Johnny Ludlow, Fourth Series

“It is so warm,” said she, in apology, as Tom shook hands. “And the trees make it shady here. I went over to ask Mary Maceveril to come back with me and dine: but they have gone to Worcester for the day.”

“So much the better for me,” said Tom. “I want to tell you, Emma, that I am going to leave.”

“To leave!”

“I have had a very good place offered me in London. Mr. Paul knows nothing about it yet, for I did not make up my mind till last night, and I could not get a minute alone with him this morning.”

She had turned her face suddenly to the hedge, seemingly to pick a wild rose. Tom saw that the pink roses on her cheek had turned to white ones.

“I shall be very sorry to leave Islip, Emma. But what else can I do? Situated as I am now, I cannot even glance at any plans for the future. By making this change, I may be able to do so. My salary will be a good one and enable me to put by: and the firm I am going to dropped me a hint of a possible partnership.”

“I wish these dog-roses had no thorns! And I wish they would grow double, as the garden roses do!”

“So that I—having considered the matter thoroughly—believe I shall do well to make the change. Perhaps then I may begin to indulge dreams of a future.”

“There! all the petals are off!”

“Let me gather them for you. What is the matter, Emma?”

“Matter? Nothing, sir. What should there be?”

“Here is a beauty. Will you take it?”

“Thank you. I never thought you would leave papa, Mr. Chandler.”

“But—don’t you perceive my reasons, Emma? What prospect is there for me as long as I remain here? What hope can I indulge, or even glance at, of—of settling in life?”

“I dare say you don’t want to settle.”

“I do not put the question to myself, because it is so useless.”

“I shall be late for dinner. Good-bye.”

She took a sudden flight to the little white side-gate of her house, which opened to the field, ran across the garden, and disappeared within doors. Tom, catching a glimpse of her face, saw that it was wet with tears.

“Yes, it’s very hard upon her and upon me,” he said to himself. “And all the more so that I cannot in honour speak, even just to let her know that I care for her.”

Continuing his way towards the office, he met Mr. Paul, who was just leaving it. Tom turned with him, having to report to him of the business he had been to execute.

“I expected you home before this, Chandler.”

“Willis was out when I arrived there, and I had to wait for him. His wife gave me some syllabub.”

“Now for goodness’ sake don’t mix up syllabubs with law!” cried the old gentleman, testily. “That’s just you, Tom Chandler. Will Willis do as I advise him, or will he not?”

“Yes, he is willing; but upon conditions. I will explain to-morrow morning,” added Tom, as Mr. Paul laid his hand upon the handle of his front-gate, to enter.

“You can come in and explain now: and take some dinner with me.”

Emma did not know he was there until she came into the dining-room. It gave her a sort of pleasant shock. They were deep in conversation about Willis, and she sat down quietly.

“I am glad he has asked me,” thought Tom. “It will give me an opportunity of telling him about myself after dinner.”

Accordingly, when the port wine was on the table and Emma had gone, for she never stayed after the cloth was removed, Tom spoke. Old Paul was pouring out his one large glass. The communication was over in a few words, for Tom did not feel it a comfortable one to make.

“Oh!” said old Paul, after listening. “Want to better yourself, do you? Going to London to get four hundred a-year, with a faint prospect of partnership? Have had it in your mind some time to make a change? No prospects here at Islip? Can only just keep your mother? Perhaps you want to keep a wife as well, Tom Chandler?”

Tom flushed like a school-girl. As the old gentleman saw, peering at him from under his bushy grey eyebrows.

“I should very much like to be able to do it, sir,” boldly replied Tom, playing with his wine-glass. “But I can’t. I can’t as much as think of it under present circumstances.”

“Who is the young lady? Your cousin Julietta?”

Tom burst into laughter. “No, that it is not, sir.”

“Perhaps it is Miss Maceveril? Well, the Maceverils are exclusive people. But faint heart, you know, never won fair lady.”

Tom shook his head. “I should not be afraid of winning her.” But it was not Miss Maceveril he was thinking of.

“What should you be afraid of?”

“Her friends. They would not listen to me.”

“Thinking you are not rich, I suppose?”

“Knowing I am not, sir.”

“The young lady may have money.”

“There’s the evil of it,” said Tom, impulsively. “If she had none, it would be all straight and smooth for us. I would very soon make a little home for her in London.”

“It is the first time I ever heard of money being an impediment to matrimony,” observed old Paul, taking the first sip at his wine.

“Not when the money is on the wrong side, sir.”

“Has she much?”

“I don’t know in the least. She will be sure to have some: she is an only child.”

“Then it is Mary Maceveril!” nodded the old man. “You look after her, Tom, my boy. She will have ten thousand pounds.”

“Miss Maceveril would not look at me, if I wanted her ever so. She is as proud as a peacock.”

“Tut, tut! Try. Try, boy. Why, what could she want? As my partner, you might be a match for even Miss Maceveril.”

“Your what, sir?” cried Tom, in surprise, lifting his eyes from the blue-and-red checked table-cover.

“I said my partner, Tom. Yes, that is what I intend to make you: have intended it for some time. We will have no fly-away London jaunts and junkets. Once my partner, of course the world will understand that you will be also my successor: and I think I shall soon retire.”

Tom had risen from his seat: for once in his life he was agitated. Mr. Paul rose and put his hand on Tom’s shoulder.

“With this position, and a suitable income to back it, Tom, you are a match for Mary Maceveril, or for any other good girl. Go and try her, boy; try your luck.”

“But—it is of no use,” spoke Tom. “You don’t understand, sir.”

“No use! Go and try,”—pushing him towards the door. “My wife was one of the proud Wintertons, you know: how should I have gained her but for trying? I did not depreciate myself, and say I’m not good enough for her: I went and asked her to have me.”

“But suppose it is not Mary Maceveril, sir?—as indeed it is not. Suppose it is somebody nearer—nearer home?”

“No matter. Go and try, I say.”

“I—do—think—you—understand—me, sir,” cried Tom, slowly and dubiously. “I—hope there is no mistake!”

“Rubbish about mistake!” cried old Paul, pushing him towards the door. “Go and do as I bid you. Try.”

He went to look for Emma, and saw her sitting under the acacia tree on the bench, which faced the other way. Stepping noiselessly over the grass, he put his arms on her shoulders, and she turned round with a cry. But Tom would not let her go.

“I am told to come out and try, Emma. I want a wife, and your father thinks I may gain one. He is going to make me his partner; and he says he thinks I am a match for any good girl. And I am not going to London.”

She turned pale and red, red and pale, and then burst into a fit of tears and trembling.

“Oh, Tom, can it be true! Oh, Tom, Tom!”

And Tom kissed her for the first time in his life. But not for the last.

The news came out to us in a lump. Tom Chandler was taken into partnership and was to marry Emma. We wished them good luck. She was not to leave her home, for her father would not spare her: she and Tom were to live with him.

“I had to do it, you know, Squire,” said old Paul, meeting the Squire one day. “Only children are apt to be wilful. Not that I ever found Emma so. Had I not allowed it, I expect she’d have dutifully saddled herself, an old maid, upon me for life.”

“She could not have chosen better,” cried the Squire, warmly. “If there’s one young fellow I respect above another, it’s Tom Chandler. He is good to the back-bone.”

“He wouldn’t have got her if he were not; you may rely upon that,” concluded old Paul, emphatically.

So the wedding took place at Islip in the autumn, and old Paul gave Tom a month’s holiday, and told him he had better take Emma to Paris; as they both seemed, by what he could gather, red-hot to see it.

Drizzle, drizzle, drizzle, came down the rain, dropping with monotonous patter on the decaying leaves that strewed the garden. Not the trim well-kept garden it used to be, but showing signs of neglect. What with the long grass, and the leaves, and the sloppy roads, and the November skies, nothing could well look more dreary than the world looked to-day, as seen from the windows of North Villa.

Time had gone on, another year, bringing its events and its changes; as time always does bring. The chief change, as connected with this little record, lay in Valentine Chandler. He had gone to the dogs. That was Islip’s expression for it, not mine. A baby had come to Tom and Emma.

Little by little, step by step, Valentine had gone down lower and lower. Some people, who are given to bad habits, make spasmodic efforts to reform; but, so far as Islip could see, Valentine never made any. He passed more time at the Bell, or at less respectable public-houses, and drank deeper: and at last neglected his business almost entirely. Enervated and good for nothing, he would lie in bed till twelve o’clock in the day. To keep on the office seemed only a farce. Its profits were not enough to pay for its one solitary clerk. Valentine was then pulled up by an illness, which confined him to his bed, and left him in a shaky state. The practice had quite gone then, and the clerk had gone; and Valentine knew that, even though he had had sufficient energy left to try to bring them back, no clients would have returned to him.

He was going to emigrate to Canada. His friends hoped he would be steady there, and redeem the past: he gave fair promises of it. George Chandler (Tom’s brother, who was doing very well there now, with a large farm about him, and a wife and children) had undertaken to receive Valentine and help him to employment. So he would have to begin life over again.

It was all so much gall and bitterness to his mother and sisters, and had been for a long while. The tears were dropping through the fingers of Mrs. Chandler now, as she leaned on her hand and watched the dreary rain on the window-panes. With all his faults, she had so loved Valentine. She loved him still, above all the trouble he had brought; and it seemed, this afternoon, just as though her heart would break.

When the business fell off, of course her income fell off also. Valentine was to have paid her a third of the profits, but if he did not make any profits, he could not pay her any. She had the private income, two hundred a-year, which Jacob had secured to her: but what was that for a family accustomed to live in the fashion? There is an old saying that necessity has no law: and Mrs. Jacob Chandler and her daughters had proved its truth. One of the girls had gone out as a governess; one was on a prolonged visit to her aunt Cramp; and Julietta and her mother were to move into a smaller house at Christmas. The practice and the other business, once Valentine’s, and his father’s before him, had all gone over to the other firm, Paul and Chandler.

“I’m sure I don’t know what Georgiana means by writing home for money amidst all our troubles!” cried Mrs. Chandler, fretfully. “She has fifteen pounds a-year salary, and she must make that do.”

“She says her last quarter’s money is all spent, and she can’t possibly manage without a new mantle for Sunday,” returned Julietta.

“I can’t supply it; you know I can’t. I am not able to pay my own way now. Let her write to Mrs. Cramp.”

“It would be of no use, mamma. Aunt Mary Ann will never help us to clothes. She says we have had too many of them.”

“Well, I don’t want to be worried with these matters: it’s enough for me to think of poor Valentine’s things. Only two days now before he starts. And what wretched weather it is!”

“Valentine says he shall not take much luggage with him. He saw me counting his shirts, and he said they were too many by half.”

“And who will supply him with shirts out there, do you suppose?” demanded Mrs. Chandler. “You talk nothing but nonsense, Julietta. Where is Valentine? He ought to be here, with all this packing to do. He must have been gone out these two hours.”

“He said he had business at Islip.”

Mrs. Chandler looked gloomy at the answer. She hated the very name of Islip: partly because they held no longer any part in the place, partly because the Bell was in it.

But Valentine had not gone to the Bell this time. His visit was to his cousin Tom; and his errand was to beg of Tom to give or lend him a fifty-pound note before sailing.

“I shall have next to nothing in my pocket, Tom, when I land,” he urged, as the two sat together in Tom’s private room. “If I get on over there, I will pay you back. If I don’t—well, perhaps you won’t grudge having helped me for the last time.”

For a moment Tom did not answer. He sat before his desk-table, Valentine near him: just as Valentine had one day sat at his desk in his private room, and Tom had been the petitioner, not so many years gone by. Valentine looked upon the silence as an ill-omen.

“You have all the business that once was mine in your fingers now, Tom. It has left me for you.”

“But not by any wish or seeking of mine, Valentine; you know that,” spoke Tom readily, turning his honest eyes and kindly face on the fallen man. “I wish you were in your office still. There’s plenty of work for both of us.”

“Well, I am not in it; and you have got it all. You might lend me such a poor little sum as fifty pounds.”

“Of course I mean to lend it: but I was thinking. Look here, Valentine. I will not give it you now; you cannot want it before sailing: and you might lose it on board,” he added laughing. “You shall carry with you an order upon my brother George for one hundred pounds.”

“Will George pay it?”

“I will take care of that. He shall receive a letter from me by the same mail that takes you out. Stay, Valentine. I will give you the order now.”

He wrote what was necessary, sealed it up, and handed it over. Valentine thanked him.

“How is Emma?” he asked as he rose. “And the boy?”

“Quite well, thank you: both. Will you not go in and see them?”

“I think not. You can say good-bye for me. I don’t much care to trouble people.”

“God bless you, Valentine,” said Tom, clasping his hand. “You will begin life anew over there, and may have a happy one yet. One of these days you will be coming back to us, a prosperous man.”

Valentine went trudging home through the rain, miserable and dispirited, and found a visitor had arrived—Mrs. Cramp. His mother and sister were upstairs then, busy over his trunks; so Mrs. Cramp had him all to herself. She had liked Valentine very much. When he went wrong, it put her out frightfully, and since then she had not spared him: which of course put out Valentine.

“Yes, it will be a change,” he acknowledged, in reply to a remark of hers. “A flourishing solicitor here, and a servant there. For that’s what I shall be over yonder, I conclude; I can’t expect to be my own master. You don’t know how good the business was, Aunt Mary Ann, at the time my father died. If I could only have kept it!”

“You could not expect to keep it,” said Mrs. Cramp, who sat facing him, her bonnet tilted back from her red and comely face, her purple stuff gown pulled up above her boots.

“I should have kept it, but for now and then taking a little drop too much,” confessed poor Valentine: who was deeper in the dumps that day than he had ever been before.

“I don’t know that,” said Mrs. Cramp. “The business was a usurped one.”

“A what?” said Valentine.

“There is an overruling Power above us, you know,” she went on. “I am quite sure, Valentine—I have learnt it by experience—that injustice never answers in the long run. It may seem to succeed for a time; but it does not last: it cannot and it does not. If a man rears himself on another’s downfall, causing himself that downfall that he may rise, his prosperity rests on no sure foundation. In some way or other the past comes home to him; and he suffers for it, if not in his own person, in that of his children. Ill-gotten riches bring a curse, never a blessing.”

“What a growler you are, Aunt Mary Ann!”

“I don’t mean it for growling, Valentine. It is true.”

“It’s not true.”

“Not true! The longer I live the more examples I see of it. A man treads another down that he may rise himself: and there he stands high and flourishing. But wait a few years, and look then. He is gone. Gone, and no trace of his prosperity left. And when I mark that, I recall that verse in the Psalms of David: ‘I went by, and lo, he was gone: I sought him, but his place was nowhere to be found.’ That verse is a true type of real life, Valentine.”

“I don’t believe it,” cried Valentine. “And where’s the good of having the Psalms at your finger-ends?”

“You do believe it. Why, Valentine, take your own case. Was there ever a closer exemplification? Tom was injured; put down; I may say, crushed by you and your father. Yes, crushed: crushed out of his rights. His father made the business; and the half of it, at any rate, ought to have been Tom’s. Instead of that, your father deposed him and usurped it. He repented when he was dying, and charged you to remedy the wrong. But you did not; you usurped it. And what has it ended in?”

“Ended in?” cried Valentine vacantly.

“You are—as you are; ruined in character, in purse, in reputation; and Tom is respected and flourishing. The business has left you and gone to him; not through any seeking of his, but through your own doings entirely; the very self-same business that his father made has in the natural course of time and events gone back to him—and he is not thirty yet. It is retribution, nephew. Justice has been righting herself; and man could neither stay nor hinder it.”

“What nonsense!” debated Valentine testily. “Suppose I had been steady: would the business have left me for Tom then?”

“Yes. In some inscrutable way, that we see not, it would. I am sure of it. You would no more have been allowed to triumph to the end on your ill-gotten gains, than I could stand if I went out and perched myself on yonder weathercock,” affirmed Mrs. Cramp, growing warm. “Your father kept his place, it is true; but what a miserable man he always was, and without any ostensible cause.”

“I wonder you don’t set up for a parson, Aunt Mary Ann! This is as good as a sermon.”

“Then carry the sermon in your memory through life, Valentine. Our doings, whether they be good or ill, bring back their fruits. In some wonderful manner that we cannot understand, events are always shaping onwards their own true ends, their appointed destiny, and working out the will of Heaven.”

That’s all. And the Squire seemed to take a leaf out of Mrs. Cramp’s book. For ever so long afterwards, he would tell us to read a lesson from the history of the Chandlers, and to remember that none can deal unjustly in the sight of God without having to account for it sooner or later.

VERENA FONTAINE’S REBELLION

I

You have been at Timberdale Rectory two or three times before; an old-fashioned, red-brick, irregularly-built house, the ivy clustering on its front walls. It had not much beauty to boast of, but was as comfortable a dwelling-place as any in Worcestershire. The well-stocked kitchen-garden, filled with plain fruit-trees and beds of vegetables, stretched out beyond the little lawn behind it; the small garden in front, with its sweet and homely flowers, opened to the pasture-field that lay between the house and the church.

Timberdale Rectory basked to-day in the morning sun. It shone upon Grace, the Rector’s wife, as she sat in the bow-window of their usual sitting-room, making a child’s frock. Having no little ones of her own to work for—and sometimes Timberdale thought it was that fact that made the Rector show himself so crusty to the world in general—she had time, and to spare, to sew for the poor young starvelings in her husband’s parish.

“Here he comes at last!” exclaimed Grace.

Herbert Tanerton looked round from the fire over which he was shivering, though it was a warm and lovely April day. A glass of lemonade, or some such cooling drink, stood on the table at his elbow. He was always catching a sore throat—or fancied it.

“If I find the delay has arisen through any neglect of Lee’s, I shall report him for it,” spoke the Rector severely. For, though he had condoned that one great mishap of Lee’s, the burning of the letter, he considered it his duty to look sharply after him.

“Oh but, Herbert, it cannot be; he is always punctual,” cried Grace. “I’ll go and ask.”

Mrs. Tanerton left the room, and ran down the short path to the little white gate; poor old Lee, the letterman, was approaching it from the field. Grace glanced at the church clock—three-quarters past ten.

“A break-down on the line, we hear, ma’am,” said he, without waiting to be questioned, as he put one letter into her hand. “Salmon has been in a fine way all the morning, wondering what was up.”

“Thank you,” said Grace, glancing at the letter; “we wondered too. What a beautiful day it is! Your wife will lose her rheumatism now. Tell her I say so.”

Back ran Grace. Herbert Tanerton was standing up, impatient for the letter he had been specially expecting, his hand stretched out for it.

“Your letter has not come, Herbert. Only one for me. It is from Alice.”

“Oh!” returned Herbert, crustily, as he sat down again to his fire and his lemonade.

Grace ran her eyes quickly over the letter—rather a long one, but very legibly written. Her husband’s brother, Jack Tanerton—if you have not forgotten him—had just brought home in safety from another voyage the good ship Rose of Delhi, of which he was commander. Alice, his wife, who generally voyaged with him, had gone immediately on landing to her mother at New Brighton, near Liverpool; Jack remaining with his ship. This time the ship had been chartered for London, and Jack was there with it.

Grace folded the letter slowly, an expression of pain seated in her eyes. “Would you like to read it, Herbert?” she asked.

“Not now,” groaned Herbert, shifting the band of flannel on his throat. “What does she say?”

“She says”—Grace hesitated a moment before proceeding—“she says she wishes Jack could leave the sea.”

“I dare say!” exclaimed Herbert. “Now, Grace, I’ll not have that absurd notion encouraged. It was Alice’s cry last time they were at home; and I told you then I would not.”

“I have not encouraged it, Herbert. Of course what Alice says has reason in it: one cannot help seeing that.”

“Jack chose the sea as his profession, and Jack must abide by it. A turncoat is never worth a rush. Jack likes the sea; and Jack has been successful at it.”

“Oh yes: he’s a first-rate sailor,” conceded Grace. “It is Alice’s wish, no doubt, rather than his. She says here”—opening the letter—“Oh, if Jack could but leave the sea! All my little ones coming on!—I shall not be able to go with him this next voyage. And I come home to find my little Mary and my mother both ill! If we could but leave the sea!”

“I may just as well say ‘If I could but leave the Church!’—I’m sure I’m never well in it,” retorted Herbert. “Jack had better not talk to me of this: I should put him down at once.”

Grace sighed as she took up the little frock again. She remembered, though it might suit her husband to forget it, that Jack had not, in one sense of the word, chosen the sea; he had been deluded into it by Aunt Dean, his wife’s mother. She had plotted and planned, that woman, for her daughter’s advancement, and found out too late that she had plotted wrongly; for Alice chose Jack, and Jack, through her machinations, had been deprived of the greater portion of his birthright. He made a smart sailor; he was steady, and stuck to his duty manfully; never a better merchant commander sailed out of port than John Tanerton. But, as his wife said, her little ones were beginning to grow about her; she had two already; and she could not be with them at New Brighton, and be skimming over the seas to Calcutta, or where not, in the Rose of Delhi. Interests clashed; and with her whole heart Alice wished Jack could quit the sea. Grace sighed as she thought of this; she saw how natural was the wish, though Herbert did not see it: neither could she forget that the chief portion of the fortune which ought to have been Jack’s was enjoyed by herself and her husband. She had always thought it unjust; it did not seem to bring them luck; it lay upon her heart like a weight of care. Their income from the living and the fortune, comprised together, was over a thousand pounds a-year. They lived very quietly, not spending, she was sure, anything like half of it; Herbert put by the rest. What good did all the money bring them? But little. Herbert was always ailing, fretful, and grumbling: the propensity to set the world to rights grew upon him: he had ever taken pleasure in that, from the time when a little lad he would muffle himself in his step-father’s surplice, and preach to Jack and Alice. Poor Jack had to work hard for what he earned at sea; he had only a hundred and fifty pounds a-year, besides, of the money that had been his mother’s; Herbert had the other six hundred and fifty of it. But Jack, sunny-natured, ever-ready Jack, was just as happy as the day was long.