Читать книгу A Whim, and Its Consequences - G. P. R. James - Страница 14

A fine, tall, broad-fronted house, massy in architecture, and placed upon a commanding height, in a beautiful park, had all the window-shutters closed along the principal façade, though a number of people going in and coming out showed that it was not empty. There was no attempt at decoration to be seen in the building. All was plain, solid, and severe. Some dark pines on either hand harmonized with the sternness of the mansion; and the brown oaks and beeches behind carried off the lines to the wavy hills above. Everything was neat and in good order around; the trees carefully confined to their exact proportions near the house, the lawns close mowed, the gravel walks free from the least intrusive weed. The gardens, with their long lines of green and hot houses, showed care and expense; and from a distance one would have supposed that the whole open ground of the park had been lately subject to the scythe, so smooth and trim did everything look.

Within was death.

In the state drawing-room, with crimson curtains sweeping down, and panelling of white and gold, upon a rich Axminster carpet, and surrounded by furniture of the most gorgeous kind, stood the dull trestles, bearing the moral of all--the coffin and the pall: splendour and ostentation and luxury without; death and foulness and corruption within. It was a still homily.

The library adjoining was crowded with gentlemen in black--they called it mourning--and they were eating and drinking cake and wine. Why should they not?--They would have done the same at a wedding. A little beautiful spaniel stood upon his hind legs to one of the mourners for a bit of cake. It was thrown to him; the dog caught it, and the mourners laughed. It was all very well.

Suddenly, however, they put on graver faces. Heaven! what a machine of falsehood is the face! The tongue may lie now and then--the face lies every minute. There was a little bustle at the door, and several of those near made way, speaking a few words to a young gentleman who entered, clothed, like the rest, in black, but with mourning written on his face. Where have we seen that face before? Is it Chandos? Surely it is. But yet how different is the air and manner; with what grave, sad dignity he passes on towards the spot at the other side of the room where Roberts, the steward, is standing, unconscious of his entrance! And who is that who stops him now, and shakes hands with him warmly, yet with a timid, half-averted eye--that pale young man with the waving fair hair around his forehead? Hark! Chandos answers him. "Well, quite well, Faber, I thank you. I have not been far distant; but I must speak to Roberts for a moment, and then," he added, slowly and solemnly, "I must go into the next room."

"You had better not, Sir," said Mr. Faber, the late Sir Harry Winslow's secretary, speaking in a low, imploring tone; "indeed you had better not."

"Do not be afraid, Faber," replied Chandos, "I have more command over myself now. I was too impetuous then. I was rash and hasty. Now I am calm; and nothing on earth would provoke me again to say one angry word. I shall ever be glad to hear of you, Faber; and you must write to me. Address your letters to the care of Roberts; he will be able to forward them."

He was then moving on; but the young man detained him by the hand, saying, in a whisper, "Oh, think better of it, Chandos. Be reconciled to him."

"That may be whenever he seeks reconciliation," answered Chandos; "but it will make no difference in my purposes. I will never be his dependent, Faber; for I know well what it is to be so."

Thus saying, he turned away, and spoke a few words to the steward; after which, with a slow but steady step, he walked towards the door leading to the great drawing-room, opened it, and passed through. Many an eye watched him till the door was closed; and then the funeral guests murmured together, talking over his character and history. In the meantime he advanced through the drawing-room, and stood by the coffin of his father. Then slowly inclining his head to two men who stood at the opposite door, he bade them leave him for a moment. They instantly obeyed; and Chandos knelt down and prayed, with one hand resting on the pall. In a minute or two he heard a step coming, and rose; but did not quit the room, remaining by the side of the coffin, with his tall head bowed down, and a tear in his eyes. The next instant the opposite door opened quickly and sharply, and a man of two or three and thirty entered, bearing a strong family likeness to him who already stood there, but shorter, stouter, and less graceful. Though the features were like those of Chandos, yet there was a great difference of expression--the fierce, keen, eager eye, with its small, contracted pupil, the firm set teeth, and the curl at the corner of the mouth, all gave a look of bitterness and irritability from which the face of the other was quite free.

The moment the new comer's eyes rested on Chandos, the habitual expression grew more intense, deepening into malevolence, and he exclaimed, "You here, Sir!"

"Yes, I am, Sir William Winslow," answered the younger man. "You did not surely expect me to be absent from my father's funeral!"

"One never knows what to expect from you or of you," replied his brother. "I doubt not, you have really come for the purpose of insulting me again."

"Far from it," replied Chandos, calmly. "I came to pay the last duty to my parent; to insult no one. It is but for a few hours that we shall be together, Sir William: let us for that time forget everything but that we are the sons of the same father and mother; and by the side of this coffin lay aside, at least for the time, all feelings of animosity."

"Very well for you to talk of forgetting," answered Sir William Winslow, bitterly. "I do not forget so easily, Sir. The sons of the same father and mother!--Well, it is so, and strange, too."

"Hush! hush!" cried Chandos, waving his hand with an indignant look; and, not knowing what would be uttered next, he turned quickly away, and left the room.

"Oh, he runs," said Sir William Winslow, whose face was flushed, and his brow knit. "But he shall hear more of my mind before he goes. He said before them all that he would never consent to be dependent on one who was a tyrant in everything--to my servants--even to my dogs. Was that not an insult?--I will make him eat those words as soon as the funeral is over, or he shall learn that I can and will exercise the power my father left me to the uttermost. It was the wisest thing he ever did to enable me to tame this proud spirit. Oh, I will bring it down!--Sons of the same father and mother! On my life, if it were not for the likeness, I should think he was a changeling. But he is like--very like; and like my mother, too. It is from her that he takes that obstinate spirit which he thinks so fine, and calls resolution."

As he thus thought, his eyes fell upon the coffin; and he felt a little ashamed. There is a still, calm power in the presence of the dead which rebukes wrath; and Sir William Winslow looked down upon the pall, and thought of what was beneath with feelings that he did not like to indulge, but could not altogether conquer. He was spared a struggle with them, however; for a minute had hardly passed after Chandos had left him, when a servant came in, and advanced to whisper a word in his master's ear.

"Well, I am ready," replied Sir William, "quite ready. Where are all the carriages? I do not see them."

"They have been taken into the back court," said the man.

"Well, then, I am quite ready," repeated the baronet, and retired, but not by the door which led to the room where the guests were assembled.

Half an hour passed in the gloomy preparations for the funeral march. The callous assistants of the undertaker went about their task with the usual studied gravity of aspect, and, at heart, the cold indifference of habit to all the fearful realities which lay hid under the pageantry which their own hands had prepared out of plumes and tinsel, and velvet and silk. Then came the display of hearse and mutes and plume-bearers, and the long line of carriages following with the mourners, who were only in the mercenary point better than the hired mourners of more ancient days. And the people of the village came out to stare at the fine sight; and amongst the young, some vague indefinite notion of there being something solemn and awful under all that decoration might prevail; but with the great multitude it was but a stage-procession.

None thought of what it is to lay the flesh of man amongst the worms, when the spirit has winged its flight away where no man knoweth.

To one person, indeed, amongst those who were carried along after the corpse, the whole was full of awe. He knew that his father had lived as if the world were all: he knew not if he had died in the hope of another; and the lessons early implanted in his heart by a mother's voice, made that consideration a terrible one for him. Then, too, the gaping crowd was painful to him. And oh, what he felt when the little village boys ran along laughing and pointing by the side of the funeral train!

They reached the gates of the churchyard, which was wide and well tenanted; and there the coffin had to be taken out, and Chandos stood side by side with his brother. Neither spoke to, neither looked at, the other. It was a terrible thing to behold that want of sympathy between two so nearly allied at the funeral of a father; but the eye that most marked it, saw that the one was full of deep and sorrowful thoughts, the other of fierce and angry passions.

The moment after, rose upon the air, pronounced by the powerful voice of the village curate, those words of bright but awful hope, "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord, he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die." That solemn and impressive service, the most beautiful and appropriate, the most elevating, yet the most subduing that ever was composed--the burial office of the English church--proceeded; and Chandos Winslow lost himself completely in the ideas that it awakened. But little manifested were many of those ideas, it is true; but they were only on that account the more absorbing; and when the words, "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life," sounded in his ears, a shudder passed over him as he asked himself--"Had he such a hope?"

Most different were the feelings of the man who stood by his side. The customs of the world, the habits of good society put a restraint upon him; but, with a strange perversion of the true meaning of the words he heard, and a false application of them to his own circumstances, he fancied that he was virtuous and religious when he refrained, even there, from venting his anger in any shape upon its object; and heard the sentences of the Psalmist, as a. sort of laudation of his own forbearance. When the clergyman read aloud: "I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle, while the ungodly is in my sight," he fancied himself a second David, and reserved his wrath for the time to come.

At length all was over; the dull shovelsfull of earth rattled upon the coffin; the last "Amen" was said; and the mourners took their way back towards the carriages, leaving the sexton to finish his work. But when Sir William Winslow had entered the coach with two other gentlemen, and the servant was about to shut the door, he put down his head, and asked in a low but fierce voice, "Where is my brother? Where is Mr. Chandos Winslow?"

"He went away, Sir William, a minute ago," replied the servant. "He took the other way on foot."

Sir William Winslow cast himself back in the seat, and set his teeth hard; but he did not utter a word to any one, till he reached Elmsly Park. His demeanour, however, was courteous to those few persons who were on sufficiently intimate terms to remain for a few minutes after his return; and to one of them he even said a few words upon the absence of his "strange brother." His was the tone of an injured man; but the gentleman to whom he spoke was not without plain, straightforward good sense; and his only reply was, "Some allowance must be made, Sir William, for your brother's modification at finding that your father has left him nothing of all his large fortune; not even the portion which fell to his mother, on the death of her uncle."

"Not, Sir, when my father desired me in his will to provide for him properly," said Sir William Winslow.

"Why, I don't know," answered the other in a careless tone. "No man likes to be dependent, or to owe to favour that which he thinks he might claim of right. I have heard, too, that you and Mr. Winslow have not been on good terms for the last four or five years; but nobody can judge of such matters but the parties concerned. I must take my leave, however; for I see my carriage, and I have far to go."

Sir William Winslow made a stiff how, and the other departed.

"Now send Roberts to me," said the heir of immense wealth, as soon as every one of his own rank was gone, speaking of his father's steward and law-agent, as if he had been a horse-boy in his stable. But the footman to whom he spoke informed him that Mr. Roberts was not in the house. Sir William Winslow fretted himself for half-an-hour, when at length it was announced that the steward had arrived. He entered with his usual calm, deliberate air; and was advancing towards the table at which the baronet sat, when the latter addressed him sharply, saying, "I told you, Mr. Roberts, that I should require to speak with you immediately after the funeral."

"I have come, Sir William," replied the other, calmly, "as soon as important business, which could not be delayed, would permit me; and I had hoped to be here by the time most convenient to you. I did not know that the gentlemen who returned with you would go so soon."

"You have kept me half-an-hour waiting, Sir," replied Sir William; "and I do not like to be kept waiting."

"I am sorry that it so occurred," answered the steward. "May I ask your commands?"

"In the first place, I wish to know, where is my brother Chandos?" said the baronet, "I saw him speaking to you in the churchyard."

"He did, Sir," replied Roberts, "and he has since been at my house. But where he now is I cannot tell you."

"Oh, he has been arranging all his affairs with you, I suppose," said Sir William Winslow, with a sneer; "and, I suppose, hearing from you of my father being supposed to have made another will."

"No, Sir William," replied the steward, perfectly undisturbed. "He did arrange some affairs with me; gave me power to receive the dividend upon the small sum in the funds, left him by Mrs. Grant, amounting to one hundred and sixty-two pounds ten, per annum; and directed me what to do with the books and furniture, left him by your father. But I did not judge it expedient to tell him at present, that I know Sir Harry did once make another will; because, as you say he burnt it afterwards, I imagined such information might only increase his disappointment, or excite hopes never likely to be realized."

"You did right," answered the baronet. "I saw my father burn it with my own eyes; and I desire that you will not mention the subject to him at all. It is my intention to let him bite at the bridle a little; and then, when his spirit is tamed, do for him what my father wished me to do. Have you any means of communicating with him?"

But Mr. Roberts was a methodical man; and he answered things in order. "In regard to mentioning the subject of the later will, Sir William," he said, "I will take advice. I am placed in a peculiar position, Sir: as your agent, I have a duty to perform to you; but as an honest man, I have also duties to perform. I know that a will five years posterior to that which has been opened, was duly executed by your father. I think you are mistaken in supposing it was burnt by him, and--."

"By him!" cried the baronet, catching at his words, "do you mean to insinuate that I burnt it?"

"Far from it, Sir William," was the reply of the steward. "I am sure you are quite incapable of such an act; and if I had just cause to believe such a thing, either you or I would not be here now. But, as I have said, my position is a peculiar one: and I would rather leave the decision of how I ought to act to others."

"You have heard my orders, Sir; and you are aware of what must be the consequence of your hesitating to obey them," rejoined the baronet, nodding his head significantly.

"Perfectly, Sir William," answered Mr. Roberts; "and that is a subject on which I wish to speak. When I gave up practice as an attorney, and undertook the office of steward or agent to your late father, I would only consent to do so under an indenture which insured me three months clear notice of the termination of my engagement with him and his heirs, &c.; during which three months I was to continue in the full exercises of all the functions specified in the document of which I beg leave to hand you a copy. This I did require for the safety of myself and of those parties with whom I might enter into engagements regarding the letting of various farms, and other matters which a new agent might think fit to overset, unless I had the power of completing legally any contracts to which your father might have consented, though in an informal manner. Your father assented, and had, I believe, no cause to regret having done so; as, without distressing the tenantry, the rental has been raised twenty-seven per cent, within the last fifteen years. Your father was pleased, Sir William, to treat me in a different manner from that which you have thought fit to use within the last week; and I therefore must beg leave to give you notice, that at the termination of three months I shall cease to be your agent. The indenture requires a written notice on either part; and therefore I shall have the honour of enclosing one this afternoon."

Sir William Winslow had listened, in silent astonishment, to his steward's words, and the first feeling was undoubtedly rage; but Mr. Roberts was sufficiently long-winded to allow reflection to come in, though not entirely to let anger go out. The baronet walked to the window, and looked out into the park. Had Mr. Roberts been in the park, he would have seen the muscles of his face working with passion; but when Sir William, after a silence of two or three minutes, turned round again, the expression was calm, though very grave.

"Do not send in the notice," he said; "take another week to consider of it, Roberts. I have had a good deal to irritate me, a good deal to excite me. I am, I know, a passionate and irritable man; but--. There, let us say no more of it at present, Roberts. We will both think better of many things."

It is wonderful how often men imagine that by acknowledging they are irritable, they justify all that irritation prompts. It affords to the male part of the sex the same universal excuse that nervousness does to so many women. I am quite sure that many a lady who finds her way into Doctors' Commons, fancies she broke the seventh commandment from pure nervousness.

Mr. Roberts was not at all satisfied that Sir William Winslow's irritability would ever take a less unpleasant form; but nevertheless, without reply, he bowed and withdrew.