Doctor Thorne, Anthony Trollope [best book reader .txt] 📗

to have remembered. Indeed, I put it to him

nearly in those very words; but Mr Gresham never did, and never will

receive with common civility anything that comes from me.”

 

“I know, Rosina, he never did; and yet where would he have been

but for the de Courcys?” So exclaimed, in her gratitude, the Lady

Arabella; to speak the truth, however, but for the de Courcys, Mr

Gresham might have been at this moment on the top of Boxall Hill,

monarch of all he surveyed.

 

“As I was saying,” continued the countess, “I never approved of the

hounds coming to Greshamsbury; but yet, my dear, the hounds can’t

have eaten up everything. A man with ten thousand a year ought to be

able to keep hounds; particularly as he had a subscription.”

 

“He says the subscription was little or nothing.”

 

“That’s nonsense, my dear. Now, Arabella, what does he do with his

money? That’s the question. Does he gamble?”

 

“Well,” said Lady Arabella, very slowly, “I don’t think he does.” If

the squire did gamble he must have done it very slyly, for he rarely

went away from Greshamsbury, and certainly very few men looking like

gamblers were in the habit of coming thither as guests. “I don’t

think he does gamble.” Lady Arabella put her emphasis on the word

gamble, as though her husband, if he might perhaps be charitably

acquitted of that vice, was certainly guilty of every other known in

the civilised world.

 

“I know he used,” said Lady de Courcy, looking very wise, and rather

suspicious. She certainly had sufficient domestic reasons for

disliking the propensity; “I know he used; and when a man begins, he

is hardly ever cured.”

 

“Well, if he does, I don’t know it,” said the Lady Arabella.

 

“The money, my dear, must go somewhere. What excuse does he give when

you tell him you want this and that—all the common necessaries of

life, that you have always been used to?”

 

“He gives no excuse; sometimes he says the family is so large.”

 

“Nonsense! Girls cost nothing; there’s only Frank, and he can’t have

cost anything yet. Can he be saving money to buy back Boxall Hill?”

 

“Oh no!” said the Lady Arabella, quickly. “He is not saving anything;

he never did, and never will save, though he is so stingy to me. He

is hard pushed for money, I know that.”

 

“Then where has it gone?” said the Countess de Courcy, with a look of

stern decision.

 

“Heaven only knows! Now, Augusta is to be married. I must of course

have a few hundred pounds. You should have heard how he groaned when

I asked him for it. Heaven only knows where the money goes!” And the

injured wife wiped a piteous tear from her eye with her fine dress

cambric handkerchief. “I have all the sufferings and privations of

a poor man’s wife, but I have none of the consolations. He has no

confidence in me; he never tells me anything; he never talks to

me about his affairs. If he talks to any one it is to that horrid

doctor.”

 

“What, Dr Thorne?” Now the Countess de Courcy hated Dr Thorne with a

holy hatred.

 

“Yes; Dr Thorne. I believe that he knows everything; and advises

everything, too. Whatever difficulties poor Gresham may have, I do

believe Dr Thorne has brought them about. I do believe it, Rosina.”

 

“Well, that is surprising. Mr Gresham, with all his faults, is

a gentleman; and how he can talk about his affairs with a low

apothecary like that, I, for one, cannot imagine. Lord de Courcy has

not always been to me all that he should have been; far from it.” And

Lady de Courcy thought over in her mind injuries of a much graver

description than any that her sister-in-law had ever suffered; “but I

have never known anything like that at Courcy Castle. Surely Umbleby

knows all about it, doesn’t he?”

 

“Not half so much as the doctor,” said Lady Arabella.

 

The countess shook her head slowly; the idea of Mr Gresham, a country

gentleman of good estate like him, making a confidant of a country

doctor was too great a shock for her nerves; and for a while she was

constrained to sit silent before she could recover herself.

 

“One thing at any rate is certain, Arabella,” said the countess,

as soon as she found herself again sufficiently composed to offer

counsel in a properly dictatorial manner. “One thing at any rate is

certain; if Mr Gresham be involved so deeply as you say, Frank has

but one duty before him. He must marry money. The heir of fourteen

thousand a year may indulge himself in looking for blood, as Mr

Gresham did, my dear”—it must be understood that there was very

little compliment in this, as the Lady Arabella had always conceived

herself to be a beauty—“or for beauty, as some men do,” continued

the countess, thinking of the choice that the present Earl de Courcy

had made; “but Frank must marry money. I hope he will understand this

early; do make him understand this before he makes a fool of himself;

when a man thoroughly understands this, when he knows what his

circumstances require, why, the matter becomes easy to him. I hope

that Frank understands that he has no alternative. In his position he

must marry money.”

 

But, alas! alas! Frank Gresham had already made a fool of himself.

 

“Well, my boy, I wish you joy with all my heart,” said the Honourable

John, slapping his cousin on the back, as he walked round to the

stable-yard with him before dinner, to inspect a setter puppy of

peculiarly fine breed which had been sent to Frank as a birthday

present. “I wish I were an elder son; but we can’t all have that

luck.”

 

“Who wouldn’t sooner be the younger son of an earl than the eldest

son of a plain squire?” said Frank, wishing to say something civil in

return for his cousin’s civility.

 

“I wouldn’t for one,” said the Honourable John. “What chance have I?

There’s Porlock as strong as a horse; and then George comes next. And

the governor’s good for these twenty years.” And the young man sighed

as he reflected what small hope there was that all those who were

nearest and dearest to him should die out of his way, and leave him

to the sweet enjoyment of an earl’s coronet and fortune. “Now, you’re

sure of your game some day; and as you’ve no brothers, I suppose the

squire’ll let you do pretty well what you like. Besides, he’s not so

strong as my governor, though he’s younger.”

 

Frank had never looked at his fortune in this light before, and was

so slow and green that he was not much delighted at the prospect now

that it was offered to him. He had always, however, been taught to

look to his cousins, the de Courcys, as men with whom it would be

very expedient that he should be intimate; he therefore showed no

offence, but changed the conversation.

 

“Shall you hunt with the Barsetshire this season, John? I hope you

will; I shall.”

 

“Well, I don’t know. It’s very slow. It’s all tillage here, or else

woodland. I rather fancy I shall go to Leicestershire when the

partridge-shooting is over. What sort of a lot do you mean to come

out with, Frank?”

 

Frank became a little red as he answered, “Oh, I shall have two,” he

said; “that is, the mare I have had these two years, and the horse my

father gave me this morning.”

 

“What! only those two? and the mare is nothing more than a pony.”

 

“She is fifteen hands,” said Frank, offended.

 

“Well, Frank, I certainly would not stand that,” said the Honourable

John. “What, go out before the county with one untrained horse and a

pony; and you the heir to Greshamsbury!”

 

“I’ll have him so trained before November,” said Frank, “that

nothing in Barsetshire shall stop him. Peter says”—Peter was

the Greshamsbury stud-groom—“that he tucks up his hind legs

beautifully.”

 

“But who the deuce would think of going to work with one horse; or

two either, if you insist on calling the old pony a huntress? I’ll

put you up to a trick, my lad: if you stand that you’ll stand

anything; and if you don’t mean to go in leading-strings all your

life, now is the time to show it. There’s young Baker—Harry Baker,

you know—he came of age last year, and he has as pretty a string of

nags as any one would wish to set eyes on; four hunters and a hack.

Now, if old Baker has four thousand a year it’s every shilling he has

got.”

 

This was true, and Frank Gresham, who in the morning had been made so

happy by his father’s present of a horse, began to feel that hardly

enough had been done for him. It was true that Mr Baker had only four

thousand a year; but it was also true that he had no other child than

Harry Baker; that he had no great establishment to keep up; that he

owed a shilling to no one; and, also, that he was a great fool in

encouraging a mere boy to ape all the caprices of a man of wealth.

Nevertheless, for a moment, Frank Gresham did feel that, considering

his position, he was being treated rather unworthily.

 

“Take the matter in your own hands, Frank,” said the Honourable John,

seeing the impression that he had made. “Of course the governor knows

very well that you won’t put up with such a stable as that. Lord

bless you! I have heard that when he married my aunt, and that was

when he was about your age, he had the best stud in the whole county;

and then he was in Parliament before he was three-and-twenty.”

 

“His father, you know, died when he was very young,” said Frank.

 

“Yes; I know he had a stroke of luck that doesn’t fall to everyone;

but—”

 

Young Frank’s face grew dark now instead of red. When his cousin

submitted to him the necessity of having more than two horses for

his own use he could listen to him; but when the same monitor talked

of the chance of a father’s death as a stroke of luck, Frank was

too much disgusted to be able to pretend to pass it over with

indifference. What! was he thus to think of his father, whose face

was always lighted up with pleasure when his boy came near to him,

and so rarely bright at any other time? Frank had watched his father

closely enough to be aware of this; he knew how his father delighted

in him; he had had cause to guess that his father had many troubles,

and that he strove hard to banish the memory of them when his son was

with him. He loved his father truly, purely, and thoroughly, liked to

be with him, and would be proud to be his confidant. Could he then

listen quietly while his cousin spoke of the chance of his father’s

death as a stroke of luck?

 

“I shouldn’t think it a stroke of luck, John. I should think it the

greatest misfortune in the world.”

 

It is so difficult for a young man to enumerate sententiously a

principle of morality, or even an expression of ordinary good

feeling, without giving himself something of a ridiculous air,

without assuming something of a mock grandeur!

 

“Oh, of course, my dear fellow,” said the Honourable John, laughing;

“that’s a matter of course. We all understand that without saying it.