Mildred Arkell Volume Iii Part 29

"And she now finds her recompense," observed the dean. "A happy thing for you, if your mothers had so taught you. Dismiss the school, Mr.

Wilberforce. And I hope," he added, turning round to the boys, as he and the other two gentlemen left the hall, "that you will, every one, go home, not to riot on this solemn holiday, but to meditate on these important thoughts, and resolve to endeavour to become more like Henry Arkell. You will attend service this afternoon."

And that was the ending. And the boy, with his talents, his beauty, and his goodness, was gone; and nothing of him remained but what was mouldering under the cloister gravestone.

HENRY CHEVELEY ARKELL.

Died March 24th, 18--, Aged 16.

Not lost, but gone before.

CHAPTER XI.

THOUGHTLESS WORDS.

This is the last part of our history, and you must be prepared for changes, although but little time--not very much more than a year--has gone by.

Death has been busy during that period. Mrs. Peter Arkell survived her son so short a time, that it is already twelve months since she was laid in the churchyard of St. James the Less. It is a twelvemonth also since Mr. Fauntleroy died, and his daughters are the great heiresses of Westerbury.

Westerbury had need of heiresses, or something else substantial, to keep up its consequence; for it was dwindling down lower (speaking of its commercial importance) day by day. The clerical party (in contradistinction to the commercial) rose and flourished; the other fell.

Amidst those with whom it was beginning to be a struggle to keep their heads above water was Mr. Arkell. The hope that times would mend; a hope that had buoyed up for years and years other large manufacturers in Westerbury, was beginning to show itself what it really was--a delusive one. A deplorable gloom hung over the brow of Mr. Arkell, and he most bitterly repented that he had not thrown this hope to the winds long ago, and given up business before so much of his good property was sacrificed. He had in the past year made those retrenchments in his expenditure, which, in point of prudence, ought to have been made before; but his wife had set her face determinately against it, and to a peaceable-dispositioned man like Mr. Arkell, the letting the ruin come is almost preferable to the contention the change involves. Those of my readers who may have had experience of this, will know that I only state what is true. But necessity has no law: and when Mr. Arkell could no longer drain himself to meet these superfluous expenses, the change was made. The close carriage was laid down; the household was reduced to what it had been in his father's time--two maids, and a man for the horse and garden, and he admonished his wife and daughters that they must spend in dress just half what they had spent. But with all the retrenchment, Mr. Arkell saw himself slowly drifting downwards. His manufactory was still kept on; but it had been far better given up. It must surely come to it, and Travice would have to seek a different channel of obtaining a living. Not only Travice: the men who had grown old in William Arkell's service, they must be turned adrift. There's not the least doubt that this last thought helped, more than all else, to keep Mr. Arkell's decision on the balance.

And Peter Arkell? Peter was in worse plight than his cousin. As it had been all their lives, the contrast in their fortunes marked, so it was still; so it would be to the end. William still lived well, and as a gentleman; he had but lopped off superfluities; Peter was a poor, bowed, broken man, obliged to be careful how he laid out money for even the common necessaries of life. But for Mildred's never-ceasing forethought, those necessaries might not always have been bought. The death of his wife, the death of his gifted son, had told seriously upon Peter Arkell: and his health, never too good, had since been ominously breaking up.

His good and gentle daughter, Lucy, had care upon her in many ways. The little petty household economies it was necessary to practise unceasingly, wearied her spirit; the uncertainty of how they were to live, now that her father could no longer teach or write--and his learned books had brought him in a trifle from time to time--chilled her hope. Not yet had she recovered the shock, the terrible heart-blow brought to her by the death of Henry; and her mother's death had followed close upon it. It seemed to have cast a blight upon her young spirit: and there were times when Lucy, good and trusting girl though she was, felt tempted to think that G.o.d was making her path one of needless sorrow. The sad, thoughtful look was ever in her countenance now, in her sweet brown eyes; and her fair features, not strictly beautiful, but pleasant to look upon, grew more like what Mildred's were after the blight had fallen upon her. But no heart-blight had as yet come to Lucy.

One evening an old and confidential friend of Peter Arkell's dropped in to sit an hour with him. It was Mr. Palmer, the manager and cas.h.i.+er of the Westerbury bank, and the brother to Mr. Palmer of Heath Hall. As the two friends talked confidentially on this evening, deploring the commercial state of the city, and saying that it would never rise again from its distress, Mr. Palmer dropped a hint that the firm of George Arkell and Son had been effecting another mortgage on their property.

Mr. Peter Arkell said nothing then; but Lucy, who went into the room on the departure of their guest, noticed that he remained sunk in melancholy silence; and she could not arouse him from it.

Travice Arkell came in. Travice was in the habit of coming in a great deal more than one of the ruling powers at home had any idea of. Travice would very much have liked to make Lucy his wife; but there were serious impediments in more ways than one, and he was condemned to silence, and to wait and see what an uncertain future might bring forth.

The romance that had been enacted in the early days of William Arkell and Mildred was being re-enacted now. But with a difference. For whereas William, as you have seen, forsook the companion of his boyhood, and cast his love upon a stranger, Travice's whole hopes were concentrated upon Lucy. And Lucy loved him with all the impa.s.sioned ideality of a first and powerful pa.s.sion, with all the fervour of an imaginative and reticent nature. It was impossible but that each should detect, in a degree, the feelings of the other, though they might not be, and had not been, spoken of openly.

Travice reached the chess-board from a side-table where it was kept, took his seat opposite Peter, and began to set out the men. Of the same kind, considerate nature that his father was before him, he compa.s.sionated the lonely man's solitary days, and was wont to play a game at chess with him sometimes in an evening, to while away one of his weary hours. But Peter, on this night, put up his hand in token of refusal.

"Not this evening, Travice. I am not equal to it. My spirits are low."

"Do you feel ill?" asked Travice, beginning to put the pieces in the box again.

"I feel low; out of sorts. Mr. Palmer has been here talking of things, and he gives so deplorable a state of private affairs generally, consequent upon the long-continued commercial depression, that it's hard to say who's safe and whose tottering. He has especial means of ascertaining, you know, so there's no doubt he's right."

"Well, what of that?" returned Travice. "It cannot affect you; you are not in business."

"True. I was not thinking of myself."

"A game at chess will divert your thoughts."

"Not to-night, Travice; I'd rather not play to-night."

"Will you have a game, Lucy?"

She looked up from her sewing to smile a negative. "That would be leaving papa quite to his thoughts. I think we had better talk to him."

"Travice," Peter Arkell suddenly said, "I am sure this depression must seriously affect your father."

"Of course it does," was the ready answer. "He has just now had to borrow more money again."

"Then Palmer was right," thought Peter Arkell. "Will he keep on the business?" he asked aloud.

"I should not, were I in his place," said Travice. "He would have given up long ago, I believe, but for thinking what's to become of me. Of course if he does give up, I am thrown on the world, a wandering Arab."

His tone was as much one of jest as of gravity. The young do not see things in the same light as the old. To his father and to Peter Arkell, his being thrown out of the business he had embraced as his own, appeared an almost irrecoverable blight in life; to Travice himself it seemed but a very slight misfortune. The world was before him, and he had honour, education, health, and brains; surely he could win his way in it!

"It is not well to throw down one calling and take up another," observed Peter, thoughtfully. "It does not always answer."

"But if you are forced to it!" argued Travice. "There's no help for it then, and you must do the best you can."

"It is a pity but you had gone to Oxford, Travice, and entered into some profession!"

"I suppose it is, as things seem to be turning out. Thrown out of the manufactory, I should seem a sort of luckless adventurer, not knowing which way to turn to prey upon the public."

"It would be just beginning life again," said Peter, his grave tone bearing in it a sound of reproach to the lighter one.

He rose, and went to the next room--the "Peter's study" of the old days--to get something from his desk there. Travice happened to look at Lucy, and saw her eyes fixed upon him with a troubled, earnest expression. She blushed as he caught their gaze.

"What's the matter, Lucy?"

"I was wondering whatever you would do, if Mr. Arkell does give up."

"I think I should be rather glad of it? I could turn astronomer."

"Turn astronomer! But you don't really mean that, Travice?"

He laughed.

"I should mean it, but for one thing."

"What is that one thing?"

"That it might not find me in bread and cheese. Perhaps they'd make me honorary star-gazer at the observatory royal. The worst is, one must eat and drink; and the essentials necessary for that don't drop from the clouds, as the manna once did of old. Very convenient for some of us if it did."

"I wish you'd be serious," she rejoined, the momentary tears rising to her eyes. She was feeling wretchedly troubled, she could not tell why, and his light mood jarred upon her.

It changed now as he looked at her. Travice Arkell's face changed to an expression of deep, grave meaning, of troubled meaning, and he dropped his voice to a low tone as he rose and stood near Lucy, looking down upon her.

"I wish I could be serious; I have wished it, Lucy, this long while past. Other men at my age are thinking of forming those social ties that man naturally expects to form; of gathering about him a home, and a wife, and children. I must not; for what I can see at present, they must be denied to me for good and all; unless--unless----"