The spring advanced; the days grew a little warmer; and at length, partly from economic considerations, it was determined they should go home. When they reached London, they found a great difference in the weather: it cannot be said she owes her salubrity to her climate. Fog and drizzle, frost and fog, were the embodiment of its unvarying mutability. At once Richard was worse, and dared not think, for his mother's sake, and the labour she had spent upon him, of going to the next popular concert, if indeed those delights had not ceased for the season. But he ought to try, for he could do that in the middle of the day, at least to get news of Arthur Manson. He dreaded hearing that he was no more in this world. The cold wintry weather, and the return to poor and spare nourishment caused by Richard's illness, must have been hard upon him! It was a continual sorrow to Richard that he had not been able to get him his new clothes before he was taken ill. So the first morning he felt it possible, he took his way to the city. There he learned that the company had dispensed with Arthur's services, because his attendance had become so irregular.
“You see, sir,” said the porter, “the gov'nors they don't think no more of a man than they do of a horse: so long as he can hold the shafts up an' lean agin the collar, he's money; when he can't no longer, he's dirt!”
Sad at heart, Richard set out for Clerkenwell. He was ill able for the journey, but Arthur was dying! He would brave the mother for the sake of the son! He got into an omnibus which took him a good part of the way, and walked the rest. When at length he looked up at the dreary house, he saw the blinds of the windows drawn down. A pang of fear went through his heart, and an infilial murmur awoke in his brain:—why was he, on whom those poor lives almost depended, made feeble as themselves, and incapable of helping them? After all his hoping and trusting,couldthere be a God in the earth and things go like that? The look of things seemed the truth of things; the seen denied the unseen. Cold and hunger and desertion; ugly, mocking failure; heartless comfort, and hopeless misery, made up the law of life! Moody and wretched he went up the stair to the darkened floor.
When he knocked at the front room, that in which Alice slept with her mother, it was opened by Alice, looking more small and forlorn than he had yet seen her, with hollower cheeks and larger eyes, and a smile to make an angel weep.
“Richard!” she cried, with a voice in which the very gladness sounded like pain. A pink flush rose in her poor wasted cheeks, and she lay still in his arms as if she had gone to live there.
He could not, for pity, speak one word.
“How ill you look!” she murmured. “I knew you must be ill! I thought you might be dead! Oh, Godisgood to leave you to us!” Then bursting into tears, “How wicked of me,” she sobbed, “to feel anything like gladness, with my mother lying there, and me not able to do anything for her, and not knowing what's become of her, or how things are going with her!—We shall never see her again!”
“Don't say that, Alice! Never sayneverabout anything except it be bad. You can't besure, you know. You can't be sure of anything that's not in your very mouth—and then sometimes you can't swallow it!—But how's Arthur?”
“He'll know all about it soon!” she answered, with a touch of bitterness. “If he had been left me, we should have got along somehow. He would have lain in bed, and I would have worked beside him! How I could have worked forhim! But he's past hope now! He'll never get up again.”
“Oh God,” cried Richard in his heart, where an agony of will wrestled with doubt, “if thou art, thou wilt hear me, and take pity on her, and on us all!—I dare not pray, Alice,” he went on aloud, “that he may live, but I will pray God to be with him. It would be poor kindness to want him left with us, if he is taking him where he will be well. May I go and see him?”
“Surely, Richard.—But mayn't I let him know first? The surprise might be too much for him.”
Their talk had waked him, however, and he knew his brother's voice. “Richard! Richard!” he cried, so loud that it startled Alice: he had not spoken above a whisper for days. Richard opened his door, and went in. But when he saw Arthur, he could scarcely recognize him, he was so wasted. His eyes stood out like balls from his sunken cheeks, and the smile with which he greeted him was all teeth, like the helpless smile of a skull. Overcome with tenderness, the stronger that he would have passed him in the street as one unknown, Richard stooped and kissed his forehead, then stood speechless, holding the thin leaf of a hand that strained his. Arthur tried to speak, but his cough came on, and his brother begged him to be silent.
“I will go into the next room with Alice,” he said, “and come to you again. I shall see you often now, I hope. I've been ill or I should have been here fifty times.”
In the next room lay the motionless form of the unmotherly mother. A certain something of human grace had returned to her countenance. Richard did not like looking at her; he felt that, not loving her, he had no right to let his eyes rest on her. But she had been sinned against like his own mother: he must not fail her with what sympathy she might claim!
“Don't think hard things of her,” said Alice, as if she knew what he was thinking. “She had not the strength of some people. I believe myself she could not help it. She had been used to everything she wanted!”
“I pity her heartily,” answered Richard.
She threw her arms round his neck, and clung to him as if she would never more let him go.
“But what am I to do?” she said, releasing him. “If I stay at home to nurse Arthur, we must both die of hunger. If I go away, there is nobody to do anything for him!”
“I wish I could stay with him!” returned Richard. “But I've been so long ill that I have no money, and I don't know when I shall have any. I have just one shilling in my possession. Take it, dear.”
“I can't take your last shilling, Richard!”
“There's no fear of me,” he said; “I shall have everything I want. It makes me ashamed to think of it. You must just creep on for a while as best you can, while I think what to do. Only there's the funeral!”
Alice gave a cry choked by a sob.
“There is no help!” she said in a voice of despair. “The parish is all that is left us!”
“It don't matter much,” rejoined Richard. “For my part I don't care a paring what becomes of my old clothes when I've done with them! You needn't think, whether she be anywhere or nowhere, that she cares how her body gets put under the earth! Don't trouble about it, Alice; it really is nothing. I would come to the funeral, but I don't see how I can. I don't know now what I shall say to my mother!—Tell Arthur I hope to see him again soon; I must not stop now. I won't forget you, Alice—not for an hour, I think. Beg some one in the house to go in to him now and then while you are away. I shall soon do something to cheer him up a bit. Good-night, dear!”
With a heavy heart Richard went. It was all he could do to get home before dark, having to walk all the way. His mother was much distressed to see him so exhausted; but he managed not to tell her what he had been about. He had some tea and went to bed, and there remained all the next day. And while he was in bed, it came to him clear and plain what he must do. It was certain that for a long time he could do nothing for Arthur and Alice out of his own pocket. Even if he got to work at once, he could not take his wages as before, seeing his parents had spent upon him almost all they had saved!
But there was one whooughtto help them! Specially in such sore need had they a right to the saving help of their own father! He would go to his father and their father—and as the words rose in his mind, he wondered where he had heard something like them before.
The next day he begged his father and mother to let him spend a week or two with his grandfather.
The day after, well wrapt from the cold, he took his place in a slow train, and at the station was heartily welcomed by his grandfather, who had come with his pony-cart to take him home. Settled in the room once occupied by Alice, he felt like a usurper, a robber of the helpless: he had left her in misery and wretchedness, and was in the heart of the comfort that had once been hers. He had to tell himself that it was foolish; that he was there for her sake.
He took his grandfather at once into his confidence, begging him not to let his mother know: and Simon, who had in former days experienced something of the hardness of his true-hearted daughter, entered into the thing with a brooding kind of smile. He saw no reason why Richard should not make the attempt, but shook his head at the prospect of success. Doubtless the baronet thought he had done all that could be required of him! He would have Richard rest a day before encountering him but when he heard in what condition he had left Alice and her brother, he said no more, but the next morning had his trap ready to drive him to Mortgrange.
Richard's heart beat fast as he entered the lodge-gate, and walked up to the front door. After a moment's bewilderment the servant who answered his ring recognized him, and expressed concern that he looked so ill. When he asked to see sir Wilton, the man, thinking he came to resume the work so suddenly abandoned, said he was in the library, having his morning cigar.
“Then I'll just step in!” said Richard; and the footman gave way as to a member of the household.
Sir Wilton, now an elderly and broken man, sat in the same chair, and in the same attitude, as when Richard, a new-born and ugly child, had, in the arms of his aunt, his first interview with him, nearly one and twenty years before. The relation between them had not developed a hair's-breadth since that moment, and Richard, partly from the state of his health, could not, with all the courage he could gather, help quailing a little before the expected encounter; but he remained outwardly quiet and seemingly cool. The sun was not shining into the room, and it was rather dark. Sir Wilton sat with his back to the one large bay-window, and Richard received its light on his face as he entered. He stood an instant, hesitating. His father did not speak, but sat looking straight at him, staring indeed as at something portentous—much as when first he saw the ugly apparition of his infant heir. Richard's illness had brought out, in the pallor and emaciation of his countenance, what likeness there was in him to his mother; and, strange to say, at the moment when the door opened to admit him, sir Wilton was thinking of the monstrous baby his wife had left him, and wondering if the creature were still alive, and as hideous as twenty years before.
It was notverystrange, however. Sir Wilton had been annoyed with his wife that morning, and it was yet a bitterer thing not to be able to hurt her in return, which, because of her cold imperturbability, was impossible, say what he might. As often, therefore, as he sat in silent irritation with her, the thought of his lost child never failed to present itself. What a power over her ladyship would he not possess, what a plough and harrow for her frozen equanimity, if only he knew where the heir to Mortgrange was! He was damned ugly, but the uglier the better! If he but had him, he swore he would have a merry time, with his lady's pride on its marrow-bones! After so many years the poor lad might, ugly as he was, turn out presentable, and if so, then, by heaven, that smooth-faced gentleman, Arthur, should shift for himself!
Suddenly appeared Richard, with his mother in his face; and before his father had time to settle what the deuce it could mean, the apparition spoke.
“I am very sorry to intrude upon you, sir Wilton,” he said, “but—”
Here he paused.
“—But you've got something to tell me—eh?” suggested sir Wilton. He was on the point of adding, “If it be where you got those eyes, I may have to ask you to sit down!” but he checked himself, and said only, “You'd better make haste, then; for the devil is at the door in the shape of my damned gout!”
“I came to tell you, sir Wilton,” replied Richard, plunging at once into the middle of things, which was indeed the best way with sir Wilton, “about a son of yours—”
“What!” cried sir Wilton, putting his hands on the arms of his chair and leaning forward as if on the point of rising to his feet. “Where the devil is he? What do you know about him?”
“He is lying at the point of death—dying of hunger, I may say.”
“Rubbish!” cried the baronet contemptuously. “You want to get money out of me! But you shan't!—not a damned penny!”
“I do want to get money from you, sir,” said Richard. “I kept the poor fellow alive—kept him in dinners at least, him and his sister, till I fell ill and couldn't work.”
At the wordsisterthe baronet grew calmer. It was nothing about the lost heir! The other sort did not matter: they were no use against the enemy!
Richard paused. The baronet stared.
“I haven't a penny to call my own, or I should not have come to you,” resumed Richard.
“I thought so! That's your orthodox style! But you've come to the wrong man!” returned sir Wilton. “I never give anything to beggars.”
He did not in the least doubt what he heard, but he scarcely knew what he answered—wondering where he had seen the fellow, and how he came to be so like his wife. The remembered ugliness of her infant prevented all suggestion that this handsome fellow might be the same.
“You are the last man, sir Wilton, from whom I would ask anything for myself,” said Richard.
“Why so?”
Richard hesitated. To let him suspect the same claim in himself, would be fatal.
“I swear to you, sir Wilton,” he said, “by all that men count sacred, I come only to tell you that Arthur and Alice Manson, your son and daughter, are in dire want. Your son may be dead; he looked like it three days ago, and had no one to attend to him; his sister had to leave him to earn their next day's food. Their mother lay a corpse in the other of their two rooms.”
“Oh! she's gone, is she! That alters the case. But what became of all the money I gave her? It was more than her body was worth; soul she never had any!”
“She lost it somehow, and her son and daughter starved themselves to keep her in plenty, so that by the time she died, they were all but dead themselves.”
“A pair of fools.”
“A good son and daughter, sir!”
“Attached to the young woman, eh?” asked the baronet, looking hard at him.
“Very much; but hardly more than to her brother,” answered Richard. “God knows if I had but my strength,” he cried, almost in despair, and suddenly shooting out his long thin arms, with his two hands, wasted white, at the ends of them, “I would work myself to the bone for them, and not ask you for a penny!”
“I provided for their mother!—why didn't they look after the money?I'mnot accountable forthem!”
“Ain't you accountable for giving the poor things a mother like that, sir?”
“By Jove, you have me there! Shewasa bad lot—a damned liar!—Young fellow, I don't know who you are, but I like your pluck! There ain't many I'd let stand talking at me like that! I'll give you something for the poor creatures—that is, mind you, if you've told me the truth about their mother! You're sure she's dead? Not a penny shall they have if she's alive!”
“I saw her dead, sir, with my own eyes.”
“You're sure she wasn't shamming?”
“She couldn't have shammed anything so peaceful.”
The baronet laughed.
“Believe me, sir,” said Richard, “she's dead—and by this time buried by the parish.”
“God bless my soul! Well, it's none of my fault!”
“She ate and drank her own children!” said Richard with a groan, for his strength was failing him. He sank into a chair.
“I will give you a cheque,” said sir Wilton, rising, and going to a writing-table in the window. “I will give you twenty pounds for them in the meantime—and then we'll see—we'll see!—that is,” he added, turning to Richard, “if you swear by God that you have told me nothing but the truth!”
“I swear,” said Richard solemnly, “by all my hopes in God the saviour of men, that I have not wittingly uttered a word that is untrue or incorrect.”
“That's enough. I'll give you the cheque.”
He turned again to the table, sat down, searched for his keys, unlocked and drew out a drawer, took from it a cheque-book, and settled himself to write with deliberation, thinking all the time. When he had done—“Have the goodness to come and fetch your money,” he said tartly.
“With pleasure!” answered Richard, and went up to the table.
Sir Wilton turned on his seat, and looked him in the face, full in the eyes. Richard steadily encountered his gaze.
“What is your name?” said sir Wilton at length. “I must make the cheque payable to you!”
“Richard Tuke, sir,” answered Richard.
“What are you?”
“A bookbinder. I was here all the summer, sir, repairing your library.”
“Oh! bless my soul!—Yes! that's what it was! I thought I had seen you somewhere! Why didn't you tell me so at first?”
“It had nothing to do with my coming now, and I did not imagine it of any interest to you, sir.”
“It would have saved me the trouble of trying to remember where I had seen you!”
Then suddenly a light flashed across his face.
“By heaven,” he muttered, “I understand it now!—They saw it—that look on his face!—By Jove!—But no; she never sawher!—She must have heard something about him then!—They didn't treat you well, I believe!” he said: “—turned you away at a moment's notice!—I hope they took that into consideration when they paid you?”
“I made no complaint, sir. I never asked why I was dismissed!”
“But they made it up to you—didn't they?”
“I don't submit to ill usage, sir.” “That's right! I'm glad you made them pay for it!”
“To take money for ill usage is to submit to it, it seems to me!” said Richard.
“By Jove, there are not many would call money ill usage!—Well, it wasn't right, and I'll have nothing to do with it!—Here,” he went on, wheeling round to the table, and drawing his cheque-book toward him, “I will give you another cheque for yourself.”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Richard, “but I can take nothing for myself! Don't you see, sir?—As soon as I was gone, you would think I had after all come for my own sake!”
“I won't, I promise you. I think you a very honest fellow!”
“Then, sir, please continue to think me so, and don't offer me money!”
“Lest you should be tempted to take it?”
“No; lest I should annoy you by the use I made of it!”
“Tut, tut! I don't care what you do with it! You can't annoy me!”
He wrote a second cheque, blotted it, then finished the other, and held out both to Richard.
“I can't give you so much as the other poor beggars; you haven't the same claim upon me!” he said.
Richard took the cheques, looked at them, put the larger in his pocket, walked to the fire, and placed the other in the hottest cavern of it.
“By Jove!” cried the baronet, and again stared at him: he had seen his mother do precisely the same thing—with the same action, to the very turn of her hand, and with the same choice of the central gulf of fire!
Richard turned to sir Wilton, and would have thanked him again on behalf of Alice and Arthur, but something got up in his throat, and, with a grateful look and a bend of the head, he made for the door speechless.
“I say, I say, my lad!” cried sir Wilton, and Richard stopped.
“There's something in this,” the baronet went on, “more than I understand! I would give a big cheque to know what is in your mind! What does it all mean?”
Richard looked at him, but said nothing: he was in some sort fascinated by the old man's gaze.
“Suppose now,” said sir Wilton, “I were to tell you I would do whatever you asked me so far as it was in my power—what would you say?”
“That I would ask you for nothing,” answered Richard.
“I make the promise; I say solemnly that I will give you whatever you ask of me—provided I can do it honestly,” said the baronet.
“What a damned fool I am!” he thought with himself. “The devil is in me to let the fellow walk over me like this! But I must know what it all means! I shall find some way out of it!”
For one moment the books around him seemed to Richard to rush upon his brain like troops to the assault of a citadel; but the next he said—
“I can ask you for nothing whatever, sir; but I thank you from my heart for my poor friends, your children. Believe me I am grateful.”
With a lingering look at his father, he left the room.
The godless old man was strangely moved. He rose, but instead of ringing the bell, hobbled after Richard to the door. As he opened it, however, he heard the hall-door close. He went to it, but by the time he reached it, the bookbinder had turned a corner of the house, to go by a back-way to the spot where his grandfather was waiting for him.
He found him in his cart, immovably expectant, his pony eating the grass at the edge of the road. Before he got his head pulled up, Richard was in the cart beside him.
“Drive on, grandfather,” he panted in triumph. “I've got it!”
“Got what, lad?” returned the old man, with a flash in his eyes, and a forward strain of his neck.
“What I wanted. Money. Twenty pounds.”
“Bah! twenty pounds!” returned Simon with contempt, and a jerk of his head the other way.
He had himself noted Richard's likeness to his daughter, and imagined it impossible sir Wilton should not also see it.
“But of course,” he went on, “twenty pounds will be a large sum to them, and give them time to look about, and see what can be done. And now I'll tell you what, lad: if the young man is fit to be moved when you go back, you just bring him down here—to the cottage, I mean—and it shan't cost him a ha'penny. I've a bit of a nest-egg as ain't chalk nor yet china; and Jessie is going to be well married; and who knows but the place may suit him as it did his sister! You look to it when you get home.”
“I will indeed, grandfather!—You're a good man, grandfather: the poor things are no blood of yours!”
“Where's the odds o' that!” grunted Simon. “I reckon it was your God and mine as made 'em!”
Richard felt in his soul that, little reason as he had to be proud of his descent, he had at least one noble grandfather.
“You're a good man, grandfather!” he repeated meditatively.
“Middlin',” returned the old man, laughing. “I'm not so good by a long chalk as my maker meant me, and I'm not so bad as the devil would have me. But if I were the powers that be, I wouldn't leave things as they are! I'd have 'em a bit straightened out afore I died!”
“That shows where you come from, Mr. Wingfold would say; for that is just what God is always doing.”
“I know the man; I know your Mr. Wingfold! Since you went, he's been more than once or twice to the smithy to ask after you. He's one o' the right sort, he is! He's a man, he is!—not an old woman in breeches! My soul! why don't they walk and talk and look like men? Most on 'em as I've seen are no more like men than if they was drawn on the wall with a coal! If they was all like your Mr. Wingfold now! Why, the devil wouldn't hare a chance! I've a soft heart for the clergy—always had, though every now and then they do turn me sick!”
They were spinning along the road, half-way home, behind the little four-legged business in the shafts, when they became aware of a quick sharp trot behind them. Neither looked round: the blacksmith was minding his pony and the clergy, and the twenty pounds in Richard's heart were making it sing a new song. What a thing is money even, with God in it. The horseman came alongside the cart, and slackened his pace!
“Sir Wilton wants to see Mr. Tuke again,” he said. “He made a mistake in the cheque he gave him.”
An arrow of fear shot through Richard's heart. What did it mean? Was the precious thing going to be taken from him? Was his hope to be destroyed and his heart left desolate? He took the cheque from his pocket and examined it. Simon had pulled up his pony, and they were standing in the middle of the highway, the old man waiting his grandson's decision. Richard was not unaccustomed to cheques in payment of his work, and he could see nothing amiss with the baronet's: it was made payable to bearer, and not crossed: Alice could take it to the bank and get the money for it! The next moment, however, he noted that it was payable at a branch-bank in the town of Barset, near Mortgrange. The baronet, he concluded, had, with more care than he would have expected of him, thought of this, and that it would cause trouble, so had sent his man to bring him back, that he might replace the cheque with one payable in London. His heart warmed toward his father.
“I see!” he said. “I'm sorry to give you the trouble, grandfather, but I'm afraid we must go!”
Simon turned the pony's head without a word, and they went trotting briskly back to Mortgrange. Richard explained the matter as it seemed to him.
“I'm glad to find him so considerate!” said the old man. “It's a bad cheese that don't improve with age! Only men ain't cheeses!—If I'd brought up my girls better,—” he went on reflectively, but Richard interrupted him.
“You ain't going to hit my mother, grandfather!” said Richard.
“No, no, lad; I learned my manners better than that! Whatever I was going to say, I was thinking of my own faults and no one else's. But it's not possible we should be wise at the outset, and I trust the Maker will remember it. He'll be considerate, lad!—The Bible would call itmerciful, but I don' care for parson-words! I like things that are true to sound true, just as any common honest man would say them!”
The moment he saw that Richard was indeed gone, the baronet swore to himself that the fellow was his own son. He was his mother all over!—anything but ugly, and far fitter to represent the family than the smooth-faced ape lady Ann had presented him with! But a doubt came: his late wife had a sister somewhere, and a son of hers might have stolen a likeness to his lady-aunt! The tradesman fellow knew of the connection, and pretended to himself not to think much of it!
“Whatarewe coming to, by Jove!” muttered the baronet. “The pride of the lower classes is growing portentous!—No, the fellow is none of mine!” he concluded with a sigh.
Alas for his grip on lady Ann! The pincers had melted in his grasp, and she was gone! Itwasa pity! If he had been a better husband to poor Ruby, he would have taken better care of her child, ugly as he was, and would have had him now to plague lady Ann! But stop! there was something odd about the child—something more than mere ugliness—something his nurse had shown him in that very room! By Jove! what was it? It had something to do with ducks, or geese, or swans, or pelicans! He had mentioned the thing to his wife, he knew, and she was sure to have remembered it! But he was not going to ask her! Very likely she had known the fellow by it, and therefore sent him out of the house!—Yes! yes! by Jove! that was it! He had webs between his fingers and toes!—He might have got rid of them, no doubt, but he must see his hands!
All this passed swiftly through sir Wilton's mind. He rang the library bell furiously, and sent a groom after the bookbinder. They drove in at the gate, but stopped a little way from the house. Richard ran to the great door, found it open, and went straight to the library. There sat the baronet as at first.
“I bethought me,” said sir Wilton the moment he entered, “that I had given you a cheque on the branch at Barset, when it would probably suit you better to have one on headquarters in London!”
“It was very kind of you to think of it, sir,” answered Richard.
“Kind! I don't know about that! I'm not often accused of that weakness!” returned sir Wilton, rising with a grin—in which, however, there was more of humour than ill nature.
He went to the table in the window, sat down, unlocked a drawer, took out a cheque-book, and began to write a cheque.
“What did you say was your name?” he asked: “these cheques are all made to order, and I should prefer your drawing the money.”
Richard gave him again the name he had always been known by.
“Tuke! What a beast of a name!” said the baronet. “How do you spell it?”
Richard's face flushed, but he would not willingly show anger with one who had granted the prayer of his sorest need. He spelled the name to him as unconcernedly as he could. But the baronet had a keen ear.
“Oh, you needn't be crusty!” he said. “I meant no harm. One has fancies about names, you know! What did they call your mother before she was married?”
Richard hesitated. He did not want sir Wilton to know who he was. He felt that, the relation between them known by both, he must behave to his father in a way he would not like. But he must, nevertheless, speak the truth! Wherever he had not spoken the truth, he had repented, and been ashamed, and had now come to see that to tell a lie was to step out of the march of the ages led by the great will. “Her name, sir, was Armour,” he said.
“Hey!” cried the baronet with a start. Yet he had all but expected it.
“Yes, sir,—Jane Armour.”
“Jane!” said his father with an accent of scorn. “—Not a bit of it!—Jane!” he repeated, and muttered to himself—“What motive could there be for misinforming the boy as to theChristianname of his mother?”
For, the moment he saw the youth again, the spell was upon him afresh, and he felt all but certain he was his own.
Richard stood perplexed. Sir Wilton had taken his mother's name oddly for any supposition. He had said Mrs. Manson was a liar: might not her assertion of a relation between them be as groundless as it was spiteful? He had at once acknowledged the Mansons, but showed no recognition of himself on hearing his mother's name? There might be nothing in Mrs. Manson's story; he might after all be the son of John as well as of Jane Tuke! Only, alas, then, Alice and Arthur would not be his sister and brother! They would be God's children all the same, though, and he God's child! they would still be his brother and sister, to love and to keep.
“Here, put your name on the back there,” said the baronet, having blotted the cheque. “I have made it payable to your order, and without your name it is worth nothing.”
“It will be safer to endorse it at the bank, sir,” returned Richard.
“I see you know what you're about!” grinned sir Wilton—saying to himself, however, “The rascal will be too many for me!—But,” he continued, “I see too you don't know how to sign your own name! I had better alter it tobearer, with my initials! Damn it! your paltry cheque has given me more trouble than if it had been for ten thousand! Sit down there, will you, and write your name on that sheet of paper.”
Richard knew the story of Talleyrand—how, giving his autograph to a lady, he wrote it at the top left-hand corner of the sheet, so that she could write above or before it, neither an order for money nor a promise of marriage: yielding to an absurd impulse, he did the same. The baronet burst into loud laughter, which, however, ceased abruptly: he had not gained his end!
“What comical duck-fists you've got!” he cried, risking the throw. “I once knew a man whose fingers and toes too were tied together that way! He swam like a duck!”
“My feet are more that way than my hands,” replied Richard. “Onlysomeof my fingers have got the web between them. My mother made me promise to put up with the monstrosity till I came of age. She seemed to think some luck lay in it.”
“Your mother!” murmured the baronet, and kept eyeing him. “By Jove,” he said aloud, “your mother—! Who is your mother?”
“As I told you, sir, my mother's name is Jane Tuke!”
“Born Armour?”
“Yes, sir.”
“By heaven!” said the baronet to himself, “I see it all now! That terrible nurse was one of the family—and carried him away because she didn't like the look of my lady! Don't I wish I had had half her insight! Perhaps she was cousin to Robina—perhaps her own sister! Simon, the villain, will know all about it!” He sat silent for a moment.
“Hm!—Now tell me, you young rascal,” he said, “why didn't you put in a claim for yourself instead of those confounded Mansons?”
“Why should I, sir? I didn't want anything. I have all I desire—except a little more strength to work, and that is coming.”
The baronet kept gazing at him with the strangest look on his wicked, handsome old face.
“There is something youshouldhave asked me for!” he said at length, in a gentler tone.
“What is that, sir?”
“Your rights. You have a claim upon me before anyone else in the whole world!—I like you, too,” he went on in yet gentler tone, with a touch of mockery in it. Apparently he still hesitated to commit himself. “I must do something for you!”
His son could contain himself no longer.
“I would ask nothing, I would take nothing,” he said, as calmly as he could, though his voice trembled, and his heart throbbed with the beginnings of love, “from a man who had wronged my mother!”
“Damn the rascal! I never wronged his mother!—Who said I wronged your mother, you scoundrel? I'll take my oathshenever did! Answer me directly who told you so!”
His voice had risen to a roar of anger.
His son could do the dead no wrong by speaking the truth.
“Mrs. Manson told me,” he began, but was not allowed to finish the sentence.
“Damned liar she always was!” cried the baronet—with such a fierceness in his growl as made Richard call to mind a certain bear in the Zoological gardens. “Then it was she that had you stolen! The beast ought to have died on the gallows, not in her bed! Ah, she was the one to plot, the snake! In this whole curse of a world,shewas the meanest devil I ever came across, and I've known more than a few!”
“I know nothing about her, sir, except as the mother of Arthur, my schoolfellow. She seemed to hate me! She said I belonged to you, and had no right to be better off than her children!”
“How did she know you?”
“I can't tell, sir.”
“You are like your mother, but the snake never can have set eyes on her!—Give me that cheque. Her fry shan't have a farthing! Let them rot alive with their dead dam!”
He held out his hand: the second cheque lay on the table, and Richard had the former still in his possession. He did not move, nor did sir Wilton urge his demand.
“Did I not tell you?” he resumed. “Did I not say she was a liar? I never did your mother a wrong—nor you neither, though I did swear at you a bit, you were so damned ugly. I don't blame you. You couldn't help it! Lord, what a display the woman made of your fingers and toes, as if the webs were something to be proud of, and atoned for the face!—Can you swim?”
“Fairly well, sir,” answered Richard carelessly.
“Your mother swam like a—Naiad, was it—or Nereid?—I forget—damn it!”
“I don't know the difference in their swimming.”
“Nor any other difference, I dare say!”
“I know the one was a nymph of the sea, the other of a river.”
“Oh! you know Greek, then?”
“I wish I did, sir: I was not long enough at school. I had to learn a trade and be independent.”
“By Jove, I wish I knew a trade and was independent! But you shall learn Greek, my boy! There will be some good in teachingyou!Inever learned anything?—But how the deuce do you know about Naiads and Nereids and all that bosh, if you don't know Greek?”
“I know my Keats, sir. I had to plough with his heifer though—use myLempriere, I mean!”
“Good heavens!” said the baronet, who knew as little of Keats as any Lap.—“I wish I had been content to take you with all your ugliness, and bring you up myself, instead of marrying Lot's widow!”
Richard fancied he preferred the bringing up he had had, but he said nothing. Indeed he could make nothing of the whole business. How was it that, if sir Wilton had done his mother no wrong, his mother was the wife of John Tuke? He was bewildered.
“You wouldn't like to learn Greek, then?” said his father.
“Yes, sir; indeed I should!”
“Why don't you say so then? I never saw such a block! I say youshalllearn Greek!—Why do you stand there looking like a dead oyster?”
“I beg your pardon, sir! May I have the other cheque?”
“What other cheque?”
“The cheque there for my brother and sister, sir,” answered Richard, pointing to it where the baronet had laid it, on the other side of him.
“Brother and sister!”
“The Mansons, sir,” persisted Richard.
“Oh, give them the cheque and be damned to them! But remember they're no brother and sister of yours, and must never be alluded to as such, or as persons you have any knowledge of. When you've given them that,”—he pointed to the cheque which still lay beside him—“you drop their acquaintance.”
“That I cannot do, sir.”
“There's a good beginning now! But I might have expected it!—You tell me to my face you won't do what I order you?”
“I can't, sir; it wouldn't be right.”
“Fiddlesticks!—Wouldn't be right! What's that to you? It's my business. You've got to do what I tell you.”
“I must go by my conscience, sir.”
“Oh, damn your conscience! Will you promise, or will you not? You're to have nothing to say to those young persons.”
“I will not promise.”
“Not if I promise to look after them?”
“No, sir.” His father was silent for a moment, regarding him—not all in anger.
“Well, you're a good-plucked one, I allow? But you're the greatest fool, the dullest young ass out, notwithstanding. You won't suit me—though you are web-footed!—Why, damn it, boy! don't you understand yet that I'm your father?”
“Mrs. Manson told me so, sir.”
“Oh, rot Mrs. Manson! she told you a damned lie! She told you I wronged your mother! I tell you I married her! What a blockhead you are! Look there, with your miserable tradesman's-eyes: all those books will be yours one day!—to put in the fire if you like, or mend at from morning to night, just as you choose! You fool! Ain't you my son, heir to Mortgrange, and whatever I may choose to give you besides!”
Richard's heart gave a bound as if it would leap to heaven. It was not the land; it was not the money; it was not the books; it was not even Barbara; it was Arthur and Alice that made it bound. But the voice of his father went on.
“You know now, you idiot,” it said, “why you can have nothing more to do with that cursed litter of Mansons!”
Richard's heart rose to meet the heartlessness of his father.
“They are my brother and sister, sir!” he said.
“And what the devil does it matter to you if they are! It's my business that, not yours! You had nothing to do with it! You didn't make the Mansons!”
“No, sir; but God made us all, and says we're to love our brethren.”
“Now don't you come the pious over me! It won't pay here! Mind you, nobody heard me acknowledge you! By the mighty heavens, I will deny knowing anything about you! You'll have to prove to the court of chancery that you're my son, born in wedlock, and kidnapped in infancy: by Jove, you'll find it stiff! Who'll advance you the money to carry it there?—you can't do it without money. Nobody; the property's not entailed, and who cares whether it be sir Richard or sir Arthur? What's the title without the property! But don't imagine I should mind telling a lie to keep the two together. I'm not a nice man; I don't mind lying! I'm a bad man!—that I know better than you or any one else, and you'll find it uncomfortable to differ and deal with me both at once!”
“I will not deny my own flesh and blood,” said Richard.
“Then I will deny mine, and you may go rot with them.”
“I will work for them and myself,” said Richard.
Sir Wilton glared at him. Richard made a stride to the table. The baronet caught up the cheque. Richard darted forward to seize it. Was his truth to his friends to be the death of them? Hewouldhave the money! It was his! He had told him to take it!
What might have followed I dare not think. Richard's hands were out to lay hold on his father, when happily he remembered that he had not given him back the former cheque, and Barset was quite within reach of his grandfather's pony! He turned and made for the door. Sir Wilton read his thought.
“Give me that cheque,” he cried, and hobbled to the bell.
Richard glanced at the lock of the door: there was no key in it! Besides there were two more doors to the room! He darted out: there was the man, far off down the passage, coming to answer the bell! He hastened to meet him.
“Jacob,” he said, “sir Wilton rang for you: just run down with me to the gate, and give the woman there a message for me.”
He hurried to the door, and the man, nothing doubting, followed him.
“Tell her,” said Richard as they went, “if she should see Mr. Wingfold pass, to ask him to call at old Armour's smithy. She does not seem to remember me! Good day! I'm in a hurry!” He leaped into the pony-cart.
“Barset!” he cried, and the same moment they were off at speed, for Simon saw something fresh was up.
“Drive like Jehu,” panted Richard. “Let's see what the blessed pony can do! Every instant is precious.”
Never asking the cause of his haste, old Simon did drive like Jehu, and never had the pony gone with a better will: evidently he believed speed was wanted, and knew he had it to give.
No hoofs came clamping on the road behind them. They reached the town in safety, and Richard cashed his cheque—the more easily that Simon, a well-known man in Barset, was seen waiting for him in his trap outside. The eager, anxious look of Richard, and the way he clutched at the notes, might otherwise have waked suspicion. As it was, it only waked curiosity.
When the man whom Richard had decoyed, appeared at length before his master, whose repeated ringing had brought the butler first; and when sir Wilton, after much swearing on his, and bewilderment on the man's part, made out the trick played on him, his wrath began to evaporate in amusement: he was outwitted and outmanoeuvred—but by his own son! and even in the face of such an early outbreak of hostilities, he could not help being proud of him. He burst into a half cynical laugh, and dismissed the men—to vain speculation on the meaning of the affair.
Simon would have had Richard send the bank-notes by post, and stay with him a week or two; but Richard must take them himself; no other way seemed safe. Nor could he possibly rest until he had seen his mother, and told her all. He said nothing to his grandfather of his recognition by sir Wilton, and what followed: he feared he might take the thing in his own hands, and go to sir Wilton.
Questioning his grandfather, he learned that Barbara was at home, but that he had seen her only once. She had one day appeared suddenly at the smithy door, with Miss Brown all in a foam. She asked about Richard, wheeled her mare, and was off homeward, straight as an arrow—for he went to the corner, and looked after her.
They were near a station at Barset, and a train was almost due. Simon drove him there straight from the bank, and before he was home, Richard was half-way to London.
Short as was his visit, he had got from it not merely all he had hoped, but almost all he needed. His weakness had left him; he had twenty pounds for his brother and sister; and his mother was cleared, though he could not yet tell how: was he not also a little step nearer to Barbara? True, he was disowned, but he had lived without his father hitherto, and could very well go on to live without such a father! As long as he did what was right, the right was on his side! As long as he gave others their rights, he could waive his own! A fellow was not bound, he said, to insist on his rights—at least he had not met with any he was bound to insist upon. Borne swiftly back to London, his heart seemed rushing in the might of its gladness to console the heaven-laden hearts of Alice and Arthur. Twenty pounds was a great sum to carry them! He could indeed himself earn such a sum in a little while, but how long would it not take him to save as much! Here it was, whole and free, present and potent, ready to be turned at once into food and warmth and hope!