CHAPTER XX
After Philip had gone, Richard Meadowes leaned back in his chair with closed eyes for a long time. The past was stirred in him by this quarrel. In the twenty years that had elapsed since Anne Champion’s death he had changed very little outwardly; but the soul had travelled a long road these twenty years. Now looking back over the ‘Past’s enormous disarray’ he scarcely recognised himself for the same man he had been. He that had started so eagerly in the race, how he lagged now! he had not an enthusiasm left, and smiled to remember all he used to have. At one time too he remembered having thought about things spiritual; these did not visit him now. Once even he had feared death and judgment; death now-a-days had ceased to appall him, and for judgment he thought of it as an old-world fable. He could even think of Anne Champion’s sad story and her cruel end with no more than a momentary pang of discomfort.
But for all this the soul was still partially alive in this man. He could still suffer, and that is a sign of vitality, and if he had a genuine sentiment left it was for his son.
His suffering indeed was of a purely egotistical sort. The vast failure he had made of life struck a sort of cold despair through him; Phil must make restitution for his failures; and now the coldest thought of all assailed him: he had not Phil’s heart. He had lavished kindness on the boy all his life, yet sometimes Phil would look at him in his curiously expressive fashion and turn away quickly as if to hide the thought that leapt out from his speaking eyes: ‘I know you, I understand you.’
But whether Phil loved him or not, thought he, he could not afford to quarrel with him after this fashion. Everything else in life had failed; Phil at least he must keep!
Meadowes rose hurriedly and went in search of Phil, who had gone out, it appeared, across the Park.
The sun had come out now, after the rain, and its warmth drew up the smell of the mould from the streaming moisture-laden earth.
‘Earth, where I shall soon lie,’ thought Meadowes; ‘earth, that will absorb me into its elements again. Then the great failure will be at an end, the puzzle solved—no, not solved, only concluded: solved would mean another life, and that would mean—— Ah! the opened Books, and the Face from which earth and heaven flee away, and the Voice crying: “Give an account of thy stewardship, for thou mayest be no longer steward.” Tush, why does that old nonsense so ring in the brain?’
‘Phil, Phil,’ he shouted; he could stand his own thoughts no longer.
It is always a difficult matter to retract one’s words. But it was a characteristic of Richard Meadowes that he could generally extricate himself from any difficult situation with grace and composure.
It was, he admitted, quite unsuitable that, after having fairly warned Phil of the results of his disobedience, he should now retract all he had just said; but it must be done. Phil must stay with him at any cost.
So, putting the best face he could to it, he called and called again for Philip, who at last appeared: he had quite expected the summons.
‘I suppose he desires to forget all that has just passed,’ thought Phil, well aware of the sway he held over his father’s affections.
‘I think you called me, sir?’ he said. He wore a very demure aspect.
‘Yes; I wished to explain this matter further, Phil: ’twas perhaps scarcely fair in me not to give you a reason for my displeasure. Let us walk on and I shall tell you all.’
But it would, alas, have been as impossible for the Richard Meadowes of now-a-days to tell all the truth about any subject as it would be for a crab to discontinue the sidelong gait which is its inheritance; so he cut out one half of the story and padded up the other half, and summed up the whole in one easy sentence: ‘ ’Twas, in fact, jealousy on Shepley’s part caused our quarrel,’ he said—a half-truth which altered the facts of the case a little.
‘Who was the woman?’ asked Philip bluntly. ‘I suppose she was my mother?’
‘Yes, Anne Champion by name,’ Meadowes said, but hurried on before Phil had time to question him further. ‘So you can see, Philip, that I have reason on my side when I bid you have no more to do with Miss Caroline Shepley.’
‘I scarce see why an old quarrel between our parents should come between us,’ said Phil.
‘My dear Phil,’ said the candid father, ‘I will be frank with you—’tis an old story, and I, for my part, would willingly bury it; but I know Shepley for a man of vindictive passions, and I tell you this, that no power on earth would persuade him to give you his daughter’s hand in marriage. ’Twill spare you perhaps much pain and unpleasantness with him if you but take my advice and see no more of the girl.’
Phil shook his head. But light had meantime come to Meadowes. He would make peace with Phil yet—all would be well.
‘Well, Phil,’ he said, ‘I have told you the truth of how the matter stands, and how prudence should guide you; but moreover I have considered what I said to you in haste, and even should you persist in this folly I will not turn you from your home.’
Then with a sudden genuine impulse of feeling he laid his hand on Phil’s arm.
‘Phil, Phil, you are all that I have—you must stay with me were a hundred Carrie Shepleys in the case.’ Phil did not speak, but he took his father’s hand, bowing over it with the elaborate courtesy of the age.
‘I can only ask you, give this matter your very careful consideration,’ said his father, and with that he turned the conversation into another channel.
But a few hours later—when the dusk had fallen, a man on horseback left Fairmeadowes bearing a special and important missive to Dr. Sebastian Shepley of London. The horseman had orders to spend as little time on the road as might be, and the letter ran thus:—
‘Sebastian Shepley,—Richard Meadowes must acquaint you with the fact that, unless you take prompt measures for the removal of your daughter from the house of her aunt Lady Mallow, she will undoubtedly contract a marriage with the son of that man who has the honour to sign himself
‘Your Enemy.’