Mattie:-A Stray Volume II Part 30

His salary had been raised by that time; he had distinguished himself as a good and faithful servant, and he took the wages that were due to him, with thanks for his promotion.

One day, his uncle sent for him into the inner chamber, to speak of matters foreign to the business of a banking house.

"Sidney, I have troubled you more than once with advice concerning my son Maurice."

"Yes."

"He is about to offer you and your father an invitation to dine with him next week."

"I know what to answer, sir," said Sidney, somewhat stiffly. He objected to this advice-gratis principle, and thought that Mr. Geoffry Hinchford might have left him to his own judgment.

"No, you don't, and that's why I sent for you. Maurice will be thirty-one next week--it's a little family affair, almost exclusively confined to members of the family, and I hope that you will both come."

"Sir--I----"

"Bygones are bygones; we do not make a mere pretence of having forgotten the past--_we_ Hinchfords," said his uncle. "Sidney, I will ask it as a favour?"

"Very well, sir. But my father is not well, and I fear not able to bear any extra fatigue."

"I am not afraid of old Jemmy's consent," said the banker. "There, go to your desk, and don't waste valuable time in prolixity."

Late that day Maurice Hinchford addressed his cousin. Sidney was going down the bank steps homewards, when his cousin followed him, and pa.s.sed his arm through his.

"Sidney--you'll find two letters of mine at home. They are for you and your father. I shall call it deuced unkind to say No to their contents!"

"Suppose we say Yes, then!"

"Thank you. The governor and I want you and your governor down at our place next week. No excuses. Even Mr. Geoffry Hinchford will not have them this time; that stern paterfamilias, who thinks familiarity with me will breed the usual contempt."

"For the business--not for you, Maurice!"

"He's very anxious to make a model clerk of you; and very much afraid that I shall spoil you. As if I were so dangerous a friend, relative, or acquaintance! Upon my honour, I can't make it out exactly. I've had an idea that I should be just the friend for you. Perhaps the governor is coming round to my way of thinking, at last."

Sidney repeated his past a.s.sertions that their positions did not, and could never correspond. Maurice laughed at this as usual.

"Haven't I told you fifty times that I don't care a fig for position, and that a Hinchford is always a Hinchford--_i.e._, a gentleman? Sidney, you are an incomprehensibility; when you marry that lady to whose attractions you have confessed yourself susceptible, perhaps I shall make you out more clearly."

Sidney's countenance changed a little--he became grave, and his cousin noticed the difference.

"Anything wrong?" was the quick question here.

Sidney was annoyed that he had betrayed himself--he who prided himself upon mastering all emotion when the occasion was necessary.

"Oh! no; everything right, Maurice!" he said with a forced lightness of demeanour; "the folly of an engagement that could end in nothing, discovered in good time, and two romantic beings sobered for their good!"

"Why could it end in nothing?--I don't see."

"Oh! it's a long story," replied Sidney, "and you would not feel interested in it. I was selfish to seek to bind her to a long engagement, and we both thought so, after mature deliberation. I turn off here--Good night!"

"Good night!"

Sidney found the invitations awaiting him at home. Mr. Hinchford had opened his own letter, and spent the greater part of the afternoon in perusing and reperusing it.

"What--what do you think of this, Sid?"

"Tell me what _you_ think of it."

"Well--I think, just for once, we might as well go--show them that we know how to behave ourselves, poor as we are, Sidney."

"Very well," said Sidney, somewhat wearily; "we'll go!"

"Let me see; what have I done with that dress coat of mine?" said the father; "how long is it since I wore it, I wonder?"

Twenty-five years, or thereabouts, since Mr. Hinchford had worn a dress-coat, consequently a little behind the fas.h.i.+on just then. Sidney Hinchford thought with a sigh of the fresh expenses incurred by the acceptance of his cousin's invitation; he who was saving money for the rainy days ahead of him. How long ahead now, he thought, were the years still to intervene and leave him in G.o.d's sunlight? He could not tell; but there was a cruel doubt, which kept him restless. Give him his sight whilst his father lived, at least, and spare the white head further care in this life! Afterwards, when he was alone, he thought, a little misanthropically, it did not matter. His own trouble he could bear, and there would be no one else--no one in all the world!--to grieve about _him_. A few expressions of commonplace condolence for his affliction, and then--for ever alone!

Sidney Hinchford and his father went down by railway to Redhill. The dinner-party was for five P.M.--an early hour, to admit of London friends return by the eleven o'clock train. At the station, Mr. Geoffry Hinchford's carriage waited for father and son, and whirled them away to the family mansion, whilst the less favoured, who had arrived by the same train, sought hired conveyances.

"He treats us well--just as we deserve to be treated--just as I would have treated him, Sid. He was always a good sort--old Jef!"

Sidney did not take heed of his father's change of opinion--the world had been full of changes, and here was nothing to astonish him. He was prepared for anything remarkable now, he thought--he could believe in any transformations.

Father and son reached their relative's mansion exactly as the clock in the turret roof of the stable-house was striking five--there were carriages winding their way down the avenue before them, the hired flys with their hungry occupants were bringing up the rear. Sid looked from the carriage window, and almost repented that he had brought his father to the festivities. But Mr. Hinchford was cool and self-possessed; it was a return to the old life, and he seemed brighter and better for the change.

Maurice Hinchford received them in the hall; the first face in the large ante-room was that of Uncle Geoffry. There was no doubt of the genuineness of their reception--it was an honest and a hearty welcome.

Sidney had mixed but little in society--few young men at his age had seen less of men and manners, yet few men, old or young, could have been more composed and stately. He was not anxious to look his best, or fearful of betraying his want of knowledge; he had graver thoughts at his heart, and being indifferent as to the effect he produced, was cool and unmoved by the crowd of guests into which he had been suddenly thrust. He had accepted that invitation to oblige his cousin, not himself; and there he was, by his father's side, for Maurice's guests to think the best or worst of him--which they pleased, he cared not.

Poor Sid at this time was inclined to be misanthropical; he looked at all things through a distorting medium, and he had lost his natural lightness of heart. His lip curled at the stateliness and frigidity of his uncle's guests, and he was disposed to see a stand-offishness in some of them which did not exist, and was only the natural ante-dinner iciness that pervades a conglomeration of diners-out, unknown to each other. Still it steeled Sidney somewhat; he was the poor relation, he fancied, and some of these starchy beings scented his poverty by instinct! Maurice introduced him to his mother and sisters--people with whom we shall have little to do, and therefore need not dilate upon. The greeting was a little stiff from the maternal quarter--Sidney remembered on the instant his father's previous verdicts on the brother's wife--cordial and cousinly enough from the sisters, two pretty girls, the junior of Maurice, and three buxom ladies, the senior of their brother--two married, with Maurices of their own.

Sidney endeavoured to act his best; he had not come there to look disagreeable, though he felt so, in the first early moments of meeting; when the signal was given to pa.s.s into the dining-room, he offered his arm to his youngest cousin, at Maurice's suggestion, and thawed a little at her frankness, and at the brightness of her happy looking face.

There might have been one little pang at the evidence of wealth and position which that dining-room afforded him--for he was a Hinchford also, and his father had been a rich man in past days--but the feeling was evanescent, if it existed, and after one glance at his father, as cool and collected as himself, he devoted himself to the cousin, whom he had met for the first time in his life.

A grand dinner-party, given in grand style, as befitted a man well to do in the world. No gardeners and stablemen turned into waiters for the nonce, and still unmistakably gardeners and stablemen for all their limp white neckcloths--no hired waiters from remote quarters of the world, and looking more like undertaker's men than lacqueys--no fl.u.s.tered maid-servants and nurserymaids, pressed into the service, and suffering from nervous trepidation--this array of footmen at the back, the staff always on hand in that palatial residence, which a lucky turn of the wheel had reared for Geoffry Hinchford.

Sidney's cousin sang the praises of her brother all dinner-time; what a good-tempered, good-hearted fellow he was, and how universally liked by all with whom he came in contact. She was anxious to know what Sidney thought of him, and whether he had been impressed by Maurice's demeanour; and Sidney sang in a minor key to the praises of his cousin also, not forgetting in his peculiar pride to regret that difference of position which set Maurice apart from him.

Miss Hinchford did not see that, and was sure that Maurice would scoff at the idea--she was sure, also, that everyone would be glad to see Sidney at their house as often as he liked to call there. Sidney thawed more and more; a naturally good-tempered man, with a pleasant companion at his side, it was not in his power to preserve a gloomy aspect; he became conversational and agreeable; he had only one care, and that was concerning his father, to whom he glanced now and then, and whom he always found looking the high-bred gentleman, perfectly at his ease--and very different to the old man, whose mental infirmities had kept him anxious lately. Mr. James Hinchford had gone back to a past in which he had been ever at home; his pliant memory had abjured all the long interim of poverty, lodgings in Great Suffolk Street, and a post at a builder's desk; he remembered nothing of them that night, and was the old Hinchford that his brother had known. To the amazement of his son, he rose after dinner to propose the toast of the evening--somewhat out of place, being a relation and yet a stranger almost--and spoke at length, and with a fluency and volubility which Sidney had not remarked before. He a.s.sumed his right to propose the toast as the oldest friend of the family, and he did it well and gracefully enough, utterly confounding the family physician, who had been two days compiling a long and elaborate speech which "that white-headed gentleman opposite" had taken completely out of his mouth.

That white-headed gentleman sat down amidst hearty plaudits, and Maurice's health was drunk with due honours; and then Maurice--"dear old Morry!" as his sister impetuously exclaimed--responded to the toast.

A long speech in his turn, delivered with much energy and rapidity, his flushed and good-looking face turning to right and left of that long array of guests around him. Sidney's heart thrilled to hear one expression of Maurice's--an allusion to the gentleman who had proposed his health, "his dear uncle, whose presence there tended so much to the pleasurable feelings of that night."

"Well--he is a good fellow," said Sidney, heartily; "I wish I had a brother like him to stand by me in life."

His cousin looked her grat.i.tude at him for the outburst, and no one hammered the table more l.u.s.tily than Sidney at the conclusion of his cousin's speech.

There were a few more toasts before the ladies retired at the signal given by the hostess; there was a rustle of silk and muslin through the broad doorway, and then the gentlemen left to themselves, and many of them breathing freer in consequence.