John: A Love Story - Volume 1 by Mrs. Oliphant - HTML preview

CHAPTER XIV.

MR CREDITON’S bank was in the High Street of Camelford—a low-roofed, rather shabby-looking office, with dingy old desks and counters, at which the clerks sat about in corners, all visible to the public, and liable to constant distraction. The windows were never cleaned, on principle, and there were some iron bars across the lower half of them. Mr Crediton’s own room was inside—you had to pass through the office to reach it; and the banker, when he chose to open his door, was visible to the clerks and the public at the end of the dingy vista, just as the clerks, and the public entering at the swing-door, and sometimes the street outside, were to him. The office was a kind of lean-to to the house, which was much loftier, more imposing, and stately; and Mr Crediton’s room communicated with his dwelling by a dark passage. The whole edifice was red brick, and recalled the age of the early Georges, or even of their predecessor Anne—a time when men were not ashamed of their business, but at the same time did it unpretendingly, and had no need during office hours of gilding or plate-glass. The house had a flight of steps up to it almost as high as the top of the office windows, and a big iron horn to extinguish links, and other traces of a moderate antiquity. Up to these steps Kate Crediton’s horse would be led day after day, or her carriage draw up, in very sight of the clerks behind their murky windows. They kept their noses over their desks all day, in order that a butterfly creature, in all the brilliant colours of her kind, might flutter out and in in the sunshine, and take her pleasure. That was perhaps what some of them thought. But, to tell the truth, I don’t believe many of them thought so. Even Mr Whichelo, the head clerk, whose children were often ailing, and who had a good deal of trouble to make both ends meet, smiled benign upon Kate. Had she been her own mother, it might have been different; but she was a creature of nineteen, and everybody felt it was natural. The clerks, with their noses at the grindstone, and her father sombre in the dingy room, working hard too in his way—all to keep up the high-stepping horses, the shining harness, the silks and velvets, and the high supremacy of that thing like a rosebud who sat princess among them,—after all, was it not quite natural? What is the good of the stem but to carry, and of the leaves and thorns but to protect, the flower?

But it may be supposed that John Mitford’s feelings would be of a very strange description when he found himself dropped down in Mr Crediton’s office, as if he had dropped from the skies. He was the junior clerk, and did not know the business, and his perch was behind backs, not far from one of the windows from which he could see all Kate’s exits and entrances. He saw the public, too, coming and going, the swing-door flashing back and forward all day long, and on Saturdays and market-days caught sometimes the wondering glances of country folks who knew him. He sat like a man in a dream, while all these things went on around him. How his life had changed! What had brought him here? what was to come of it? were questions which glided dreamily through John’s brain from time to time, but he could give no answer to them. He was here instead of at Fanshawe Regis; instead of serving the world and his generation, as he had expected to do, he was junior clerk in a banker’s office, entering dreary lines of figures into dreary columns. How had it all come about? John was stupefied by the fall and by the surprise, and all the overwhelming dreary novelty; and accordingly he sat the day through at first, and did what he was told to do with a certain apathy beyond power of thinking; but that was a state of mind, of course, which could not last for ever. Yet even when that apathy was broken, the feeling of surprise continued to surmount all other feelings. He had taken this strange step, as he supposed, by his own will; nobody had forced or even persuaded him. It was his own voluntary doing; and yet how was it? This question floated constantly, without any power on his part to answer it, about his uneasy brain.

He was close to Kate, sitting writing all day long under a roof adjoining the very roof that sheltered her, with herself before his eyes every day. For he could not help but see her as she went out and in. But still it was doubtful whether there was much comfort in those glimpses of her. Mr Crediton had not been unkind to him; but he had never pretended, of course, to be deeply delighted with the unexpected choice which his daughter had made. “If I consent to Kate’s engagement with you,” he had said, “it must be upon my own conditions. It is likely to be a long time before you can marry, and I cannot have a perpetual philandering going on before my eyes. She might like it, perhaps, for that is just one of the points upon which girls have no feeling; but you may depend upon it, it would be very bad for you, and I should not submit to it for a moment. I don’t mean to say that you are not to see her, but it must be only at stipulated times. Thus far, at least, I must have my own way.” John had acquiesced in this arrangement without much resistance. It had seemed to him reasonable, comprehensible. Perpetual philandering certainly would not do. He had to work—to acquire a new trade foreign to all his previous thoughts and education—to put himself in the way of making money and providing for his wife; and he too could see as well as her father that to be following her about everywhere, and interrupting the common business of life by idle love-making, however beatific it might be, was simply impossible. To be able to look forward now and then to the delight of her presence—to make milestones upon his way of the times in which he should be permitted to see her, and sun himself in her eyes,—with that solace by the way, John thought the time would pass as the time passed to Jacob—as one day; and he accordingly assented, almost without reluctance.

But he did not know when he consented thus to the father’s conditions that Kate would be flashing before him constantly under an aspect so different from that in which he had known her. The engagement, though it made such an overwhelming difference to him, made little difference to Kate. She had come home to resume her usual life—a life not like anything that was familiar to him. Poor John had never known much about young ladies. He had never become practically aware of the place which amusement holds in such conditions of existence—how, in fact, it becomes the framework of life round which graver matters gather and entwine themselves; and it was a long time before he fully made the discovery, if, indeed, he did ever make it. Society could scarcely be said to exist in Fanshawe Regis; and those perpetual ridings and drivings and expeditions here and there—those dinners and dances—those afternoon assemblages—the music and the chatter, the va et vient, the continual flutter and movement, confounded the young man. He tried to be glad at first that she had so much gaiety, and felt very sorry for himself, who was shut out from all share in it. And then he got a little puzzled and perplexed. Did this sort of thing go on for ever? Was there never to be any break in it? Kate herself unconsciously unfolded to him its perennial character without the remotest idea of the amazement she was exciting in his mind. So far as John’s experience went, a dance, or even a dinner-party, or a croquet-party, or a picnic, were periodical delights which came at long intervals; but they were the common occupations of life to Kate. He felt that he could have lived and worked like Jacob for twice seven years, had his love been living such a life as Rachel did by his side—going out with the flocks, tending the lambs, drawing water at the fountain, smiling shy and sweet at him from the tent-door. These were the terms in which his imagination put it. Had he seen Kate trip by the window as his mother did with her little basket, or trip back again with a book, after his own ideal of existence, his heart would have blessed her as she passed, and he himself would have returned to his ledger and worked twice as hard, and learned his duties twice as quickly; but to see her flash away from the door amid a cavalcade of unknown riders—to see her put into her carriage by some man whom he longed to kick on the spot—to watch her out of sight going into scenes where his imagination could not follow her, was very hard upon John. And thus to see her every day, and yet never, except once a-week or so, exchange words with her! Against his will, and in spite of all his exertions, this sense of her continual presence, and of her unknown friends, and life which was so close to him, and yet so far from him, absorbed his mind. When he should have been working his office work he was thinking where could she have gone to-day? When he ought to have been awakening to the interests of the bank, he was brooding with a certain sulkiness quite unnatural to him over the question, who that man could be who put her on her horse? It is impossible to describe how all this hindered and hampered him, and what a chaos it made of his life.

And even Kate herself found it very different from what she had anticipated. She sent in a servant for him several times at first; and once, when she had some little errand in the town, had the audacity to walk into the bank in her proper person and call her lover from his desk. “Please tell Mr Mitford I want him,” she said, looking Mr Whichelo full in the face, with an angelical blush and smile; and when he came to her, Kate turned to him before all the clerks, who were watching with a curiosity which may be imagined. “Oh John,” she said, “come with me as far as Paterson’s. It is market-day, and I don’t like to walk alone.” Of course he went, though he had his work to do. Of course he would have gone whatever had been the penalty. The penalty was that Mr Crediton gave Kate what she called “a dreadful scold.” “It was like a fishwoman, you know,” she confided to John afterwards. “I could not have believed it of papa; but I suppose when people are in a passion they are all alike, and don’t mind what they say.”

“It is because he grudges you to me,” said poor John, with a sigh, “and I don’t much wonder;” upon which Kate clasped her two pretty hands on his arm, and beguiled him out of all his troubles. This was on one of the Sunday evenings which it was his privilege to spend with her. Mr Crediton was old-fashioned, and saw no company on Sundays, and that was the day on which John was free to come to spend as much of it as he pleased with his betrothed. At first he had begun by going to luncheon, and remaining the whole afternoon in her company; but very soon it came to be the evening only which was given up to him. Either it was that Mr Crediton made himself disagreeable at luncheon, or that he thrust engagements upon Kate, reminding her that she had promised to read to him, or copy letters for him, or some altogether unimportant matter. Mr Crediton, though he was so much the best off of the party that he had thus the means of avenging himself, was not without grievances too; indeed, had he been consulted, he would probably have declared himself the person most aggrieved. His only child was about to be taken from him, and her society was already claimed by this nameless young man, without any particular recommendation, whom in her caprice she preferred. The Sunday afternoons had been the banker’s favourite moment; he had nothing to do, and his doors were shut against society, and his child was always with him. No wonder that he used all the means in his power to drive back the enemy from that sacred spot.

And Mr Crediton had means in his power,—unlike Mrs Mitford, who sat, more alone than he, by her bedroom window all the hours when she was not at church, and wiped noiselessly again and again the tears out of her eyes. John’s mother suffered more from this dreary change than words could say. She had not the heart to sit down-stairs except when it was necessary for that outline of family life consisting of prayers and meals, which, to Dr Mitford’s mind, filled up all possible requirements. Mrs Mitford did not tell her husband what she was thinking. There seemed no longer any one left in the world who cared to know. And she could not punish Kate as Mr Crediton could punish John. Probably she would not have done it if she could, for to punish Kate would have been to punish him too; but oh, she sometimes thought to herself, if her horse had only run away with her before somebody else’s door, this might never have been!

Thus it will be seen that this pretty young lady and that first caprice for the subjugation of John which came into her mind before she had seen him, in the leisure of her convalescence, had affected the friends of both in anything but a happy way. Indeed nobody except perhaps Kate herself got any good out of the new bond. To her, who at the present moment was not called upon to make any sacrifice or give up anything, the possession of John, as of some one to fall back upon, was pleasant enough. She had all her usual delights and pleasures, lived as she had always lived, amused herself as of old, was the envy of her companions, the ringleader in all their amusements, the banker’s only, much-indulged, fortunate child; and at the same time she had John to worship her on those Sunday evenings which once had been rather dull for Kate. When Mr Crediton dozed, as he sometimes did after dinner, or when he was busy with the little private pieces of business he used to give himself up to on Sunday evenings, there was her lover ready to bow down before her. It was the cream and crown of all her many enjoyments. Everybody admired, petted, praised, and was good to Kate—and John adored her. She looked forward to her Sunday ramble round the old-fashioned garden, sometimes in the dark, sometimes in the moonlight, with an exquisite sense of something awaiting her there which had a more subtle, penetrating, delicious sweetness than all the other sweets surrounding her. And she felt that he was happy too as soon as she had placed her little hand on his arm—and forgot that there was anything in his lot which could make him feel that he had bought his happiness dearly. Kate was young, and knew nothing about life, and therefore was unconsciously selfish. She was happy, without any drawback to her happiness; and so, naturally and as a matter of course, she took him to be, forgetting that he had purchased that hour on the Sunday evenings by the sacrifice of all the prejudices and all the habits and prospects and occupations of his life. This unconsciousness was one from which she might awaken any day. A chance word might open her eyes to it, and show her, to her own disgust and confusion, the immense price he was paying for so transitory a delight; but at present nothing had awakened such a thought in her mind, and she was the one happy among the five most intimately concerned.

Next after Kate in contentment with the new state of affairs was Dr Mitford, who saw a prospect of a very satisfactory “settlement in life” for his son, though he did not feel any very great satisfaction in the preliminaries. It was a pain to him, though a mild one, that John had abandoned the Church and become a clerk in a banker’s office. It was a pain, and a little humiliation too, for everybody in Fanshawe Regis, and even the neighbouring clergymen, shook their heads and were very sorry to hear it, and wounded Dr Mitford’s pride. But, after all, that was a trifling drawback in comparison with the substantial advantage of marrying so much money as was represented by Kate Crediton. “And fond of her too,” he would say to himself in his study when he paused in one of his articles and thought it over. But yet the articles were interrupted by thinking it over as they had never been used to be. It gave him a passing twinge now and then, but it was he who suffered the least after Kate.

As for Mr Crediton, there was a certain sullen wrath in his mind which he seldom suffered to have expression, yet which plagued him like a hidden wound. To think that for this lout, this country lad, his child should, as it were, have jilted him, made light of all his wishes, shown a desire to separate herself from him and the life which he had fenced round from every care, and made delightful with every indulgence that heart could desire! He had gone out of his way to contrive pleasures for her, and to surround her with everything that was brilliant and fair like herself. She was more like a princess than a banker’s daughter, thanks to his unchanging, unremitting thoughtfulness; and this was how she had rewarded him the very first opportunity she had. Mr Crediton was very sore and wroth, as fathers are sometimes. Mothers are miserable and lonely and jealous often enough, heaven knows! but the fathers are wroth with that inextinguishable wonder—how the love-making of some trumpery young man should, in a day or two, or a week or two, obliterate their deeper love and all the bonds of nature—which lies as deep in the heart as does the young impulse which calls it forth. Mr Crediton was angry, not so much, except at moments, with Kate, as with the world, and nature, and things in general—and John. He could not cross or thwart his child, but he would have been glad in his heart if something had happened to the man whom his child loved. Such sentiments are wicked, and they are very inconsistent—but they exist everywhere, and it would be futile to deny them; and the consequence was, that Mr Crediton was much less happy after his daughter’s engagement, and put up with it by an effort; and, while John had his moment of delight on those Sunday evenings, was, for his part, anything but delighted. It even made him less good a man. He sat and fretted by himself, and found it very difficult to occupy his mind with any other subject. It vexed him to think of his Kate thus hanging on a stranger’s arm. Of course he had always known that she must marry some time, but he had thought little of it as an approaching calamity; and then it had appeared certain that there would be a blaze of external advantage, and perhaps splendour, in any match Kate could make, which perhaps, prospectively at least, would lessen the blow. If it had exalted her into the higher circles of the social paradise, he felt as if the deprivation to himself would have been less great. But here there was nothing to make amends—no salve to his wounded tenderness. Poor John! Mr Crediton had the justice now and then to feel that John was paying a hard price for his felicity. “Serve the fellow right,” he said, and almost hated him; and pondered, with a sourd sense of cruelty and wrong-doing, how he might be got rid of and removed out of the way.

Mrs Mitford, for her part, was simply unhappy, without hoping to mend matters, or thinking any more than she could help about the cause. She had lost her boy. To be sure it is what most mothers have to look forward to; but she, up to the very last, had been flattering herself that she should not be as most mothers. It had seemed so clear that his lot was cast at home, where surely his duty was; and the change had this double aggravation to her, that she had expected him not only to make her personally happy, but to carry on and develop the work of her life. It was she who had been for all these years the real spiritual head of Fanshawe Regis. Dr Mitford had done the “duty,” and had preached the sermons, but every practical good influence, every attempt to mend the rustic parish, to curb its characteristic vices, or develop its better qualities, had come from his wife. And she had laboured on for years past, with the conviction that her son would perfect everything she began; that he would bring greater knowledge to it, and a more perfectly trained mind, and all the superior understanding which such humble women hold to be natural to a man. When she had to give up this hope, it seemed to her at first as though the world had come to an end. What was the use of doing anything more, of carrying on the plans which must now die with her? The next new curate would probably care nothing about her schemes, and even might set himself to thwart her, as new curates sometimes do when a clergywoman is too active in a parish. And she was sick of the world and everything in it. The monotony of her life, from which all the colour seemed to have died out in a moment, suddenly became apparent to her, and all the failures, and obstructions, and hindrances which met her at every side. What could she do, a weak woman, she said to herself, against all the powers of darkness, as embodied in Fanshawe Regis? Would it not be best to resign the unprofitable warfare and sink back into quiet, and shut out the mocking light?

Poor Mrs Mitford! wherever she went the people asked her questions about Mr John. Was he not to be a clergyman after all? Was it along o’ his lass that wouldn’t let him do as he wished? What was it? His mother came home with her heart wearied by such inquiries, and sick with disappointment and misery. And she would go up to the room in which he was born, and cry, and say to herself that she never never could encounter it again. And oh, how dreary it was sitting down-stairs for the few moments which necessity and Dr Mitford required, in those summer nights when the moths were flying by scores in at the open window, and dimness reigned in all the corners, and the lamp shone steady and clear on the table! In all the obscurity round her, her son was not lurking. He was not ready to step in by the open window as he had done so often. He was with Kate Crediton, giving up his whole heart and soul to her; and his father and mother rang for the servants, and had prayers, as though they had never had any children. What a change, what a change it was! Mrs Mitford knew that it was impossible to thwart providence, let its plans be ever so unsatisfactory; but oh, she said to herself, why did not Kate’s accident happen close to the Huntleys, or to any house but hers? Other boys were not so romantic, not so tender-hearted; and other mothers had heaps of children, and could not brood over the fortunes of every individual among them, as Mrs Mitford, with an ache of helpless anger at herself, knew that she brooded over John’s. But all was in vain. She could not mend matters now. She could not mend her own bleeding, aching heart. And after all, the only thing possible was to go back to her work, whatever might come of it, and do her best. She could bear anything, she thought, but those Sunday nights—moments which had once been so sweet, and were now so solitary. She said not a word to any one, and tried hard to keep herself from thinking; and she wrote kind, cheerful little letters to her boy, who, for his part, was so very good in writing regularly—so unlike most young men, as she told the people. But after she had finished those cheery, pleasant, gossiping letters, with all the news of the parish in them, Mrs Mitford would sit down and have a good cry. Oh what a change there was! how silent the house was, how ghostly the garden where she was always thinking she heard his step! The servants came in and went out again, and the father and the mother would sit together softly without a word, as if they had no child. Thus it will be seen that, of all concerned, it was Mrs Mitford who suffered most; but that none was satisfied, or felt the slightest approach of anything like happiness in the new state of affairs, unless, indeed, it might be Kate.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.