The Squire of Sandal-Side Part 19

"You suppose wrong. He is her father."

"For her, then, you have given up your faith, your country, your home, your profession, every thing that other men hold dear and sacred. Do you expect father to support you? Or is your wife to sing in Italy?"

"I think you are trying how disagreeable you can be, Charlotte."

"I am asking you honest questions in honest words."

"I have the money from the sale of my commission."

"It does not then strike you as dishonorable to keep it?"

"No, father gave me it."

"It appears to me, that if money was taken from the estate, let us say to stock a sheep-walk, and it was decided after three years' trial to give up the enterprise, and sell the sheep, that the money would naturally go back to the estate. When you came of age, father made you a very generous allowance. After a time you preferred that he should invest a large sum in a military commission for you; and you proposed to live upon your pay,--a thing you never have even tried to do. Suddenly, you find that the commission will not suit your more recent plans, and you sell it. Ought not the money to go back to the estate, and you to make a fresh arrangement with father about your allowance? That is my idea."

"Foolishness! And pray what allowance would my father make me, after the marriage I have contracted?"

"Now, you show your secret heart, Harry. You know you have no right to expect one, and so you keep what is not yours. This sin also for the woman whom you have put before every sentiment of love and honor."

"You were stubborn enough about Steve Latrigg."

"I was honorable; I was considerate for father, and did not put Stephen before him. Do you think I would ever marry Stephen against father's wish, or to the injury or suffering of any one whom I love? Certainly I would marry no one else, but I gave father my word that I would wait for his sanction. When people do right, things come right for them. But if father had stood out twenty years, Steve and I would have waited. Ducie gave us the same advice. 'Wait, children,' she said: 'I have seen many a wilful match, and many a run-away match, but never one, never one that prospered.'"

"Charley, I expected you to stand by me. I expected you to help me."

"O Harry, Harry! How can I help? What can I do? There is nothing left but to suffer."

"There is this: plead for me when I am away. My wife is sick in Florence. I must go to her at once. The money I have from my commission is all I have. I am going to invest it in a little house and vineyard. I have found out that my real tastes are for a pastoral life."

"Ah, if you could only have found that out for father!"

"Circ.u.mstances may change."

"That is, your father may die. I suppose you and your wife have talked over that probability. Beatrice will be able to endure the climate then."

"If I did not see that you were under very strong excitement, Charlotte, I should be much offended by what you say. But you don't mean to hurt me. Do you imagine that I feel no sorrow in leaving father and my mother and you and the old home? My heart is very sad to-night, Charley. I feel that I shall come here no more."

"Then why go away? Why, why?"

"Because a man leaves father and mother and every thing for the woman he loves. Charley, help me."

She shook her head sadly.

"Help me to break the trouble to father."

"There is no 'breaking' it. It will break him. It will kill him. Alas, it is the ungrateful child that has the power to inflict a slow and torturing death! Poor father! Poor mother! And it is I that must witness it. I, that would die to save them from such undeserved sorrow."

Then Harry rose up angrily, pushed his chair impatiently away, and without a word went to his own room.

In the morning the squire came down to breakfast in exceedingly high spirits. A Scotchman would have called him "_fey_," and been certain that misfortune was at his heels. And Charlotte looked at him in wondering pity, for Harry's face was the face of a man determined to carry out his own will regardless of consequences.

"Come, come, Harry," said the squire in a loud, cheerful voice, "you are moping, and eating no breakfast. Charlotte will have to fill three times before it is 'cup down' with me. I think we will take Dobbin, and go over to Windermere in the tax-cart. The roads will be a bit sloppery, but Dobbin isn't too old to splash through them at a rattling pace. He is a famous good old-has-been is Dobbin. Give me a Suffolk Punch for a roadster. I set much by them. Eh? What?"

"I must leave Sandal this morning, sir."

"Sir me no sir, Harry. 'Father' will stand between you and me, I think.

You must make a put-off for one day. I was at Bowness last week, and they say such a winter for char-fis.h.i.+ng was never seen. While I was on the lakeside, Kit n.o.ble's boat came in. He had all of twenty dozen in the bottom of it. Mr. Wordsworth was there too, and he made a piece of poetry about 'The silvery lights playing over them;' and he took me to see a picture that a London gentleman painted of Kit and his boat. You never saw fish out of the water look so fresh; their olive-green backs and vermillion bellies and dark-red fins were as natural as life. Come Harry, we will go and fetch over a few dozen. If you carry your colonel some, he will take the gift as an excuse for the day. Eh? What?"

"I think Harry had better not go with you, father."

"Eh? What is the matter with you, Charlotte? You are as nattert and cross as never was. Where is your mother? I like my morning cup filled with a smile. It helps the day through."

"Mother isn't feeling well. She had a bad dream about Harry and you, and she is making herself sick over it. She is all in a tremble. I didn't think mother was so foolish."

"Dreams are from somewhere beyond us, Charlotte. There's them that visit us a-dreaming. I am not so wise as to be foolish. I believe in some things that are outside of my short wits. Maybe we had better not go to Windermere. We might be tempted into a boat, and dry land is a middling bit safer. Eh? What?"

Charlotte felt as if she could endure her father's unsuspicious happiness no longer. It was like watching a little child smiling and prattling on the road to its mother's funeral. She put Mrs. Sandal's breakfast on a small tray, and with this in her hand went up-stairs, leaving Harry and the squire still at the table.

"Charlotte is a bit hurrysome this morning," he said; and Harry making no answer, he seemed suddenly to be struck with his att.i.tude. He looked curiously at him a moment, and then lapsed into silence. "Harry wants money." That was his first thought, and he began to calculate how far he was able to meet the want. Even then, his only bitter reflection was, that Harry should suppose it necessary to be glum about it. "A cheerful asker is the next thing to a cheerful giver;" and to such musings he filled his pipe, and with a shadow of offence on his large ruddy face went into "the master's room" to smoke.

When kindly good-nature is snubbed, it feels it keenly; and there was a mist of tears in the squire's blue eyes when Harry followed, and he turned them on him. And it was part of his punishment, that, even in the first flush of the pleasure of his sin, he felt all the pangs of remorse.

"Father?"

"Well, well, Harry! I see you are wanting money again."

"It will be the last time. I am married, and am going to Italy to live."

"Eh? What?" The squire flushed hotly. His hand shook, his long clay pipe fell to the hearthstone, and was shattered to pieces.

Then a reckless desire to have the whole wrong out urged the unhappy son to a most cruel distinctness of detail. Without wasting a word in explanation or excuse, he stated broadly that he had fallen in love with the famous singer, Beatrice Lanza, and had married her. He spared himself or his father nothing; he appeared to gather a hard courage as he spoke of her failing health, her hatred of England, her devotion to her own faith, and the necessity of his retirement to Italy with her. He seemed determined to put it out of the power of any one to say worse of him than he had already said of himself. In conclusion he added, "I have sold my commission, and paid what I owed, and have very little money left. Life, however, is not an expensive affair in the village to which I am going. If you will allow me two hundred pounds a year I shall be very grateful."

"I will not give you one penny, sir."

The words came thick and heavy, and with great difficulty; though the wretched father had risen, and was standing by the table, leaning hard with both hands upon it.

He would not look at his son, though the young man went on speaking. He heard nothing that he said. In his ears there was the roaring of mighty waters. All the waves and the billows were going over him. For a few moments he struggled desperately with the black, advancing tide. His sight failed, it was growing dark. Then he threw the last forces of life into one terrible cry, and fell, as a great tree falls, heavily to the ground.

The cry rang through the house. The mother, trembling in her bed; Charlotte, crouching upon the stairs, fearing and listening; the servants, chattering in the kitchen and the chambers,--all heard it, and were for a moment horrified by the agony and despair it expressed. But ere the awful echo had quite subsided, Charlotte was at her father's side; in a moment afterwards, Mrs. Sandal, sobbing at every flying step, and still in her night-clothing, followed; and then servants from every quarter came rus.h.i.+ng to the master's room.

There was no time for inquiry or lamentation. Harry and two of the men mounted swift horses in search of medical help. Others lifted the insensible man, and carried him tenderly to his bed. In a moment the atmosphere of the house had changed. The master's room, which had held for generations nothing but memories of pastoral business and sylvan pleasures, had suddenly become a place of sorrow. The shattered pipe upon the hearthstone made Charlotte utter a low, hopeless cry of pain.

She closed the shutters, and put the burning logs upon the hearth safely together, and then locked the door. Alas! alas! they had carried the master out, and in Charlotte's heart there was a conviction that he would never more cross its threshold.

After Harry's first feelings of anguish and horror had subsided, he was distinctly resentful. He felt his father's suffering to be a wrong to him. He began to reflect that the day for such intense emotions had pa.s.sed away. But he forgot that the squire belonged to a generation whose life was filled and ruled by a few strong, decided feelings and opinions that struck their roots deep into the very foundations of existence; a generation, also, which was bearing the brunt of the transition between the strong, simple life of the past, and the rapid, complex life of the present. Thus the squire opposed to the indifference of the time a rigidity of habits, which, to even small events, gave that exceptional character which rarity once imparted. He felt every thing deeply, because every thing retained its importance to him. He had great reverence. He loved, and he hated. All his convictions and prejudices were for life.

Harry's marriage had been a blow at the roots of all his conscious existence. The Sandals had always married in their own county, c.u.mberland ladies of honorable pedigree, good daughters of the Church of England, good housewives, gentle and modest women, with more or less land and gold as their dowry. Emily Beverley would have been precisely such a wife. And in a moment, even while Harry was speaking, the squire had contrasted this Beatrice Lanza with her;--a foreigner,--an Italian, of all foreigners most objectionable; a subject of the Papal States; a member of the Romish Church; a woman of obscure birth, poor and portionless, and in ill-health; worse than all, a public woman, who had sung for money, and yet who had made Harry desert his home and country and profession for her. And with this train of thought another ran parallel,--the shame and the wrong of it all. The disgrace to his wife and daughters, the humiliation to himself. Each bitter thought beat on his heart like the hammer on the anvil. They fought and blended with each other. He could not master one. He felt himself being beaten to the ground. He made agonizing efforts to retain control over the surging wave of anguish, rising, rising, rising from his breast to his brain.

And failing to do so, he fell with the mighty cry of one who, even in the death agony, protests against the victor.