Читать книгу Young Musgrave - Mrs. Oliphant - Страница 13

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The arrival of the children was an era at Penninghame from which afterwards everything dated; but the immediate result was a very curious and not very comfortable one. As they had been introduced into the house, so they lived in it. Mr. Musgrave never mentioned them, never saw them or appeared to see them, ignored their existence, in short, as completely as if his faculties had been deadened in respect to them. His life was in no way changed indeed; the extraordinary revolution which had been made to every one else in the house by this change showed all the more strongly from the absence of all effect upon him. He read, he wrote, he studied, he took his usual quiet exercise exactly as he did before, and never owned by a word or look that he was conscious of any alteration in the household. For a little while the children were hushed not to make a noise, and huddled away into corners to keep them out of sight and hearing; but that arrangement was too unnatural to continue, and it very soon happened that their presence was forced upon him by unmistakable signs, by both sight and hearing. But the Squire took not the slightest notice. He looked over their heads and never saw them. His ear was engaged with other sounds and he did not hear them. By this system of unconsciousness he deprived himself indeed of some evident advantages; for how can you interfere with the proceedings of those whose very existence you ignore? He could not give orders that the children should make less noise, because he professed not to be aware of their presence; nor send them out of his sight, when he was supposed not to see them; and in consequence this blindness and deafness on his part was perhaps a greater gain to them than to himself. The mental commotion into which he had been thrown by their arrival had never been known to any one but himself. He had a slight illness a few days after—his liver out of order, the doctor said; and so worked off his excitement without disclosing it to any one. After this he resumed his serenity, and completed his heraldic study. The history of the augmentation granted to the Musgraves in the year 1393 in remembrance of the valour of Sir Egidio, or Giles, Musgrave in the Holy Land made rather a sensation among students in that kind. It was a very interesting monograph. Besides being a singularly striking chapter of family history, it was, everybody said, a most interesting contribution to the study of heraldic honours—how and why they were bestowed; especially as concerning “augmentations” bestowed on the field for acts of valour—a rare and exceptional distinction. The Squire made a little collection of the notices that appeared in the newspapers of his “Monograph” pasting them into a pretty little book, as is not unusual with amateur authors. He enjoyed them a great deal more than if he had been the author of a great history, and resented criticism with corresponding bitterness. He was very proud of Egidio, or Giles, who died in the fifteenth century; and it did not occur to him that there was any incongruity between this devotion to his ancestors and the fact that he persisted in ignoring the little boy upstairs.

And yet day by day it grew more hard to ignore him. Mr. Musgrave in his study, after the enthusiasm of his monograph was over, could not help hearing voices which it was difficult to take no notice of. The enthusiasm of composition did a great deal for him: it carried him out of the present; it filled him with a delightful fervour and thrill of intellectual excitement. People who are always writing get used to it, and lose this sense of something fine and great which is the inheritance of the amateur. Even after the shock of renewed intercourse with the son, who had brought shame upon his name, and whom he had cast off, Mr. Musgrave, so long as his work lasted, found himself able to forget everything in the happiness it gave. When he woke in the morning his first thought was of this important occupation which awaited him, and he went to bed with the fumes of his own paragraphs in his head; he was carried away by it. But when all this intellectual commotion was over, and when the ennui of having nothing further to do had swallowed up the satisfaction of having finished a great piece of work, as it so soon does, then there came a very difficult interval for the Squire. He had no longer anything to absorb him and keep him comfortably above the circumstances of ordinary life; and as he sat in his library, only reading, only writing a letter, no longer absorbed by any special study, or by the pride and delight of recording in fine language the results of that study, ordinary life stole back, as it has a way of doing. He began to hear the knocks at the door, the ringing of bells, and to wonder what they meant; to hear steps going up and down the stairs, to be aware of Eastwood in the dining-room, and the rustle of Mary’s dress as she went about the house in the morning, and in the afternoon passed with a soft boom of the swinging door into her favourite hall. The routine of the house came back to the old man. He heard the servants in the kitchen, the ticking of that measured, leisurely old clock in the hall which took about five minutes to spell out the hour. He was not consciously paying any attention to these things. On the contrary, he was secluded from them, rapt in his books, knowing nothing of what was going on; yet he heard them all; and as he sat there through the long winter days and the still longer winter evenings, when there was rain or storm out of doors, and nothing to break the long, still blank of hours within, a sound would come to him now and then, even before the care of the household relaxed—the cry of a little voice, a running and pattering of small feet, sometimes an outburst of laughter, a small voice of weeping, which stirred strangely in the air about him and vaguely called forth old half-extinct sensations, as one might run over the jarred and half-silent keys of an old piano in the dark. This surprised him at first in his loneliness—then, when he had realized what it was, hurt him a little, rousing old wrath and bitterness, so that he would sometimes lay down his pen or close his book and all the past would come before him—the past, in which John his son had disappointed, mocked, insulted, and baffled his father. He would not allow himself to realize the presence of these children in the house, but he could not avoid thinking of the individual who stood between him and them, who was so real while they were so visionary. Always John! He had tried to live for years without thought of him and had been tranquil; it was grievous to be compelled thus to think of him again. This all happened, however, in the seclusion of his own mind, in the quiet of his library, and no one knew anything of it; not his daughter, who thought she knew his looks by heart; nor his servant, who had spelled him out by many guesses in the dark—as servants generally do—and imagined that he had his master at his fingers’ ends. But during all this time while these touches were playing upon him, bringing out ghosts of old sensations, muffled sounds and tones forgotten, Mr. Musgrave publicly ignored the fact that there were any children in the house, and contrived not to see them, nor to hear them, with a force of self-government and resolution which, in a nobler cause, would have been beyond all praise.

The effect of the change upon Miss Musgrave was scarcely less remarkable though very different. Her mental and moral education had been of a very peculiar kind. The tragedy which swallowed up her brother had interrupted the soft flowing current of her young life. All had gone smoothly before in the natural brightness of the beginning. And Mary, who had little passion in her temperament, who was more thoughtful than intense, and whose heart had never been awakened by any strong attachment beyond the ties of nature, had borne the interruption better than most people would have borne it, and had done her duty between her offending brother and her enraged father with less strain and violence of suffering than might have been imagined. And she had got through the more quiet years since without bitterness, with a self-adaptation to the primitive monotony of existence which was much helped, as most such virtues are, by temperament. She had formed her own theory of life, as most people do by the time they reach even the earliest stages of middle age; and this theory was the philosophical one that happiness, or the calm which does duty for happiness in most mature lives, was in reality very independent of events; that it came from within, not from without; and that life was wonderfully equal, neither bringing so much good, nor so much evil, as people of lively imaginations gave it credit for doing. Thus she had herself lived, not unhappy, except at the very crisis of the family life. She had suffered then. Who could hope (she said to herself) to do other than suffer one time or another in their life? But since then the calm and regularity of existence had come back, the routine which charms time away and brings content. There had no doubt been expectations in her mind which had come to nothing—expectations of more active joy, more actual well-being, than had ever fallen to her lot; but these expectations had gradually glided away, and no harm had been done. If she had no intensity of enjoyment, neither had she any wretchedness. She had enough to do; her life was full, and she was fairly happy. So she said to herself; so she had said many a day to Mr. Pen, who shook his mildly melancholy head and dissented—as far as he ever dissented from anything said by Miss Mary. Her brother was lost—away—wandering in the darkness of the great world as in a desert. But if he had been near at hand, absorbed in his married life, his wife, who was not of her species, and his unknown children, would not he have been just as much lost to Mary? So she persuaded herself at least; and so lived tranquilly, happy enough—certainly not unhappy;—and why should an ordinary mortal, youth being over, wish for more?