Into the Highways and Hedges Part 17

They all made a great deal of noise after dinner; it struck George that seven people in Hill Street were noisier than fourteen in Bryanston Square, and probably merrier. Mrs. Russelthorpe's hair would have stood on end if she could have seen that entertainment.

Mrs. Sauls enjoyed it as much as any one; but when the company had gone off hilariously, and George, having seen his guests out of the hall door, returned for a _tete-a-tete_ with her,--then she tasted the crowning felicity of the evening.

George always paid his mother the compliment of talking to her about his professional ambitions and interests. She was his only confidante, and he never forgot how she had encouraged him at the very outset of his career. He was not a man who forgot either injuries or benefits.

He talked a long time. Neither of them minded sitting up half the night; and the old lady liked the smell of his cigar, and enjoyed mixing his whisky and water for him, and rejoiced in the sound of his voice.

"Really!" he exclaimed at last, when two o'clock struck. "I am teaching you very bad ways, mother! I say, do you suppose that Miriam Moss will dream of forfeits to-night? She's a very precocious little girl! It's odd how early Jewesses develop. I've known other women of twenty or one and twenty not a quarter so 'formed' as she is."

His mother looked anxiously at him. "You are not thinking of marrying her, are you?" she asked. "You should do better than that, my son. The Mosses are rich, certainly; but I should like to see you go in for a t.i.tle, myself; and you needn't be afraid that I'll stand in your way when you want to bring a wife home. Indeed, I'd like to have a grandson on my knee before I die, George; though I don't deny that it's been luck for me, in some respects, that you haven't married before. 'A son's a son till he gets him a wife.' Still, it's time now; and, if I were you, I'd look not lower than a county family. You've got money enough. And you may tell the lady from me," and her hard old face softened at the words, "you may tell her from me, that she'll be a lucky woman, for your vulgar old mother says so, and she has had reason enough to swear to it."

George laughed, and put his arm round her. The caress meant a good deal more than all the pretty speeches he had made to Miriam.

"The lucky young woman of t.i.tle to whom I shall so kindly condescend to throw the handkerchief hasn't appeared on the horizon yet," he said.

"When she does, she shan't turn up her highly aristocratic little nose at you, mother! n.o.body shall come between you and me."

Mrs. Sauls nodded till her earrings twinkled again. "So much the better for me, my son; but wives aren't so amenable as mothers. Don't answer for her too soon!"

"One can answer for any woman--just as far as one can see her, eh?" said George, yawning; and his mother looked hard at him.

Possibly she guessed that the horizon had not been quite so clear as he would have had her believe; and had a pretty shrewd suspicion that something besides work had deepened the lines on his face. But she was wise in her generation, and kept her counsel.

He talked on for some time, chiefly on business, after that; bidding her good-night only when the dawn began to creep through the shutters.

"Good-night, my dear," said his mother, "and G.o.d bless you for a good son, as I'm sure He ought."

She had a wistful feeling while she said the words that Providence had somehow been unduly hard on George lately. Her son laughed profanely: "I believe you think that the Almighty is rather honoured in having me to bless!"

But he was fond of his mother all the same, and her blessing did him no harm.

After all, he couldn't go and make an utter fool of himself--or worse,--while the old woman believed in him so.

A girl begged of him on his way through the streets, and his sallow cheek flushed, for the colour of her hair was like Meg's.

_Her_ innocent face swam before him for a moment, and he put his hand before his eyes with a sense of sacrilege at the reminder. He believed himself as little given to sentiment as any man; but he had felt, since he had known Meg, that his other thoughts were not good enough company for those of her. Now, with a bitter revulsion, he declared to himself that the preacher, who had had no scruples, had fared the best.

He thrust the girl aside, and quickened his steps with compressed lips.

When he got to his rooms he walked straight up to his writing-table drawer, and took from it a little water-colour sketch that had been torn out of Laura's sketch book.

"I can't afford this nonsense," he said. "I shall murder the preacher, if I let you stay here now."

He tore the portrait across, and burnt it in the flame of his lamp. And this was, perhaps, the most sensible thing he could have done; but George seldom lost his head, whatever happened to his heart.

CHAPTER II.

She has tied a knot with her tongue that she'll not undo with her teeth.

Caulderwell Farm is built on the edge of the "flats". All round it, in the days of which I write, was unreclaimed land--broad salt marshes, where the water crept slowly up at high tide, oozing between the rank gra.s.s and the sand banks, where the wild ducks nested and the frogs croaked. Fresh-water springs there were too, making tender green splotches in the midst of the redder salt-fed vegetation, and deep black pools, that only the wind and the rain and the shy water-birds visited from one year's end to the other.

From the windows that face south the silver streak of salt water could be seen five miles as the crow flies across the marshes,--a lonely sea breaking on no cheerful child-haunted beach, but rolling in in long grey waves over the soft reed-tufted sand, where the rime clung in crusted serpentine ridges, and where bits of timber and sh.e.l.ls got caught among the weeds, till the waves carried them back again.

A lonely country, whose lover's salt kisses left her the more barren.

The grey walls of the solitary house stood st.u.r.dily square to every wind that blew; the bit of cultivated ground was d.y.k.ed all round, and the one road across the marsh led straight to the house door, and there stopped, for beyond the farm was no man's land.

The Thorpes had lived here from generation to generation. They boasted that the marsh ague never touched them, and that their cattle never got lost in the "mosses". They had always been noted for a particular breed of horses, for which they got a sale at the annual horse fair at N----; for the gift of "bone setting," which had appeared in the family again and again; and for a certain obstinate originality, a "way of their own," which the first Thorpe had exemplified in his choice of a home.

That good man was popularly supposed to have had a hard tussle with the marsh devil (who was peculiar to the soil, and was an unclean spirit with a head like a horse), over the building of the house. Apparently he had worsted his adversary thoroughly; for Caulderwell Farm still stands, and was three hundred years old when Margaret--who had been Margaret Deane--first made its acquaintance. Daughters had been scarce in the farm. In that respect also the Thorpe family had showed a decided peculiarity. Of the children born to it by far the larger proportion had been boys; and the few girls who had had the temerity to open their eyes in that wind-circled house had generally died before maturity.

Barnabas Thorpe's father had had no sisters, and his wife had brought him sons only.

He had been ambitious as a young man, separated as he was from the people about him by his new-fangled ideas, his greater education, and the touch of something that appeared very like genius in his youth, and like madness in his old age; the "something" that had been always cropping up afresh in each succeeding generation.

It seemed likely that his sons might be sent to college, and rise to the level of gentlefolk; but nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, the family fortunes fell back; a sort of melancholy blight seemed to have infected the man; he lost interest and energy; the tide of his ambition turned and ebbed, as that quiet creeping sea turned and ebbed from the pools outside.

People said that the two calamities of his life had soured him, that he had never been the same after the death of his wife, and that the accident that had made his first-born, his favourite son, grow up deformed in body, had given a morbid twist to the father's mind.

It may have been so; but it is more probable that the "twist" was there before,--born with him as surely as the colour of his eyes, and the shape of his head, and that it was only accentuated by circ.u.mstances.

His wife had died in childbirth; and, out of his pa.s.sionate and extreme grief, grew, hardly controllable, an aversion for the innocent cause of it.

Tom Thorpe "fathered" his brother to the best of his ability, and kept him out of his real father's sight. Barnabas grew up st.u.r.dy and strong; a lover of "out-of-door" pursuits; a hater of books; a child possessed of immense animal spirits, noisy, and rather unruly, who played truant from school whenever he could, and took the consequent thras.h.i.+ngs carelessly; a lad with a violent temper and a kind heart; who never puzzled his brains about anything, and was popular in spite of being slightly overbearing and obstinate, as all his forbears had been; a man who became a wanderer on the face of the earth, and startled every one who had known him by the suddenness and power of his "conversion".

He had been fifteen years in that service, to which he had given heart and life, when Margaret first saw him.

During that time he had come back to the farm at intervals, drawn by an overmastering longing for his native marshes; and, possibly, by a strong though undemonstrative affection for Tom. He had always returned, as he had gone, alone; until the night when he had brought home his wife.

It was late October. In the south, the trees still clung to their red and gold glories, and there was mellowness in the air, the afterglow of departing summer; but here, in the north, winter had already claimed possession, and had cut short brusquely the tender leave-takings of the warm weather.

The few trees that there were, little gnarled stunted specimens, had been violently bereft of their leaves, and leaned to one side, adapting themselves to the constant bullying of the gales, that swept through their thin knotted branches, and dashed against Caulderwell Farm, as if in hopes of, at last, laying that stern and st.u.r.dy old building low.

The lonely house looked cold and desolate enough from outside; but the heart of it, the cheerful kitchen where Mr. Thorpe and his son sat, was warm, even hot, on the coldest of nights.

The man who planned the farm had made the kitchen the n.o.blest room in it. The prim "best parlour," and even the dining-room which no one ever used, but which boasted a curiously blazoned ceiling, were nothing in comparison.

The kitchen was oak-panelled, wide and essentially comfortable, with red brick floor and huge fireplace fitted with corner seats.

Candles, smoked hams, and rows of onions hung from the rafters. The china, genuine old willow, was piled on the oak dresser; pewter pots gleamed cheerfully in the firelight, though they were muddled up with pipes and fis.h.i.+ng tackle in a way that would have made a good housewife's heart sink; and the rubicund face of an "old toby" beamed from among them,--a sort of presiding genius.

Two tallow candles stood on the square wooden table in the middle of the room. The remains of a meal were shoved together at one corner of the table, and books littered the other side. The candles cast deep eerie shadows, but never flickered; though the wind was tossing against the lozenge-shaped windows in angry gusts. The thick walls of the farm were quite draught-proof, let the storm shriek as it would.

Mr. Thorpe was walking with long uneven steps up and down the room. His hands--thin narrow hands--were clasped behind his back, his head poked forward a little.

He was a loose-limbed, gaunt man; big-boned, though he stooped so that it was difficult to guess his real height; his chest seemed to have sunk in, and his shoulders to have become permanently rounded.