The Squire of Sandal-Side, Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr [the reading list book TXT] 📗

the power to inflict a slow and torturing death! Poor father! Poor mother! And it is I that must witness it. I, that would die to save them from such undeserved sorrow."

Then Harry rose up angrily, pushed his chair impatiently away, and without a word went to his own room.

In the morning the squire came down to breakfast in exceedingly high spirits. A Scotchman would have called him "fey," and been certain that misfortune was at his heels. And Charlotte looked at him in wondering pity, for Harry's face was the face of a man determined to carry out his own will regardless of consequences.

"Come, come, Harry," said the squire in a loud, cheerful voice, "you are moping, and eating no breakfast. Charlotte will have to fill three times before it is 'cup down' with me. I think we will take Dobbin, and go over to Windermere in the tax-cart. The roads will be a bit sloppery, but Dobbin isn't too old to splash through them at a rattling pace. He is a famous good old-has-been is Dobbin. Give me a Suffolk Punch for a roadster. I set much by them. Eh? What?"

"I must leave Sandal this morning, sir."

"Sir me no sir, Harry. 'Father' will stand between you and me, I think. You must make a put-off for one day. I was at Bowness last week, and they say such a winter for char-fishing was never seen. While I was on the lakeside, Kit Noble's boat came in. He had all of twenty dozen in the bottom of it. Mr. Wordsworth was there too, and he made a piece of poetry about 'The silvery lights playing over them;' and he took me to see a picture that a London gentleman painted of Kit and his boat. You never saw fish out of the water look so fresh; their olive-green backs and vermillion bellies and dark-red fins were as natural as life. Come Harry, we will go and fetch over a few dozen. If you carry your colonel some, he will take the gift as an excuse for the day. Eh? What?"

"I think Harry had better not go with you, father."

"Eh? What is the matter with you, Charlotte? You are as nattert and cross as never was. Where is your mother? I like my morning cup filled with a smile. It helps the day through."

"Mother isn't feeling well. She had a bad dream about Harry and you, and she is making herself sick over it. She is all in a tremble. I didn't think mother was so foolish."

"Dreams are from somewhere beyond us, Charlotte. There's them that visit us a-dreaming. I am not so wise as to be foolish. I believe in some things that are outside of my short wits. Maybe we had better not go to Windermere. We might be tempted into a boat, and dry land is a middling bit safer. Eh? What?"

Charlotte felt as if she could endure her father's unsuspicious happiness no longer. It was like watching a little child smiling and prattling on the road to its mother's funeral. She put Mrs. Sandal's breakfast on a small tray, and with this in her hand went up-stairs, leaving Harry and the squire still at the table.

"Charlotte is a bit hurrysome this morning," he said; and Harry making no answer, he seemed suddenly to be struck with his attitude. He looked curiously at him a moment, and then lapsed into silence. "Harry wants money." That was his first thought, and he began to calculate how far he was able to meet the want. Even then, his only bitter reflection was, that Harry should suppose it necessary to be glum about it. "A cheerful asker is the next thing to a cheerful giver;" and to such musings he filled his pipe, and with a shadow of offence on his large ruddy face went into "the master's room" to smoke.

When kindly good-nature is snubbed, it feels it keenly; and there was a mist of tears in the squire's blue eyes when Harry followed, and he turned them on him. And it was part of his punishment, that, even in the first flush of the pleasure of his sin, he felt all the pangs of remorse.

"Father?"

"Well, well, Harry! I see you are wanting money again."

"It will be the last time. I am married, and am going to Italy to live."

"Eh? What?" The squire flushed hotly. His hand shook, his long clay pipe fell to the hearthstone, and was shattered to pieces.

Then a reckless desire to have the whole wrong out urged the unhappy son to a most cruel distinctness of detail. Without wasting a word in explanation or excuse, he stated broadly that he had fallen in love with the famous singer, Beatrice Lanza, and had married her. He spared himself or his father nothing; he appeared to gather a hard courage as he spoke of her failing health, her hatred of England, her devotion to her own faith, and the necessity of his retirement to Italy with her. He seemed determined to put it out of the power of any one to say worse of him than he had already said of himself. In conclusion he added, "I have sold my commission, and paid what I owed, and have very little money left. Life, however, is not an expensive affair in the village to which I am going. If you will allow me two hundred pounds a year I shall be very grateful."

"I will not give you one penny, sir."

The words came thick and heavy, and with great difficulty; though the wretched father had risen, and was standing by the table, leaning hard with both hands upon it.

He would not look at his son, though the young man went on speaking. He heard nothing that he said. In his ears there was the roaring of mighty waters. All the waves and the billows were going over him. For a few moments he struggled desperately with the black, advancing tide. His sight failed, it was growing dark. Then he threw the last forces of life into one terrible cry, and fell, as a great tree falls, heavily to the ground.

The cry rang through the house. The mother, trembling in her bed; Charlotte, crouching upon the stairs, fearing and listening; the servants, chattering in the kitchen and the chambers,--all heard it, and were for a moment horrified by the agony and despair it expressed. But ere the awful echo had quite subsided, Charlotte was at her father's side; in a moment afterwards, Mrs. Sandal, sobbing at every flying step, and still in her night-clothing, followed; and then servants from every quarter came rushing to the master's room.

There was no time for inquiry or lamentation. Harry and two of the men mounted swift horses in search of medical help. Others lifted the insensible man, and carried him tenderly to his bed. In a moment the atmosphere of the house had changed. The master's room, which had held for generations nothing but memories of pastoral business and sylvan pleasures, had suddenly become a place of sorrow. The shattered pipe upon the hearthstone made Charlotte utter a low, hopeless cry of pain. She closed the shutters, and put the burning logs upon the hearth safely together, and then locked the door. Alas! alas! they had carried the master out, and in Charlotte's heart there was a conviction that he would never more cross its threshold.

After Harry's first feelings of anguish and horror had subsided, he was distinctly resentful. He felt his father's suffering to be a wrong to him. He began to reflect that the day for such intense emotions had passed away. But he forgot that the squire belonged to a generation whose life was filled and ruled by a few strong, decided feelings and opinions that struck their roots deep into the very foundations of existence; a generation, also, which was bearing the brunt of the transition between the strong, simple life of the past, and the rapid, complex life of the present. Thus the squire opposed to the indifference of the time a rigidity of habits, which, to even small events, gave that exceptional character which rarity once imparted. He felt every thing deeply, because every thing retained its importance to him. He had great reverence. He loved, and he hated. All his convictions and prejudices were for life.

Harry's marriage had been a blow at the roots of all his conscious existence. The Sandals had always married in their own county, Cumberland ladies of honorable pedigree, good daughters of the Church of England, good housewives, gentle and modest women, with more or less land and gold as their dowry. Emily Beverley would have been precisely such a wife. And in a moment, even while Harry was speaking, the squire had contrasted this Beatrice Lanza with her;--a foreigner,--an Italian, of all foreigners most objectionable; a subject of the Papal States; a member of the Romish Church; a woman of obscure birth, poor and portionless, and in ill-health; worse than all, a public woman, who had sung for money, and yet who had made Harry desert his home and country and profession for her. And with this train of thought another ran parallel,--the shame and the wrong of it all. The disgrace to his wife and daughters, the humiliation to himself. Each bitter thought beat on his heart like the hammer on the anvil. They fought and blended with each other. He could not master one. He felt himself being beaten to the ground. He made agonizing efforts to retain control over the surging wave of anguish, rising, rising, rising from his breast to his brain. And failing to do so, he fell with the mighty cry of one who, even in the death agony, protests against the victor.

The news spread as if all the birds in the air carried it. There were a dozen physicians in Seat-Sandal before noon. There was a crowd of shepherds around it, waiting in silent groups for their verdict. All the afternoon the gentlemen of the Dales were coming and going with offers of help and sympathy; and in the lonely parlor the rector was softly pacing up and down, muttering, as he walked, passages from the "Order for the Visitation of the Sick":--

"O Saviour of the world, who by thy cross and precious blood hast redeemed us, save us, and help us, we humbly beseech thee, O Lord.

"Spare us good Lord. Spare thy people whom thou hast redeemed with thy most precious blood.

"Shut not up thy tender mercies in displeasure; but make him to hear of joy and gladness.

"Deliver him from the fear of the enemy. Lift up the light of thy countenance upon him. Amen."


CHAPTER IX.


ESAU.

"To be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering."

"Now conscience wakes despair
That slumberd; wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be."

It was the middle of February before Harry could leave Sandal-Side. He had remained there, however, only out of that deference to public opinion which no one likes to offend; and it had been a most melancholy and anxious delay. He was not allowed to enter the squire's room, and indeed he shrank from the ordeal. His mother and Charlotte treated him with a reserve he felt to be almost dislike.