CHAPTER XXXII.—A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION.
‘It can’t be done, sir, at the price. I’d do a good deal to meet your wishes and that, and I don’t pretend to be more sentimental than my neighbours. But marrying is a serious sort of step, you know. One can’t cry off and pay forfeit, if one changes one’s mind a bit too late. Miss Willis is’——
Thus far Captain Denzil; but now Sir Sykes interrupted his son with an irritation unusual to him: ‘Miss Willis is a great deal too good for you, I am afraid. Indeed I trust to her sound sense to keep some order in your affairs, and prevent you from driving at too headlong a pace along the road to ruin. Of course her pretensions to pedigree are very slight compared with our own, if that be the obstacle in your way.’
‘Nobody cares much about ancient blood, in a woman at least, now-a-days,’ languidly replied Jasper. ‘She is lady enough to take the head of a dinner-table, or figure creditably in a London drawing-room, after a few weeks of training, and that’s as much as need be looked for. And I admit that Miss Willis is—very clever.’
Except in the case of an authoress, no one ever applies the epithet ‘Very clever’ to a lady save as a species of covert blame. Sir Sykes felt and looked uneasy as the words reached him.
‘If you have any personal objection’—— he began.
‘Not the least in the world,’ unceremoniously interrupted Jasper. ‘I’ll even stretch a point, and say I rather like the girl than otherwise. She’d go straight, I daresay, once the course was smooth and clear before her. But I do not think, father, you are treating me quite well. Carbery ought, you know it ought, to go in the direct line, as such properties do.’
‘I apprehend your meaning,’ returned Sir Sykes in his coldest tone, ‘to be that you resent as a grievance the fact that the estate is not entailed upon yourself. You should be more reasonable, and remember the singular circumstances under which I became master here.’
‘It was a grand coup!’ exclaimed the captain, with an envious little sigh. ‘Such a stroke of luck does not come twice to the same family.’
‘I got this great gift,’ pursued Sir Sykes, ‘from the hand of one who thought less of what he gave to me than of what, by making such a will, he took away from others. The old lord’s self-tormenting mind led him to exult, in the hopes that his testament extinguished, in the injury done to kith and kin.’
‘It was a sell for the De Veres,’ muttered Jasper; ‘they didn’t on the whole take it badly.’ He looked up as he spoke at the glimmering blazonry of the great stained-glass window, and realised, for the first time perhaps, the vexation which the caprice of the late lord of Carbery had inflicted on those of his own race and name.
‘The property,’ said Sir Sykes, ‘having become my own a score of years ago, is mine to give or to withhold at my death, as in my lifetime I may judge fitting.’
‘You have told me that, sir, pretty often,’ retorted Jasper testily; ‘of course it’s yours, and you can leave it to the Foundling Hospital if you like.’
‘Common policy then would dictate,’ said Sir Sykes with deliberate emphasis, ‘the study of my wishes. And I wish very much indeed that Miss Willis should become your wife.’
‘I can’t, as I said, do it at the price; really I can’t,’ rejoined Jasper sullenly, as he thrust his hand into a side-pocket and fingered the cigar-case that lay there. He did not dare to light a cigar in the library, much as he longed to seek solace in smoke; but he grew impatient for the interview to come to an end, and to recover his freedom.
‘I offered a handsome income,’ said Sir Sykes with an offended look. ‘Had not the sum proposed proved sufficient, that was a difficulty not insuperable. You had the option of beginning married life with the revenue of an average baronet.’
‘Yes; but you see, sir, you are a trifle above the mark of an average baronet’ responded the captain; ‘and I naturally should like when my turn comes—I hope it will be a long time first—to fill the same position. A bare allowance, or a lump of settled money, won’t make me the equal of an ordinary eldest son; and I don’t see why, since by accident I’m not on a par with other fellows of my nominal rank and prospects, and I am required to marry without being allowed to choose for myself, I should not be put on a level with men of my own standing.’
Sir Sykes fidgeted restlessly in his chair, and the lines of pain about his mouth, which grew more sharply defined every day, deepened almost perceptibly.
‘Consider what you are asking of me,’ he said with an injured air; ‘to make myself a mere tenant for life where I have been for twenty years owner in fee-simple! Sons do not ask their fathers to entail an estate for their benefit.’
‘I don’t see why I should be in a worse position than other fellows,’ sullenly responded Jasper. ‘I may have been extravagant and that sort of thing; but there’s no reason why my extravagances should be totted up against me to a heavier sum-total than those of twenty I could name. Hookham, now, who let his father in for a hundred and eleven thousand the year that the French horse Plon-Plon won the Derby, is as safe of the Snivey estates as he is of the Snivey peerage.’
‘The Earl of Snivey and his prodigal heir Lord Hookham,’ answered Sir Sykes with cold urbanity, ‘do not present a case, to my mind, precisely in point. You cannot in reason expect me, after the sacrifices I have already made on your behalf, to place you in the position, as you call it, of heir of entail. I am speaking to you less as a father than as a man of the world.’
‘And as a man of the world, sir,’ said the incorrigible Jasper, ‘I trust you will excuse my saying that I scarcely care to be huddled and hustled into marrying I don’t know whom, unless at a very heavy figure, as my stock-broker, when I was fool enough to go on the Exchange, and burned my fingers over time-bargains, used to say. I can’t think why you should mind my coming next, as concerns Carbery Chase here.’
This was a home question which, if arraigned before the stern tribunal of Minos and Rhadamanthus, Sir Sykes would not have found it easy to answer. He was in the habit of telling himself that Jasper was not a successor to whom the honour and welfare of a great family could with prudence be intrusted. Were he master, the old oaks in the Chase might soon be gambled down from their prescriptive loftiness, and mortgages might spring up like mushrooms. Here was a noble estate unencumbered, like some big diamond without a flaw to mar its lustre, and he was asked to let his spendthrift son inherit as of right. There were Lucy and Blanche to be provided for. They would marry, doubtless, and their husbands would probably expect that the brides’ hands should be heavy with much gold. The bulk of the property would devolve on Captain Denzil; but then it might be tied up with an ingenious testamentary rigour that should keep the future baronet in legal leading-strings through life. Sir Sykes cherished too lively a recollection of the shifts and straits of his own outlawed progenitor Sir Harbottle, to wish the reins of government to pass unreservedly into Jasper’s unsteady hands.
But Sir Sykes had an unavowed motive for rejecting his son’s proposition. He was by no means sure how Enoch Wilkins of St Nicholas Poultney would receive such a suggestion. Mr Wilkins, that over-zealous pilot, who had insisted on assuming the guidance of affairs, might be furious at hearing that Jasper was to be promoted from heir-presumptive to heir-apparent. There was no alliance between the captain and the shrewd turf lawyer, from whom so much of his lightly expended cash had been extracted. Jasper by no means relished the elevation of Mr Wilkins to be his father’s Mentor and right-hand man. Mr Wilkins might guess that Sir Jasper would send his japanned deed-boxes elsewhere than to St Nicholas Poultney. And yet Sir Sykes could not venture to offend Mr Wilkins.
The conversation was protracted for some half-hour or more, since Sir Sykes was sincerely desirous to carry his point; but it languished by degrees, and involved, as conversations on important topics are in real life apt to do, frequent repetitions of some stock phrase or threadbare argument. Sir Sykes essayed threats, veiled ones of course, and not very comprehensible even to himself. Jasper, however, was very little moved by such threats. There are things that a gentleman cannot do, and assuredly one of them is to turn his only son out of doors because he declines a wife of the parent’s choosing. And to no other menace was the captain amenable. He should probably, as a result of his father’s displeasure, get no cheques for the next few months; but this stoppage of pocket-money could not much affect the happiness of a graceless prodigal who, had he once got a sufficient sum in his possession, would have turned his back at once on Carbery and all that belonged thereto.
Jasper, then, was singularly stubborn. He was in general as morally pliable as a jelly-fish, after the fashion of most so-called men of pleasure, but now he seemed for the nonce to have developed a backbone, and to be hard to bend. There was really some lurking sense of injury at his heart, and he felt on better terms with his own conscience than was often the case, as he resisted his father’s instances that he should marry Miss Willis, commence housekeeping on five thousand a year, and be a reformed character as well as a Benedict. He felt that all was not right, and was assured that a bride worth the taking would not be urged on his acceptance with such pertinacity.
‘I do not see,’ repeated Jasper again and again, ‘why I should be in a worse position than other fellows.’
From that formula, behind which, as behind a breastwork, he strongly intrenched himself nothing could drive him. It was not, as he explained with almost unnecessary candour, that he had any undue delicacy with regard to mercenary marriages; but that what he stipulated for was to be on a level with other spendthrifts of his own degree and set, with young Lord Hookham, with Lionel Rattlebury, and wild Lord Viscount Squandercash, and the rest. Entail the estate, so that it must pass to him, Jasper, and post-obits would become practicable, and money be easily raised; and then Miss Willis was welcome to be the partner of his joys and sorrows—such was Jasper’s simple train of reasoning. It was a heavy price, but he stood out for it.
Sir Sykes was not willing to pay the price, at the cost, it might be, of a second contest with Mr Enoch Wilkins, and the negotiation with his son came to no satisfactory conclusion. What was to be done? Hold had named a fortnight as the period of grace that he was disposed to grant; but the baronet was of opinion that it would not be politic to allow the time to expire without communicating with this man—who was in some sense his master. He would inform Hold of Captain Denzil’s unexpected obstinacy, and plead for a further delay, and—yes—he would send money. Money has often a wonderfully lenitive effect upon the temper, and its softening effects should be tried upon this buccaneering fellow.
Sir Sykes penned his letter, touching as lightly as he could on Jasper’s recalcitrancy, and expressing sanguine hopes for the future. He said nothing about the entail, which had been the subject of the haggling debate between himself and the captain. It would hardly be prudent to tell Hold of that, lest Jasper should find an unexpected ally to back his demand.
‘We had better, under the circumstances, give him, as I believe whale-fishers say, a little more line,’ wrote Sir Sykes in his confidential communication to Richard Hold, and he was weak enough to pride himself on his neat use of a nautical metaphor sure to tell with a seafaring man. And he signed a cheque for two hundred and fifty pounds, payable to Mr Richard Hold, or order, and inserted it in the letter, which he despatched by that night’s post. He could scarcely have done a more foolish thing.