The Trial; Or, More Links of the Daisy Chain Part 17

'Leonard conceited!'

'Yes; he is getting as stuck up as Tom May himself--your model I believe!'

'I thought he was yours!'

'Mine?'

'Yes; you always seem to aim at a poor imitation of him.'

There was a blus.h.i.+ng angry stammer in reply; and she suppressed her smile, but felt triumphant in having hit the mark. Unready at retort, he gathered himself up, and said: 'Well, Ave, I have only this to say, that if you choose to support that boy in his impertinences, there will be no bearing it; and I shall see what I shall do.'

Seeing what shall be done is a threat stimulating to some, but appalling to others; and Averil was of the latter cla.s.s, with no desire for such a spectacle, be it what it might. She did not apologize for the trifle--possible ink, a spot of wax, a borrowed book, were far beneath an apology; but she made up her mind to humour Henry's follies magnanimously, and avoid collisions, like an admirable peace-maker. As soon as bed-time came, she repaired to Leonard's room; and Henry, as he went along the pa.s.sage, heard the two young voices ringing with laughter! Her retort had been particularly delightful to Leonard.

'That's right, Ave! I'm glad you set him down, for I thought afterwards whether I ought not to have stood by you, only his way of pitching into me through you puts me into such a rage: I shall do something desperate some day!'

'Never mind it, Leonard; it does not hurt me; and if it did, I should like to bear a great deal for you.'

'That's all the wrong way,' said Leonard, smiling affectionately.

'No; men do and women suffer.'

'That's trite!' said Leonard, patting her fondly. 'I like you to do--as you call it--Miss May does, and every one that is worth anything. I say, Ave, when I go out to the islands, you are coming too?'

'Oh yes! I know I could do a great deal. If nothing else, I could sing; and they have a great apt.i.tude for singing, Mary was telling me.

But that reminds me I must finish copying the hymn for next Sunday; Henry hindered me, and I have six copies more to do.'

'I'll do some of them,' said Leonard. 'Let us go down now the coast is clear, if the fire is not out.'

They went down softly, Mab and all, nursed up the fire that Henry had raked out; and if Saturnalia could be held over the writing out of a hymn tune, they did it! At any rate, it had the charm of an a.s.sertion of independence; and to Averil it was something like a midnight meeting of persecuted Christians--to Leonard it was 'great fun.'

That evening was not a solitary specimen.

Averil and Leonard intended to obviate causes of offence; but they were young and heedless, and did not feel bound to obedience. A very little temptation made them forget or defy Henry's fancies; and Leonard was easily lashed into answers really unbecoming and violent, for which he could not bring himself to be sorry, when he thought over the petty interference and annoyance that had caused them.

These small tyrannies and frets made Averil the more devoted to the music, which was her rest, her delight, and not only exalted her above cares, but sanctioned her oblivion of them. The occupation grew upon her, never ending, still beginning, with fresh occasions for practice and new lessons, but though Bankside boys were willing to be taught, yet it was chiefly in hope of preferment as choristers at the Minster; and she soon found that a scholar no sooner proved his voice good for anything, than he went off to be trained for the choir on the foundation, which fed, clothed, and apprenticed its young singers. She found she must betake herself to an elder race if she wanted a reliable staff of voices; and some young men and women showing themselves willing, a practice, with Mr. Scudamour to keep order, was organized for late evenings, twice in the week. This was rather much! Henry opposed at first, on the ground that the evening would be broken up; to which she answered that for such a purpose they ought to be willing to sacrifice a little domestic comfort; and when he muttered a petulant 'Pshaw,' looked at him in reproof for sacrilege. She was not going to be one of the womankind sitting up in a row till their lords and masters should be pleased to want them!

Next, he insisted that he would not have her going about the place after dark, but she was fortified by the curate's promise to escort her safely, and reduced him to a semi-imprecation which she again viewed as extremely wicked. The existence of that meek little helpless Mrs.

Scudamour, always shut up in a warm room with her delicate baby, cut off Henry from any other possible objection, and he was obliged to submit.

Leonard would gladly have been his sister's companion on her expeditions, but he must remain at home and prepare for the morrow's school-work, and endure the first hour of dreariness unenlivened by her smile and greeting, and, what was worse, without the scanty infusion of peace produced by her presence. Her rapid departure after dinner always discomposed Henry; and the usual vent for his ill-humour was either a murmur against the clergy and all their measures, or the discovery of some of Leonard's transgressions of his code. Fretted and irritable at the destruction of evening comfort, he in his turn teased the fiery temper of his brother. If there were nothing worse, his grumbling remarks interrupted, and too often they were that sort of censure that is expressively called nagging. Leonard would reply angrily, and the flashes of his pa.s.sion generally produced silence.

Neither brother spoke to Averil of these evening interludes, which were becoming almost habitual, but they kept Leonard in a constant sore sense of injury, yet of uneasy conscience. He looked to the Randall scholars.h.i.+p as his best hope of leaving home and its torments, but his illness had thrown him back: he had not only lost the last quarter, but the acquirements of the one before it were obscured; and the vexations themselves so hara.s.sed and interrupted his evening studies, that he knew it was unreasonable to hope for it at the next examination, which, from various causes, was to come after the Christmas holidays; and it would be well if he could even succeed in the summer.

Innocent as the Mays were of the harmonium business, Henry included them in the annoyance it gave. It was the work of the curate--and was not Dr. May one in everything with the clergy? had he not been instrumental in building the chapel? was it not the Mays and the clergy who had made Ave inconveniently religious and opinionative, to say nothing of Leonard? The whole town was priest--led and bigoted; and Dr.

May was the despot to whom all bowed down.

This was an opinion Henry would hardly have originated: it was the shaft of an abler man than he--no other than Harvey Anderson, who had lately become known to the world by a book proving King John to have been the most enlightened and patriotic of English sovereigns, enduring the Interdict on a pure principle of national independence, and devising Magna Charta from his own generous brain--in fact, presenting a magnificent and misunderstood antic.i.p.ation of the most advanced theories of the nineteenth century. The book had made so much noise in the world, that the author had been induced to quit his college tutors.h.i.+p, and become editor of a popular magazine. He lived in London, but often came down to spend Sunday with his mother, and had begun to be looked on as rather the lion of the place. Henry took in his magazine, and courted his notice, often bringing him into Averil's way that she might hear her heroes treated with irony more effectual than home-made satire; but Ave was staunch. She hated the sight of Mr.

Anderson; never cut the leaves of his magazine; and if driven to sing to him, took as little pains as her musical nature would let her do.

But the very strength of her dislike gave it an air of prejudice, and it was set down less to principle than to party spirit and May influence.

There was another cause for Henry's being soured. He was not of the nature to be filial with Dr. May; and therefore grat.i.tude oppressed, and patronage embittered him. The first months of warm feeling at an end, the old spirit of independence revived, and he avoided consulting the physician as much as possible. More than once his management of a case was not approved by Dr. May; and the strong and hasty language, and the sharp reproofs that ensued, were not taken as the signs of the warm heart and friendly interest, but as the greatest offences--sullenly, but not the less bitterly endured.

Moreover, one of the Whitford surgeons had been called in by a few of the out-lying families who had hitherto been patients of the Wards; and worse than all, Mrs. Rivers took her child up to London for three days in November, and it became known--through a chain of tongues--that it was for the enlargement of tonsils, on which Mr. Ward had operated a year before.

'Old May was playing him false!' was Henry's cry. 'His professions were humbug. He would endure no one who did not submit to his dictation; and he would bring in a stranger to ruin them all!'

Little did Henry know of Dr. May's near approach to untruth in denying that he had a house to let to the opposition surgeon--of his attestations to his daughter that young Ward was a skilful operator--or of his vexation when she professed herself ready to undergo anything for his pleasure, but said that little Margaret's health was another thing.

Yet even this might have been forgiven, but for that worst rub of all--Tom May's manners. His politeness was intense--most punctilious and condescending in form--and yet provoking beyond measure to persons who, like Henry and Averil, had not playfulness enough to detect with certainty whether they were being made game of or not, nor whether his smoothly-uttered compliments were not innuendoes. Henry was certain of being despised, and naturally chafed against the prospect of the future connection between the two medical men of the town; and though Tom was gone back to Cambridge, it was the rankling remembrance of his supercilious looks that, more than any present offence or independence of spirit, made the young surgeon kick against direction from the physician. Here, too, Averil was of the same mind. She had heard Tom May observe that his sister Gertrude would play quite well enough for a lady; for the mission of a lady's music was to put one to sleep at home, and cover conversation at a party; as to the rest--unprofessionals were a mistake!

After that, the civil speeches with which Tom would approach the piano only added insult to injury.

CHAPTER VIII

Ne'er readier at alarm-bell's call, Thy burghers rose to man thy wall, Than now in danger shall be thine, Thy dauntless voluntary line.--Marmion

'Drive fast, Will,' said Dr. May, hastily stepping into his carriage in the early darkness of a December evening. 'Five already, and he is to be there by 5.25.'

'He' was no other than Harry May, and 'there' was the station. With the tidings of the terrible fight of Peiho had come a letter from a messmate of Harry's with an account of his serious wound in the chest, describing it as just short of immediately dangerous. Another letter had notified his amendment, and that he was invalided home, a few cheery words from Harry himself scrawled at the end showing that his power was far less than his good-will: and after two months' waiting and suspense, a telegram had come from Plymouth, with the words, 'Stoneborough, 5.25.'

In ignorance as to the state of the traveller, and expecting to find him in a condition requiring great care and watching, Dr. May had laid his injunctions on the eager family not to rush up to the station en ma.s.se to excite and overwhelm, but to leave the meeting there entirely to himself and his brougham. He had, therefore, been exceedingly annoyed that one of Henry Ward's pieces of self-a.s.sertion had delayed him unnecessarily at a consultation; and when at last he had escaped, he spent most of his journey with his body half out of the window, hurrying Will Adams, and making noises of encouragement to the horse; or else in a strange tumult of sensation between hope and fear, pain and pleasure, suspense and thankfulness, the predominant feeling being vexation at not having provided against this contingency by sending Richard to the station.

After all the best efforts of the stout old chestnut, he and the train were simultaneously at the station, and the pa.s.sengers were getting out on the opposite platform. The Doctor made a dash to cross in the rear of the train, but was caught and held fast by a porter with the angry exclamation, 'She's backing, sir;' and there he stood in an agony, feeling all Harry's blank disappointment, and the guilt of it besides, and straining his eyes through the narrow gaps between the blocks of carriages.

The train rushed on, and he was across the line the same instant, but the blank was his. Up and down the gas-lighted platform he looked in vain among the crowd, only his eye suddenly lit on a black case close to his feet, with the three letters MAY, and the next moment a huge chest appeared out of the darkness, bearing the same letters, and lifted on a truck by the joint strength of a green porter, and a pair of broad blue shoulders. Too ill to come on--telegraph, mail train--rushed through the poor Doctor's brain as he stepped forward as if to interrogate the chest. The blue shoulders turned, a ruddy sun-burnt face lighted up, and the inarticulate exclamation on either side was of the most intense relief and satisfaction.

'Where are the rest?' said Harry, holding his father's hand in no sick man's grasp.

'At home, I told them not to come up; I thought--'

'Well, we'll walk down together! I've got you all to myself. I thought you had missed my telegram. Hollo, Will, how d'ye do? what, this thing to drive down in?'

'I thought you were an invalid, Harry,' said Dr. May, with a laughing yet tearful ring in his agitated tone, as he packed himself and his son in.

'Ay! I wished I could have let you know sooner how well I had got over it,' said Harry, in the deep full voice of strong healthy manhood. 'I am afraid you have been very anxious.'

'We are used to it, my boy,' said the Doctor huskily, stroking the great firm fingers that were lying lovingly on his knee, 'and if it always ends in this way, it ought to do us more good than harm.'

'It has not done harm, I hope,' said Harry, catching him up quick. 'Not to old Mary?'

'No, Mary works things off, good girl. I flatter myself you will find us all in high preservation.'

'All--all at home! That's right.'

'Yes, those infants from Maplewood and all. You are sure you are all right, Harry?'