the never-to-be-convinced, shook his head. ‘Joe will suit me best,’ he said. And thus the bargain was made. He was to have a moderate allowance, his passage-money, and his outfit. He was shipped off with his friend, decently clothed, well fitted out as he desired, and disappeared into the West. When his children, half-glad, half-miserable, went to see him off, he bade them be cheerful and not fret. ‘For there is no telling when the fancy may take me, and I may turn up again,’ he said. The hearts of Susie and John sank within them at this last blessing which he flung at them over the side of the ship, which was already beginning to churn the water on her passage outward-bound. They did not see the twinkle in his eye, nor know that he meant it for a joke in the humorous simplicity of his heart.

Susie married her curate shortly after, very quietly, without any fuss, in London, an event which caused much excitement in Edgeley, but none where it took place. The Rev. Percy Spencer never mentioned it at all, or allowed that he knew of it. But he spoke of ‘that fool Cattley,’ and was so violent about the late curate’s mismanagement of the parish that even the mild rector, who never made any appearance save in extremity, took up the cudgels on behalf of the absent.

‘It will be well for you if you do half as much for the parish in your day as Cattley did in his,’ the rector said; and his son aghast at this unexpected defence ventured to say no more. Mrs. Egerton treated the matter in the contrary way. She made, perhaps, too great a joke of it, talking to everybody on the subject. ‘Such a good thing for him,’ she said, ‘going into a new place: and a good little nonentity of a wife who will adore him, which is what our good Mr. Cattley was little used to.’ But she sent the pair a wedding present, and was what Susie called very kind. This marriage was no help to Elly, however, in the arduous piece of work which she found she had before her when she got home. It made matters a little worse. It turned Percy into an open and violent foe, and it shook a little the wavering sympathy which Mrs. Egerton always accorded her. And as for the rector, whom Elly had declared her faith in, he did not respond as she had hoped. He was a true gentleman, he was as good as Chaucer’s ‘very parfit gentle knight’—he was all his daughter had claimed for him to be. But he, too, shuddered at the name of the convict. Like all the older people, he remembered May’s story, and all about him: and to permit his daughter, the quintessence of the family excellence and pride, the flower of all the kindred, to connect herself with such a race was more than Mr. Spencer’s generosity, or his kindness, or even Elly’s influence could bring him to. He retired into that stronghold of silence which is so redoubtable. He would not argue nor give his reasons; he would not enter into the abstract question. He acknowledged, or at least he did not contest, the merits of John. But, when all was said that Elly’s fervid eloquence could say, the rector remained unresponsive and unshaken.

‘One might as well try to get an answer out of a stone wall,’ Elly cried, in hot exasperation to her aunt.

‘Oh, my dear, didn’t I tell you so? I told poor Jack so and he believed me, but you would not believe me. He will never, never consent.’

‘Then he shall never, never be asked any more!’ cried Elly, in her indignation.

But this was a thing which it was not practicable to carry out. He was asked again and again, and continued to be asked until the time when Elly should come of age, and then she was determined to take her own way.

‘I am disappointed in papa,’ she wrote to John, ‘but it is not out of his heart he does it. He has not a word to say for himself. When I have showed him the question in a just light, and proved that all their objections are prejudice and nonsense, he just goes back to where he was at first and shakes his head. But never mind. In two years’ (in a year and a half—in a year—according as time went on, for this formula was repeated on several occasions) ‘I shall be of age. You cannot say that I don’t know the world or that I am too young then; and they all know what I am going to do.’

John could not refuse to take comfort from this repeated and unwavering pledge. He had plunged into the preliminaries of his work without a moment’s delay, and very soon, at an age when in England most young men are only beginning to wonder what they shall do, he found himself at the head of one of the greatest undertakings in the country, the centre of endless activity. Such advancement perhaps, everything favouring, comes sooner in his profession than in any other. But nobody, except those who had seen him grow up, suspected how young Mr. Sandford really was, and even those who did know it could scarcely believe in the accuracy of their own memory. He had always been older than his years, and the great shock he had received in the discovery of his father threw him so far apart from all the thoughts and occupations of youth, that it seems to John himself like half-a-century, that age of doubt and of misery, when everything was at its lowest ebb, before the upspringing of new hope. That grave youth matured under the fire of suffering into something like a precocious middle-age, or at least the steadiest, sternest manhood. He grew to be both respected and feared before he was five-and-twenty. And, what was curious, the resemblance to his father, which had been chiefly, perhaps, in the imagination of the elders, died completely away. He became like Mrs. Sandford in these days of strong activity and doubtful hope: not severe to his men, the multitude of work-people of all classes who now laboured under him, a whole little world of clerks, engineers, artisans, and labourers in every grade. He was not severe ever: it was said indeed that he took circumstances into consideration and tempered justice with mercy when any fault was pointed out at the office or among the men, far more than most masters do, and was slow to lose patience with any young culprit; but he looked severe, which is the same thing—nay, is better as a deterrent. The people under him were afraid of the stern look of his youthful unimpeachable virtue: whereas, if he had been as severe in fact as in looks, a natural antagonism, the protest of nature against harshness, would have speedily evolved itself.

There are some things, however, which John has not been able to do, notwithstanding his great success. He has never been able to move his mother from the position in which she has so firmly placed herself. Mrs. Sandford spoke no more of her husband than was inevitable; she never recurred to the subject with John, never mentioned it to Susie except on that one morning when Mr. Cattley was first introduced to her: but she took upon herself all the arrangements that were made by Mr. Cattley for May’s comfort, not permitting either son or daughter to interfere. Susie was proud of this fact, while John with a grudge understood it at least—that the proud woman could speak more freely to a stranger than to her children, of the man who had been the ruin of her own life. She would not see her husband, however, and never spoke of him, nor gave the least indication of any knowledge on the subject. If she was aware of the time of his departure, she made no sign of knowing it. There was no relenting in her, no affection, only a horror beyond words. And she would not allow John, when he began to grow rich, to remove her from the laborious post which it seemed no longer right that the mother of a rising man, with plenty of money at his disposal, should continue to hold. She smiled at the suggestion, and dismissed it with a wave of her hand. To return to the little house at Edgeley among all the village people, which was what John in youthful ignorance, notwithstanding his precocious middle-age, would have liked her to do, was indeed impossible. What would she have done there? unless, indeed, the cholera had broken out, or some tremendous epidemic, when she could have organised hospitals. John, however, here let us allow, with a great want of perception, was annoyed that she should not have accepted this proposal of his, and retired and given herself repose after her hard-working life. But Mrs. Sandford was not one of the people who long for rest. ‘The wages of going on’ was what pleased her most, and work, and her own way. John was not pleased; it would have soothed him to think that his mother was resting and doing nothing in that little house, which he kept up always with an obstinate determination that it should be, if not a grateful retirement for anyone, at least the shrine of departed innocence and peace.

We will not conceal from the reader that Elly is now twenty-one and more, but that the marriage has not yet taken place. There has been sickness and trouble at Edgeley, and the only daughter of the house has not been able to withdraw from the post of duty: but since she became of age she and her betrothed have corresponded fully. She knows everything that goes on at the works, and all the new steps John is taking, and received telegrams three or four times a day when that dreadful catastrophe occurred which everyone has read of, when the machinery broke down and the water poured back into the old channels, and for a moment everything seemed in jeopardy. John dragged her into that as if she had been his head clerk: he demanded her sympathy at every moment, clamouring in her ears with his telegrams, in a way which excited all the village. Indeed, there has been no political convulsion, no contested election, no crime or accident for fifty years, which has thrilled through Edgeley like that supposed collapse of the works in the Thames Valley. When all was right, the whole community began to breathe again. Dick, who was at home on furlough, trudged backward and forward between the rectory and the post-office for several days, too impatient to wait for the telegraph boy: and when it was all over he was the man who electrified the rectory and all the community by saying, ‘This will never do.’ Dick was a man of few words, like his father; an easy-going man who let other people manage most of his affairs for him; but when much enforced he would say a word of weight all the more startling from its rarity. He said these words one evening after dinner in the midst of the family, suddenly when nobody expected it. He brought down his hand upon the table, not roughly, but with sufficient sound to call attention, and he said,

‘This will never do. This business about Elly and Jack. He is a better man than any of us. What does it matter who was his father? He’s his own father, and all his relations. And that Mrs. Cattley’s a sweet little woman. Don’t let’s have any more nonsense about it,’ said Dick.

The rector gasped, and Mrs. Egerton fell a-crying, and Percy rose and left the table. But Elly held out her hand to her big brother, and the thing was as good as settled from that day.

Let it be a comfort to all virtuous young persons in a similar position that, as long as they hold out and are firm and constant, some one will always arise at the end and face all obstructions with the verdict of good sense and honest sympathy, saying in face of all unnecessary objections, whether of birth or of money: ‘This will never do.’

But with all his success, and with the happiness which is about to come, one great cloud remains on John Sandford’s life, a fear which sometimes takes his breath away and makes his heart sick, the fear that some day when he suspects nothing, some sweet day—it might be his marriage morning, it might be any happy anniversary—there will suddenly appear round a corner a stumbling, shambling figure, never without a certain attractiveness even in its degradation, a sort of charm of careless innocence in the midst of guilt. Sometimes when he goes through the works with perhaps a little elation in the greatness of his undertaking and the consciousness of the crowd which looks up to him as master, surrounding him with that veiled obsequiousness which makes the head of great industrial enterprises like a little king—the sight of some shadow in the distance will take all the strength and courage out of him.

‘There is no telling when the fancy may take me.’ These words come back to his ears with a meaning far more than was ever intended. But as a matter of fact there is cause enough to fear. For May never meant anything steadily or for long all his life. And when the fun to which he looked forward is exhausted—which is a thing that soon happens on the shady side of life—who can tell that the fancy may not take him to bring the remnants of his worn-out existence home? Poor wretch, for whom love and honour do not exist, but only fear and pity! the good man, the prosperous and happy, who has deserved his prosperity, as well as the other deserved his misery, is still the Son of His Father, and still bound for ever in this world at least, wretchedness to well-being, honour to shame.

There is, however, one way in which this piece of personal history may be safely made to end like a fairy-tale. Susie and her curate went home to their new parish like a pair of doves to their nest. And these two lived happy ever after, if ever any pair did so in this troubled yet not always miserable world.

THE END.